Docebo used its own platform to host its Revenue Kick-Off. Here’s how.

• 6 min read

When it comes to revenue enablement, Docebo is no stranger—in fact, we made it an experience.

Every January, Docebo’s Revenue team rings in the new year with their annual Revenue Kick-Off. This event, also known as “RKO”, reflects on the past year’s success, explores the year’s overarching strategy, and highlights specific initiatives and goals for the upcoming year. For three days, every attendee within the company engages with inspirational and informative presentations, leaving them eager and prepared for the year ahead.

But for an event of this magnitude, how did Docebo’s Revenue organization pull this all off? We turned to its organizers for some answers: Vanessa Metcalf (VP of Revenue Effectiveness), Tyler Cake (Content and Program Specialist), and Nick Thomas (Head of Sales Enablement).

For those of us who aren’t familiar with RKO, can you tell us a little about it?

Vanessa: Of course! RKO readies Docebo’s Revenue organization with educational content and inspirational keynotes to jumpstart our Sales, Professional Services, Customer Experience, and Marketing personnel for the year ahead. Like a fresh cup of morning coffee, RKO energizes our internal audience of over 500 participants through deep dives into our products, last year’s wins, and this year’s strategies; while exploring relevant keynote topics such as “How to drive a learning culture”.

We curate this experience to be hyper-relevant to each individual, tailoring their access to different sessions that empower them to be successful throughout the year. We also had the opportunity to hear from two incredible keynote speakers: Kim Scott (Co-founder of Just Work and Author of Radical Condor) and Debra Searle (Founder and Head of Consultancy at MIX Diversity Developers). For the very first time, we held the whole event directly on our internal instance of Docebo, The Vault.

Speaking of The Vault, what is that?

Tyler: Glad you asked! The simplest way to put it: The Vault is our Revenue organization’s instance of the Docebo Learning Suite. But it’s more than that.

It’s our “single source of truth” — a place that any customer-facing individual or revenue leader can go to for the tools and resources they need to be successful. We’re talking about everything from onboarding experiences for a new hire, to a virtual space where Docebians can go to learn a new skill. We refer to it as an “interactive knowledge repository” for a reason!

The Vault is like an expansive interactive library for everything we need. There’s even the capability for team leads to deploy content focused on upskilling and reskilling.

All in all, The Vault is powerful. It enables everyone from Business Development, Sales, Customer Success, Implementation, Customer Support, to Revenue Performance and Marketing — and it serves as our knowledge repository, learning delivery system, and learning experience platform all in one!

To learn more about The Vault, read Docebo’s The Vault case study.

Interesting! So with RKO, I noticed there were different pages and user access setup for it. How did you do that?

Nick: We were actually very inspired by traditional virtual event platforms!

We really believe that the main goal for event platforms is ensuring the least amount of friction for audiences to find the right content, and get to where they want to be next.

We had a main page that we imagined was the “main stage” of a conference. This was our central hub and served as a navigation point to any other part of the event! This could either be a product booth, a team breakout, or even an AMA (Ask Me Anything) event.

Anyone who needed to know what session or speaking event to attend could find where to go from the main page!

Our secondary pages, such as our product pages or AMA pages, acted like “break-out sessions” for individual teams. That was a really exciting addition because they really personalized the experience for all the attendees. Depending on what team an attendee is a part of, they were able to find a Zoom meeting that was relevant to their personal jobs!

The Zoom links were updated the night before to ensure they were up-to-date for the day of the event. No one had to memorize links or send out invites, we would update one link for the buttons and that was the only link where people would access those meetings.

After the event, we wanted a way to share all of the great content with our users so we built an “RKO On Demand” Page. For a month after the event, we ran a contest to see who could consume the most content and placed a leaderboard on the page to drive engagement.

That’s a super smart way of setting it up! How were you able to live-stream directly on the platform?

Vanessa: Because Docebo is able to support a lot of different tools on our platform, we’re able to, with ease, incorporate streaming tools. For RKO we used the tool Restream, allowing us to stream the feed into Youtube Live to host the live stream for our “main stage”. From there, we were able to embed a Youtube player into The Vault so that we could create a seamless experience for audiences when watching the live stream.

We also embedded the Youtube Chat into The Vault using the same methods so our internal audience could interact with the speakers and each other in real-time. We loved this feature, it allowed speakers, hosts, and attendees to feel connected throughout the experience.

We found this to be a far more affordable option and allowed us to explore the different capabilities of our platform! Compared to using an expensive hosting platform or producer, streaming tools are so much more cost-effective. Using a simple tool like Restream allows us to offset the expensive side of virtual events to our own platform and use our own talent. It’s really the best of both worlds.

That is awesome! How long did it even take to set up an event like this?

Tyler: Wow, it took quite a long time. Over four months of planning, over a month to create all the marketing and branding assets, and three weeks just to set up all the pages.

This doesn’t even include agenda formation, speaker decisions, coordinating swag, awards and recognition, content development, and planning the event experience In the end, all of the hard work was totally worth it!!

Sounds like a lot of work! What do you recommend to other organizations that are looking to also do live events like this?

Nick: Think top-down. You want to encourage buy-in and sponsorship from different parts of the company.

An initiative of this size is most successful when everyone understands the benefits of a collective effort like this. This would mean involving all department heads, making sure they’re all aligned on how to set their teams up for success, and doing it in the most engaging way possible.

For us, we also found that having a planning committee, the right teams, and tight coordination helped went a long way. We’re really happy that we have this dynamic within the Revenue organization.

Final question: obviously, we love Docebo! But can you tell us more about why we chose our platform for an event like RKO?

Vanessa: Well, as you’ve mentioned, we’re obviously biased because we’re all huge fans of Docebo! But bias aside, the reality is we have in our hands exactly what we need to get the job done, and done really well. I love that our platform is flexible and scalable enough to partner and integrate with a streaming platform.

Since this was our first time, there were many last-second ideas that were added to the event, and we needed to be confident that the hosting platform (in this case Docebo) we used allowed us that freedom, which it absolutely did.

The Vault was the safest platform because we knew we could embed external sources, and use HTML, iFrames, and various links to create amazing experiences. The best part was that we could have that all happen in one single consolidated space. Docebo’s flexibility for customization, its ease of use, and the way it supports all sorts of different tools within the platform made creating a full-scale live event a dream come true!

Why use a platform that feels like molding concrete when you can be molding clay?

Here’s what it all looked like in action!