Last Friday, I got to have an out of body experience.  For the past two and a half years, I’ve attended Tech Field Day events as a delegate. Plenty of delegates have blogged about their experiences as a delegate and I highly suggest you take some time to read about those experiences.  What I’m talking about here is coming to one of these events from the other side of the equation.  You can’t have delegates talking about company products without companies willing to present to the audience.  Last Friday, I got to present my company’s cloud portfolio to the Cloud Field Day 4 delegates.

A Whole New Perspective

I’m pretty sure that somewhere in his vast amount of information on delegates past, present, and future, Stephen (Foskett) keeps some statistics about the groups that he puts together.  I know that there have been plenty of delegates that eventually made the jump from delegate to a role with a vendor company.  What I think might be rarer air is a delegate that makes the jump to a company in which then presents at one of his events.  While not “unicorn in the wild” impossible, the numbers are pretty low, which is why I felt that this was a very good time to write up something about this experience.

The Gestalt crew do a great job of preparing the presenting companies.  They’ve seen plenty of good (and plenty of bad) formulas about how to approach the content, to the presentation style, and even to the way interactions occur with the delegates.  Now, I was not really invited to many of those sessions.  Others handled those session internally and I was kept mostly to making sure we combined a good story for two hours of content.

Grab the Pepto

To be fair, I have only been with Cohesity for roughly two months.  During that time, I’ve kept my public interactions to social media outlets. This was the first event for me to really put my face with the Cohesity products.  Having been to many of these events, I wanted to be able to craft something that set the foundation towards the rest of the product set we wanted to demo (and demonstration-heavy was the name of the game).

The Monday before the event, Stephen and Tom both swung by the Cohesity HQ in San Jose.  They want to make a site visit beforehand to make sure we have physical logistics set and ready to go.  This is also one of the last times a presenting company really has a chance to make sure they are on the right track for making a good physical impression for the delegates in the room.  As the same conference room had been previously used for a prior Field Day event (Storage Field Day 15), many of the issues that were found using the room for the first time were already rectified.  Honestly, we spent most of the time discussing with other marketing folks in the room about the entire Field Day delegate selection process and why it’s always important to be on the lookout for the next new crop of delegates.

The largest thing to worry about was making sure we had our IT staff prepared and ready to assist with the setup, start, and tear down of the event.  Behind the scenes, the PrimeImage crew brings quite a bit of equipment and you have to make sure there’s plenty of network bandwidth for live video broadcasts (taken care of with a dedicated hardline with QoS policy configuration for them) and enough power to make sure there’s no issues with popping circuits at the wrong time.  In fact, we made sure to give too many power ports in the room, since there were a lot of foreign delegates and we all know large power plugs with power plug conversion kits = lots of space.

Heartburn Time

After the Gestalt visit, the rest was up to us.  Logistics, scheduling, food ordering, swag bag creations.  All of these topics needed to be straightened out before Friday morning.  As it was also Cohesity’s SKO week, there was already plenty to do around the office and at the SKO location.  Plenty of coordination between marketing teams happened and we all finally agreed on when to be at HQ for the event (yes, I knowingly got up at 6:30am to make sure we could greet PrimeImage before the delegates arrived).

Notice that I haven’t even discussed the actual presentation yet.  Thursday became out dry run day.  I lost count to the amount of times we ran through everyone’s sections that day. All I know is that towards the end, many of us were getting rather ragged and tired of being in the main conference room.  If there is a tech company version of “12 Angry Men”/”12 Angry Jurors”, it felt like we were all living it in that room.

The sheer amount of information we wanted to show to everyone was immense.  Demos were deemed to be too long or deemed to be too oversaturated with information that we cut things down or just cut things out entirely. We defined our schedule and plan (which I’ll mention we did not try to adhere to specific time blocks on our schedule…sometimes things run long; sometimes things run short; sometimes you have guys like Howard Marks in the room that ask all the questions, all at once) and stuck to things to practice and add to the presentation.  It felt good to get out of the room (at something like 8:30pm).

Sleep?  What’s That?

So yeah, as you can imagine, with an early wakeup call and having to vacate out of the hotel, sleep was a premium that night.  However, I mentally was rolling through everything I wanted to make sure happened during the demos.  What I had been thinking about for 2-3 weeks was finally coming to a head and there was no way I was going to drop any sort of ball on this one.

6:30am rolls around and I’ve already been downstairs in the hotel lobby waiting on Aaron for about 5-10 minutes.  We walk over to HQ, get everything setup, and wait for everyone to trickle in. PrimeImage comes in a few minutes before 7am (not to future presenter companies, always have someone show up 15 minutes prior to when PrimeImage says they want to be in).  Food arrives, then the delegates arrive.  Handshakes, hugs, and caffeination occurs from 7:30am to 8am. Then it’s go time.

The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For

Personally, I was in the first block of topics/demos for the day.  The importance to the overall presentation was that I set the foundational components for the rest of the demos for the day.  Fall on your face and you leave the rest of the presenters to do damage control; win the day, and it’s an easy transition to more advanced use cases with those building blocks.

Before we continue, a quick note on my personality.  I’m not the type to really toot my own horn about a job well done.  I will always find something that needs critiqued and most often, dwell on that.  That being said, my demos couldn’t have gone any better.  The questions were the types of questions I wanted asked by the delegates and I even got to show things with my own wrinkle (Hi there, PowerShell code!). Also, not having to sacrifice a new delegate to the live demo gods is ALWAYS a plus!

Now, for the sake of the temperature in the room (as you can imagine, all the video gear, delegates, and coworkers of mine can make for a very warm room), I vacated and returned to my temp space to catch the rest of the presentation online.  I also wanted to make sure I shut down all my public cloud projects, just in case I missed parts of it where I might have exposed all my sensitive access keys.

Final Result

All in all, I believe we showed well to the delegates and to the rest of the world about the Cohesity cloud portfolio.  For a company that has talked about being hyperconverged secondary storage for so long, it was refreshing to see us start talking about elements beyond what is rapidly becoming tablestakes.  I applaud the entire effort of all those involved in making this event a great success for us and I look forward to talking about our cloud portfolio to the masses even more.

From a personal perspective, it’s fantastic to see how far I’ve come from the first time I tried to present in front of a live audience.  Who knew that I could convert a deep-rooted fear into a wild success?

Now, who do I have to talk to get approval in the budget for another one of these events? 🙂