Plan a customer dinner or executive briefing

The purpose of the event decides everything else, so Kite settles it first. A dinner meant to help prospects decide needs a few happy customers at the table who can speak honestly about their results. A dinner meant to strengthen relationships with existing customers needs a topic they all care about and no sales pitch at all. An executive briefing for one account needs a written agenda and a clear question the account wants answered.

Kite reads your goal and proposes a format that fits it. It might suggest a seated dinner for ten heads of finance in Boston, a two-hour briefing at your office for the leadership team of your largest prospect, or an evening meetup for forty practitioners in Austin. Along with the format, it proposes the discussion topic, the size of the room, and the one next step you want each guest to take afterward. That next step gives the follow-up a purpose, and it gives your team something specific to listen for during the evening.

You can change any part of the proposal before Kite starts on the guest list.

Host the dinner on the first or second night of the conference, near the venue, and invite the speakers, sponsors, and attendees who match your best customers. Your guests are already in town and already thinking about the topic, so a nearby dinner is one of the easiest invitations they'll get all week.

Kite plans a conference dinner by researching the event first. It reads the agenda to find the evenings that aren't already taken by the organizer's own receptions, and it pulls the published speaker lineup and the sponsor and exhibitor lists. From those, it picks out the people who match your ideal customer and explains why each one fits, such as a session they're giving or a recent funding round at their company. When the speaker list isn't out yet, Kite says so and uses the previous year's lineup as a guide.

Kite can also research restaurants with a private room near the venue and write the inquiry to each one's events team. Because conference weeks fill private rooms quickly, Kite plans the timeline backward from the conference dates, with the venue settled and the first invitations sent about four weeks out.

If you're still deciding which conferences to attend, Kite can rank them for you first. That work is covered in Get pipeline from conferences and events.

Invite a small group of senior people who share a real problem, mix a few happy customers in with prospects, and invite each person with a short personal email from the host. A dinner works when every guest is someone the others would be glad to sit next to, so the list should be smaller and more selective than any list you'd build for a webinar.

Kite builds the list from the people you already know and the people you'd like to know. With HubSpot or Salesforce connected, it searches your contacts and accounts for people who match the guest description, and it checks each person's current role against a public source, because people change jobs more often than CRMs get updated. Then it finds new guests by searching companies by industry, size, and location and looking for the right people inside them by title and seniority. Each guest gets a score from one to five and a one-line reason, such as "Head of Finance at a 300-person logistics company in Boston who joined in June and is rebuilding the planning team." On a longer list, Kite splits the strongest guests into a first wave and keeps a second group ready to invite as declines come in.

Next, Kite writes a personal invitation for each guest. Each one explains why this evening fits this person's work, names the host, and gives the date, the neighborhood, and the topic in a few sentences. An invitation to a small dinner lands best when it comes from a real person, so with Gmail connected, Kite sends each one from the host's own address, and replies arrive in the host's inbox. If the host would rather add a personal line first, Kite leaves the invitations in their Gmail Drafts folder instead. Without Gmail, Kite sends them from your team's Kite email address.

As replies come in, Kite keeps the guest list current. It follows up in the same thread with people who haven't answered, sends the next wave to your backup group when seats open, and sends confirmed guests a reminder a few days before the dinner with the address, the time, and the name of the person who'll greet them.

For more on building the list itself, see Build an invite list for an event. For a larger event with a registration page and scheduled reminders, see Run an event invitation email campaign.

A run of show for a customer dinner is a one-page plan for the evening, broken into time blocks, with a name beside each part saying who's responsible for it. It keeps the evening relaxed for the guests because the hosts already know what happens next. Kite writes it once the guest list is settled, using the purpose, the venue, and what it knows about each guest.

A typical run of show for a three-hour dinner looks like this:

• 6:00 to 6:30, before guests arrive. The hosts meet at the venue, confirm the room and the seating, and read the guest notes one last time.
• 6:30 to 7:15, arrival and drinks. Each host greets the guests they invited and makes the introductions Kite suggested, such as two guests who are solving the same problem at different companies.
• 7:15 to 7:30, welcome. The host gives a two-minute welcome that thanks everyone, says why this group is in the room, and introduces the topic. There's no slide deck and no product pitch.
• 7:30 to 9:00, dinner and discussion. The host opens the conversation with one prepared question and has two or three more ready in case it stalls. A happy customer is asked ahead of time to share one honest story about their own experience.
• 9:00 to 9:30, close. The host thanks the group and mentions the next step, such as a short follow-up conversation or an invitation to the next dinner.

