How Hubspot Improved Their Audience Experience with Pigeonhole Live

HubSpot is a household name to sales or marketing professionals worldwide. As a growth platform with tens of thousands of customers in over 100 countries, they take pride in engaging users through online resources, educational courses, and engaging events.

One such event is the annual GROW conference. Held in Singapore in November 2019, it featured a world-class lineup of speakers from HubSpot, LinkedIn, Ahrefs, Canva, Facebook, and Zoom. With a goal to educate digital marketers and sales leaders, it was imperative to have a live Q&A tool that allowed users to ask questions directed to the event’s panel of experts.

That’s where Pigeonhole Live came in.

Creating a Seamless Experience

When we run events at HubSpot, we really care about the attendee experience. It was important to us that we had a great Q&A experience that made it easy for our audience to ask questions - and Pigeonhole Live nailed it.
- David Fallarme, Head of Marketing, HubSpot Asia.

David Fallarme, Head of Marketing in HubSpot Asia, shared that when he first tried Pigeonhole Live’s basic account, which is free and comes with unlimited Basic Pigeonholes, he realised how easy it was to use and set up. After trying at meetings and smaller scale events, he saw the benefit of using it at their annual conference.

“When I got the chance to use the full version for GROW,” said Fallarme. “I jumped on the chance, and was confident that our audience (and our organising team) would have a seamless experience.”

The seamless attendee experience was of paramount importance when organising GROW, from scanning the QR code to submitting and upvoting questions. This also extended to branding, where Pigeonhole Live’s custom branding option helped incorporate GROW’s striking branding to the panels.

Most importantly, the tool had to be easy to use. 

“We’re a tech company with a mostly tech-savvy audience, and even then we know that you just have to make it a no-brainer to use,” said Fallarme. “The scan code worked perfectly. Session ratings were also important to us as organisers, since we wanted to make sure we continually improve the event year on year.”

Increasing Audience Engagement

Conference organisers at GROW also found that Pigeonhole Live helped increase audience engagement at the event, with active asking and voting of questions during the Q&As. 

“I attend a lot of events, and sometimes during panels you can see that people in the audience are falling asleep!” said Fallarme. “I was moderating the Q&A for one of our sessions (at GROW) and we had the complete opposite case - we actually had too many questions for the panel, which tells me that Pigeonhole helped us connect better with our audience.”

Essential Post-event Analytics

Post-event analytics and insights are also important to the HubSpot team. To help the organising team get a better idea on which sessions did well, a poll was nested with every session to ask attendees to rate the session on a scale of 1 to 10. With this data, the organisers could see what topics resonated with their audience and which speakers to invite back next year. 

Speakers at the conference especially appreciated the Answer Ratings feature, which allows event organisers to collect attendees' sentiments on how well a question was answered during the live Q&A session. Doing away with the often ineffective paper forms, the downloadable reports allowed the team to easily pass them on to speakers.

When asked if they would recommend Pigeonhole Live to other conference-providers, Fallarme answers: “Absolutely.”

As an organiser, you already have so many things to worry about. You don't want to worry about your audience engagement software. Especially since it can impact the attendee experience so much -- so many things can go wrong. But it was so smooth and seamless working with Pigeonhole Live. I’m excited to use it again for our next event.

- David Fallarme, Head of Marketing, HubSpot Asia.