Event teams must ensure their sales team has multiple opportunities to connect with potential customers at events. These meetings help them build meaningful relationships that will drive purchasing decisions down the road.
But unfortunately, sales teams are often excluded from the event planning process. They may learn about the program shortly before the event, with little context about what sessions are planned or what attendees should expect. On-site, they’re left to locate prospects on their own, find space for impromptu meetings, and operate without visibility into how attendees are engaging. After the event, buyers’ engagement data can take weeks to reach them. By then, the momentum from those in-person interactions is gone.
Modern event technology — along with the right sales enablement strategy — can solve these issues. Here are tips to enable your sales team at every stage of your event.
Before the Event
When sales teams are prepped ahead of time, they arrive with the context and tools they need to take action at your event. Here are a few ways to help them get started:
- Define prospects’ registration experience. Consider whether certain prospects should move through a different registration path. Tailored compliance questions or a curated session selection can help you gather information your sales team needs to be successful.
- Put together dedicated agendas for prospects. Identify sessions and tracks that speak directly to your prospects’ challenges and priorities, and share links with sales reps. Build beginner-level sessions into your program that answer foundational questions. For example, an early-stage prospect needs a different experience than a long-standing customer. Enable reps to copy pre-built agendas and adjust them as needed.
- Plan targeted off-site experiences. Private dinners or invitation-only receptions give sellers and prospects a lower-pressure setting to begin building a genuine relationship. Use your platform’s segmentation capabilities to limit attendance to VIPs.
- Prepare discount codes. Event platforms can streamline pass approvals and discount code distribution. When their workflows live inside your platform, requests move faster and nothing gets lost. For high-value prospects, having VIP passes ready to go means your sellers can act immediately on an opportunity.
- Share early signals. Pre-event data is valuable to sellers. Integrate your event platform with your CRM to share intent signals like registration, session favoriting, and session scheduling. These behaviors give your sales team context to engage with prospects.
During the Event
At the event, sales reps need to follow up on buying signals in real time. The following tools and strategies eliminate on-site guesswork:
- In-app messaging. While at an event, prospects might be checking their email as often, so it’s easier to reach them through the event mobile app.
- Meeting capabilities. Give reps the ability to request and confirm meetings directly through your event platform, with confirmed time blocks updated within attendees’ agendas. The result is a smoother experience, with less back-and-forth communication required.
- Keep data flowing as the event unfolds. A live integration between your event platform and CRM allows the sales team to monitor prospects’ behavior in real time, adjusting their daily schedules based on what sessions someone plans to attend or what they engaged with that day. The conversation becomes a lot more relevant when it’s informed by what just happened.
After the Event
Equip sellers with what they need to follow up with purpose:
- Share metrics as soon as possible. With integrated event technology, your sales team should have a clear picture of what each prospect actually did at your event. Ensuring data is updated instantly enhances follow-up correspondence.
- Publish on-demand content. While only a fraction of your target audience will attend your event as it happens, you can still reach them by sharing sessions on demand. Let reps know which sessions will be available on demand so they can direct prospects to your on-demand library.
- Map out future touchpoints. If your organization runs multiple events, informing reps of upcoming opportunities ensures the relationship continues to develop. For example, a prospect who wasn’t ready to commit at your annual conference might be exactly the right fit for a smaller executive roundtable a few months later.
When sales and events operate in genuine alignment, your program moves beyond creating memorable experiences to generating measurable pipeline impact. RainFocus provides organizations with the tools their sales teams need to maximize event outcomes. Request a demo to learn more about our sales enablement capabilities.
