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  • January 21, 2025
  • By Brent Leary, Managing Partner of CRM Essentials, Cofounder of PPN

IRL 2025 - A New CRM Industry Conference from Guys Who Aren't All That New

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Paul Greenberg and I, aka The CRM Playaz, are celebrating our 15th (actually by the end of this week it will be the 16th) anniversary of talking CRM/CX with a variety of industry experts and enthusiasts by doing something we've never done before - holding our own event...in real life. And while we have brought the Playaz to a number of vendor events over the years, it has taken 15+ years to get the courage up to host a conference of our own.

With that as a backdrop, we are really excited to bring you IRL (In Real Life) 2025.  And while we're holding it in real life at the Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead Wednesday, Jan. 22, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., we are equally excited to have anyone interested in joining us virtually for free by registering at our event site IRL2025.com and clicking the register button on top right of the home page.

While one of the main reasons we're doing this is because it gives us an oppotunity to gather a number of our industry friends together and thank them for being a key part of what we've been fortunate enough to do over the years, it was also important for us to take this opportunity to experiment a bit with the look and feel of things, especially for the virtual audience.  So we're not only going to stream the entire general session, we're also going to stream the virtual Playaz watch party as an alternative broadcast - kind of like watching Peyton and Eli Manning's Monday Night Football "Manningcast" where they watch and talk about the game with rotating guests.  

During the general session we'll have industy influencer and best-selling author Brian Solis joining us to discuss his new book, Mindsift. We'll be tackling customer experiences from a variety of perspectives with session focused on sports (with executives from the Atlanta Hawks, Indianapolis Colts, New York Giants and New York Yankees), gaming, enternainment, and higher education. We'll have conversations with execs at VC and PE firms along with seed and angel investors discussing the current state of affairs for investing in the enterprise apps space. We'll have fireside chats with executives at vendors that helped us make this event possible, including Oracle, Salesforce and Zoho.  And we'll have some 

We'll also have a stream of a camera trained on the very talented Heather Willems as she creates real-time visualizations of what speakers are saying during the general sessions. We're calling that the "Heather Cam" stream. And we're also going to have a "live studio audience" setup as episodes of some of our Playaz Productions Network (PPN) shows, including CRM Playaz, In The Hot Seat, The Crunch, A Few Good Minutes, and Engage with Paul and Kenny, will be streaming in the afternoon.  

That's four streams to choose from. And we'll also have event hosts dedicated completely to engaging with the virtual audience, so their experience isn't just watching a long-range camera shot the whole time. And all throughout the general session Paul will be giving out his final CRM Watchlist awards. So there will be a lot going on, and we'd love for you to be a part of it by registering to join us virtually at IRL2025.com.  Hope to "see" you this Wednesday!

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