If you’re involved with planning events such as trade shows or conferences for your organization, you know how time-consuming it can be to get information about venues, sponsorships, and potential speakers. Startup ConferencePulse hopes to make your life easier.

In this segment of the Martech Minute, Colin White speaks with Val Tsanev, Founder of ConferencePulse, an event intelligence platform that aspires to be the Bloomberg of event planning.

Q: ConferencePulse is an Event Intelligence Platform – tell us a little bit about what that means?

Val Tsanev: ConferencePulse as you mentioned is an Event Intelligence Platform and we help conference professionals with deal sourcing, with competitive intelligence, as well as sales and marketing intelligence.

Q: Who’s the typical target market for the platform?

Val Tsanev: Currently our platform is heavily used by sponsors and exhibitors to see where their competitors are, which trade shows they’re sponsoring, which trade shows they’re exhibiting at, which conferences they’re sponsoring. Also our platform is used by conference organizers and they use it to find the right sponsors for their events. So imagine it’s almost like a huge database and our long-term vision and mission is to become the Bloomberg of the B2B event industry

Q: Interesting, so who’s a typical user? If say I’m a large B2B technology company and I want to find the right trade shows to go to in 2018, how would I use your platform?

Val Tsanev: Once you log into our platform we have several verticals. One of them is the conference tab. So essentially imagine several tabs – then you have the speakers tab, we have venues, top sponsors, and the exhibitors tab. So if for example that what you just mentioned you’re looking for upcoming conferences – and I want to make sure that we’re clear that we define conferences pretty broadly – that includes trade shows and Expos. So basically if you’re looking for all the upcoming trade shows and conferences in 2018 for the information technology industry that had more than 2000 attendees, more than 500 exhibitors and for example less than 10 speakers then you can actually go in and filter those parameters. And then you’re going to get exactly the list of those conferences.

Q: Okay, I can see that being a very useful tool for competitive intelligence or if you’re a start-up and you’re looking for the right events to exhibit based on where your competitors are. Can you also use it for finding venues for your own events? Say I want to do a road show and I need to pick five cities across the country to host a hundred people each – would your platform help with that?

Val Tsanev: Yes, so we also include a venue vertical as well. We have about 3000 venues on our platform. So you can do exactly that. You can go there and you can say: I’m looking for venues in New York City for example, or any city, that can host more than a thousand attendees. Can you show me all the venues that can do that? If you’ve done that in the past for example here in New York City, you’re going to get the usual suspects – you’re going to get the Javits Center. You’re going to get all these convention centers. And then once you click on them you’re going to be able to see which events have been hosted by the Javits Center. So this way not only do you get high level – so I know that the Javits Center can house my event with more than a thousand attendees – but actually I can see specifically which events can be hosted and how many sponsors exhibitors attendees those events get.

Q: I think I read on your web site that your platform database also includes contact information as well, is that correct?

Val Tsanev: That’s correct. We have the key contacts for sponsors. So for example IBM and Microsoft who are the key contacts within Microsoft that you can contact directly who tend to be the decision-makers for potential sponsorships for events, or focusing on the event marketing department of Microsoft or IBM, or whatever the case may be.

Q: And it’s an online service and the licensing is on a per user basis?

Val Tsanev: That’s correct, per user per month currently and we started monetizing the platform only three months ago and we have come out to the market with introductory pricing of $125 per month, per user, billed annually at $1,500.

Q: Okay great – any final thoughts you’d like to add about ConferencePulse?

Val Tsanev: Yes, we’re very excited about what we’re working on at ConferencePulse. There’s a huge white space in the industry when it comes to data, and we feel very strongly that there is a very powerful element in the event industry. I personally have a very quant background. And the reason why I got involved with ConferencePulse is in my past life when I used to work for Wall Street for many years, one of the many things we had to do is manage their events portfolio. And it was very difficult for me to find the right sponsors, to compare sponsors for Credit Suisse, to find conferences for Credit Suisse to sponsor, because obviously it’s an international bank so they were doing both. And that was a big challenge. And what we’re building now is exactly that analytical platform that I think is currently missing in the market. And I think it’s going to add a ton of value to the industry.

Q: I can tell you from my own experience planning and managing events for some of the B2B technology companies that I’ve been involved with, it can be a huge time time-suck trying to find all of the different venues, trying to find where your competitors are going. So I can definitely see the benefit in having all of that data at your fingertips.

Val Tsanev: The last point I would like to make, into exactly that point, I think that the benchmarking and comparison part that we’re bringing into the market is very innovative. And this is what our current clients and prospective clients told us. They’re looking to find and compare sponsors, and see how they are doing versus competitors.

Q: Well thanks very much for joining us Val! For those of you in the audience if you want to take a look at ConferencePulse, visit their website at www.conferencepulse.com. Val Tsanev, the CEO and Founder of ConferencePulse, thanks very much for joining us today.

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