Alongside the timeline, Kite prepares the details your team needs on the night. The seating plan puts each prospect next to a customer or a host who can speak to their situation. A one-paragraph note on each guest covers their role, their company's recent news, why they were invited, and anything your team has recorded about them in your CRM. Each host also gets the discussion questions and a short list of what to listen for, so the follow-up can refer to what each guest actually said.

Kite shares the run of show in the conversation, and it can publish it as a report page your hosts can open on their phones from a shared link. For a fill-in-the-blanks version you can adapt yourself, see the run of show template for customer dinners and executive briefings Coming soon .

An executive briefing is a meeting where your company hosts the senior leaders of one customer or prospect to discuss their priorities, your plans, and how the two fit together. Because the whole meeting is about one account, its success depends on how well your team understands the people in the room before they walk in. Kite does that research and turns it into a briefing document and an agenda.

Kite starts with the account. It reads the company's recent news, such as funding, leadership changes, new products, or expansion into a new market, and it reads the public professional profile and recent posts of each executive who's attending. With HubSpot or Salesforce connected, it adds what your team already knows: the notes, meetings, and tasks on the account's records, the open deals or opportunities, and their current stage. If a new chief financial officer joined the account two months ago and your champion mentioned budget pressure on the last call, the briefing says so.

From that research, Kite writes the agenda. A good briefing agenda opens with the account's own priorities, gives your team time to show how you're addressing them, and leaves real time for questions and discussion. It ends with an agreed next step rather than a vague promise to stay in touch. Kite also writes a one-page note on each attending executive and a short list of the questions your team should be ready to answer.

You can send the agenda to the account ahead of time from your Gmail address, so their team arrives knowing what will be covered.

Pick a topic your customers and prospects both care about, find a venue for thirty to sixty people, give people a simple page to register on, and remind them the day before. A meetup is larger and more open than a dinner, so it needs a registration page and a schedule rather than a hand-picked guest list.

When Kite hosts your website, it builds the meetup page there, with the date, the venue, the agenda, the speakers, and a registration form, and its built-in analytics show how many visitors registered. It writes personal invitations to your best-fit customers and prospects in the city, and it can draft a short post about the meetup for your connected social accounts. Before the event, it writes the reminder that gives registrants the address and arrival details.

Kite writes a run of show for the meetup too. A meetup's version usually covers arrival and food, one or two short talks, a group discussion or a panel, and time to mingle at the end. If you'd like something for guests to take home, Kite can design and order branded merchandise through its built-in Printify connection, as described in Create branded merchandise for a launch or event.

After a meetup, Kite can turn your notes and the talk outlines into a recap post for your blog or social accounts, so people who couldn't come see what they missed and want to come to the next one.

The day after the event is when most of its value is won or lost, so Kite turns your notes into follow-up the next morning. Share a few lines about each guest, such as what they talked about, what they asked, and whether they seemed interested in a next step. Rough notes typed into the conversation are enough.

Kite then writes a follow-up for each guest that refers to what that person actually said. A prospect who asked how your customer handled a migration gets a note offering an introduction to that customer. A customer who mentioned a new team gets a note offering to help them get started. A guest who had to cancel gets a short message saying what they missed and an invitation to the next dinner. Approve the follow-ups, and Kite sends each one from the host's Gmail address, in the same thread as the original invitation when there is one.

Kite also records what happened in your CRM. In HubSpot, it logs the dinner as a meeting on each guest's contact record, adds a note with what they said, and creates a follow-up task for the person responsible. It can open a deal when a guest asks for a proposal. In Salesforce, it can create a campaign for the event, add each guest as a campaign member, log the follow-up on their record, and create or update an opportunity. New guests who aren't in your CRM yet are added as leads or contacts.

Finally, Kite writes a short internal recap for your team that covers who came, what the group talked about, which guests are ready for a next step, and what to change next time. It saves those lessons to your team's knowledge base, so the next guest list and run of show start from what actually worked. If you want to compare the cost of each event with the pipeline it produced, see Measure the ROI of your events Coming soon .