So, your company thinks a live event is an effective demand creation activity to attract net new customers. It certainly can be if you plan, strategize and target the most meaningful business contacts. Questions to ask when preparing for your face-to-face events:

1. Is my company’s branding strong enough to attract a targeted audience on our own or should we collaborate with our strategic partners to attract more attention?
2. Is my topic and value proposition compelling enough to entice the audience to spend a chunk of time out of their schedule to attend?
3. Can I define a target audience (organizations and contacts) within a specified geography?
4. What venue is ideal? (hotel, restaurant, ballgame)
5. What are the needs of my targeted audience? (educational/informational, peer networking, technical)
6. Do I have ample and accurate data for audience acquisition activities? (email addresses, telemarketing)
7. What activities can I effectively and efficiently manage in-house and do these activities fall under my company’s core competencies? (venue research, coordination of food and beverage, rentals, speakers,  development of e-vites and registration pages, telemarketing)
8. Have I chosen an event date that doesn’t conflict with holidays (pre or post) and/or other events in the area on the same day?
9. Is the goal to fill “butts in seats” or simultaneously ensure that they are the right butts in seats? (strong influencers, decision-makers – i.e., quantity vs. quality of attendees)

If you can effectively address the issues that these questions are intended to surface, then you’re ready to begin strategizing your event recruitment plans. I have found that the following best practices are critical to effective event recruitment:

• Set a budget and plan the venue around the budget. Keep in mind that successful events do not have to break the bank/budget.
• The best dates to hold events are Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
• Plan for a drop-off rate (i.e., registrants who actual attend). Drop-off rates can range from 45% – 85%. The average drop-off rate for a live technology event is 60%. The most common causes are last-minute business conflicts, venue location, and lack of the topic’s relevancy.
• Based on an average drop-off rate of 60% and assuming you’d like to have 50 attendees at your event, you’ll need to start your campaign by targeted approximately 6,000 contacts. Based on a 2% response rate, you’ll receive approximately 125 registrations of which approximately 50 will actually convert to attendees.

The recruitment methodology that I’ve found works well is:

• Week one: Send emails to all potential contacts. The emails should be sent about three weeks from the date of the event. If your target audience is C-Level, know that their calendars tend to book early and your timing should as well so plan on targeting these high-level contacts about six weeks prior to the event.
• Week two:  2nd email to same contacts filtering out those who have already responded followed by phone calls to the contacts the day following the second email.
• Continue calling efforts right up through two days prior to the event and be prepared to email some marketing collateral to the people you speak with who request more information.
• Place confirmation calls to all registrants beginning two days prior to the event. Plan to make a second confirmation call to each registrant if you don’t reach them the first time and leave a voicemail message on your second attempt if you can’t connect.

Some other things to consider:

• Your event recruitment calls should deliver a strong and compelling value proposition as well as validated interest with business initiatives in planning or active stages to the right target contacts.
• Of course, your topic should be relevant, compelling and address best practices.
• The event format should be comprised of a panel of peer practitioners and/or some well-recognizable speakers who are subject matter experts.
• Choose an experienced partner to outsource event planning or event marketing activities that do not fall under your company’s core competencies.
• Assess the true benefits of the event through an end-user evaluation completed prior to the close of the event.
• Perform a post event telemarketing post-mortem on those who registered but did not attend in order to further qualify a potential prospect and, based on their level of interest, set an appointment to meet with your sales representative.

When in doubt, consult with experts in event planning, management and marketing to help you ensure your event is a success. Televerde has assisted a variety of companies and their partners with planning and implementing their successful live events. I’m happy to share these success stories and more best practices with you. And if you’d like to share your ideas with me and other readers of this, please add your comments below.

Why is it important to me as a 30-year sales veteran to understand this movement to better align these departments? Four words:  “More highly qualified leads.” I consult daily with all size organizations whose sales departments all want what I want.   The research delivered at this seminar clearly demonstrated that sales and marketing departments must achieve minimum standards of alignment in order to increase productivity, generate more revenue and improve processes.

Alignment with processes involves discipline, collaborative planning, data standards and governance to analyze, diagnose and improve.  Using Televerde as an example for best practices that we implement for ourselves and for clients, we support these processes from beginning to end – starting with lead management SLA’s to our scheduled campaign performance reviews discussing campaign metrics.

Technology alignment must occur through process automation, reporting integration and information access.  As an example of this, data integration with our clients’ CRM applications enables them access to real-time sales opportunity information and the ability to measure our performance to deliver high-value sales opportunities directly to their sales team. We also deploy this practice internally for our own sales team.  Another relevant example of technology alignment that we use ourselves for clients is lead nurturing which prevents opportunities outside of the “low hanging fruit” category from being left behind for the competition to pick off.  The time has come to take some of the nurturing responsibility away from sales through automation of relevant messaging.

How does your company predict, plan and measure?  Data & Analytics will reveal valuable information about your marketing and sales opportunities, accounts and sales cycle.  Where we have found success in this area is through ongoing research services which have proven to impact our clients’ pricing strategies, territory distribution, sales personnel assessments, and account relationship-mapping.  Accurate data is a critical element to support successful sales and marketing efforts, and it’s not just about the data used to implement a marketing campaign; this also must include embedding the business intelligence and other data that results from studying each and every sales opportunity, even those that aren’t ready to buy in the next 30-90 days.  We are strong believers that with data comes wisdom, with wisdom comes insight, and insight delivers new possibilities for optimized sales and marketing performance.

Lastly, does your sales team have the proper toolkit to improve their performance month after month, year after year?  What Sales Enablement marketing and measurement tools are available? Probably the most meaningful enablement tool is having a strong set of product and solution content that is relevant to a variety of buyers at all stages of the sales cycle – early, mid and late-stage. This is an area I’ve often found to be lacking at many organizations. It’s an opportunity for improvement that can have a tremendous positive impact on sales effectiveness.

I returned from the seminar with validation that sales and marketing alignment is as critical as ever. It’s incumbent  upon all sales and marketing professionals to collaborate well in order to close the gaps.  When we’re successful at this, we will all benefit from receiving more highly qualified leads.

Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Connect to us on LinkedIn
Subscribe to us on YouTube