Event Marketer Spring 2022 - 62

SAPIZ
BRAND: Cisco
CURRENT TITLE: VP-Global Events
DREAM TEAM TITLE: Chief of Global Event Strategy & Sustainability
WHY WE WANT HER: For her obsession with progress and for her influential
playbook, encompassing 25 years of experience.
For Alex Sapiz, there is no single " ah-ha "
moment that confirmed she belonged in
the b-to-b event marketing world. Instead,
her calling has manifested itself in a series of
moments that, together, paint a near-constant
reminder of the rewards that come
with creating face-to-face engagements.
" I love watching the reactions of our
attendees when they participate in our
experiences, " Sapiz says. " There's something
so special about the opening of Cisco Live's
exhibit floor, or the HUB at Cisco Impact,
and you have that crowd waiting outside
to walk in and see what you did differently
this year. I also love the moment before a
keynote starts, when the room is dark and
you have thousands of people in a room
waiting in anticipation. I still get butterflies
in my stomach. "
A traditional marketer at the start of
her career, Sapiz took a chance opportunity
to fill a temporary role on an events team.
After that experience, she quickly pivoted
her career to focus 100 percent on events.
She decided her starting point would be on
the agency side of the business.
" I knew I wanted the breadth and the
depth of multiple brands. I wanted to work
on large-scale programs. I thought that was
going to be an amazing training ground
for me, and that essentially led me to seek
the agency side, " she says. " That experience
prepared me for the job that I have today. "
She spent seven years at George P. Johnson,
working on the Cisco account for five
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EVENT MARKETER SPRING 2022
Cisco Live, the annual sales kickoff event,
Cisco Impact, and the partner conference,
Cisco Partner Summit. In addition, she
manages a team working exclusively on
CXO events for programs such as sports
of those years before jumping to the brand
side to formally join the Cisco organization
10 years ago. Today, as vice president of
global events, she leads a vast portfolio
within the Cisco global events organization
that includes the flagship customer event,
" We need everybody in
this. That responsibility
needs to be there, across
the events industry. For us,
sustainability has been
at the forefront of our
strategy for so many years.
We have to do better. We
can all do better. "
sponsorships, a team working on portfolio
planning and event strategy, and another
team that focuses on audience engagement,
marketing, operations, and technology.
Collectively, the organization delivers
around 65 programs externally and,
through a strategic meetings management
group, on average 1,200 meetings and
events internally on an annual basis.
In her role at Cisco, and as an industry
peer, Sapiz feels she has a responsibility
to help the industry make progress on
developing tools and metrics to put hard
numbers behind the value of events. She
certainly knows first-hand the intangible
impact that strategic face-to-face experiences
have on the business.
" Our buying cycles are pretty complex;
some of our deals are extremely large and
it takes a long time for these deals to close,
which means within that period of time,
you will have hundreds if not thousands
of touchpoints, " she says. " Events are just
a subset of those touchpoints, and it's still
challenging to draw a straight line between
someone who attends an event and a deal
that closes, but we have to continue to look
at ways that we can quantify that impact.
We know we have a tremendous impact. "
Long before the pandemic, the Cisco
organization recognized the role of event
technology and dedicated a team to it. In
fact, in 2008, Cisco was one of the first
organizations to launch a virtual event for
its annual sales kickoff for 20,000 peoeventmarketer.com
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Event Marketer Spring 2022

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