Sales and events often work wide by side, yet only a few dare to leap between the two on a daily basis.
Eric Burns was thrust into the world of experiential marketing by chance. In 2020, he was a sales engineer at Fastly, a content delivery network based in San Francisco.
“I’d work with people on their websites, helping them make it faster,” he explains.
The company was thinking up ways to market itself while everyone was locked at home in the early days of COVID. That’s when another sales engineer, Darrell DeCosta, came up with an idea: Cobble up a group of high-value targets for a lesson on basic computing.
Fastly hired marketing agency Brand Revolution, then known as Haute, to organize the virtual experience.
Attendees were sent a Raspberry Pi kit—a single-board computer and keyboard—along with a link to a video call. Haute helped brand the kit with Fastly’s logo, shipping it to guests throughout the country.
The idea was to “hook up some buttons and add a little bit of code, and now look, the computer sees when you press the button,” Burns said. “When they’re done, they’ve got a full computer the size of a deck of playing cards.”
As a sales engineer, Burns was used to swooping in after a sales colleague’s pitch, taking on the more complex task of explaining the technical aspects of the product. Because of this, Fastly thought he’d be a perfect facilitator for the virtual sessions.
The first one took place on November 19, 2020. Twenty-five guests broke out their Raspberry Pis and sat in front of their webcams for an hour and a half. It was hosted by John Romero, the notable video game developer and creator of Doom, and his wife Brenda, also a video game developer.
Burns kept it simple, teaching them just enough to turn on a small lightbulb. During a second session, guests were given the more complicated task of programming a strip of LED lights, similar in shape to a miniature stoplight, to light up in different patterns.
The sessions worked because they focused on the interactive and educational aspect, especially at a time when many workers were getting cabin fever from being cooped up at home.
“One of the comments that someone made in the first or second one was, ‘I was expecting to get on this call and get a pitch for Fastly,’” Burns recalled. “But the majority of the time was interacting with the Romeros, putting together the Raspberry Pi, making a game with the hardware, and then we did a five or six-minute demo of Fastly using the hardware that we built.”
Burns enjoyed the communal aspect the most.
“It’s really neat to see a VP and a CEO join a virtual meeting, and they’ve got their kids sitting on the sofa participating in the event,” he said.
The first couple sessions were so successful that Haute asked Burns to come back as an independent contractor, helping to run the event whenever it was scheduled. Fastly gave him the go-ahead, paving the way for more complicated work as Burns got better at leading the calls and helping the attendees, who often came in with different degrees of computing knowledge.
For one session, Burns sent out five tiny screens so that attendees could program a game of Whac-a-Mole. The guests found it hard to peel themselves away.
“There was one person who was having a hard time figuring a piece out, and we were running out of time,” Burns said. “I was like,‘OK, folks do you wanna do the [virtual] cocktails or do you wanna keep going?’ Everyone said to keep going, and someone figured out how to hack the code, cheat and turn in higher scores, which was fun to watch.”
The sessions inspired Burns to pursue his newfound talent for experiential marketing via his own company, Interhouse Solutions. There, he offers consulting, website building, conversational AI improvements, and the Raspberry Pi marketing webinars that got him started in events back in 2020.
Though he’s found an unexpected second career in events, he’s not turning away from the sales world that got him in the door.
Burns is currently the vice president of North American sales at Geniusee, a Ukraine-based software development company. He’s also a fractional chief technology officer at TAG Outsourcing, a sales and customer service BPO based in the Bay Area. But like many before him, Burns has caught the bug for making the impossible possible on a deadline.
“With sales engineering, it’s a long-term process,” Burns explained. “There’s an initial meeting and conversation, then you do a demo and proof of concept. There are deals that take a year, year-and-a-half from meeting to signing a contract.
“With events it’s like, ‘OK, the invites went out, there’s 35 people showing up at this date. I need to make sure that everything works,” he said. “It’s not like being on SNL, but it’s live, and you need to double-check everything and have everything lined up and be prepared.”
