Real life is back baby!

6 pillars for killing it at in-person events.

Jul 14, 2023

What’s old is new again.

Remember when people were posting that “Events are DEAD!”. We will never go back to in person events.

Well fast forward 2 years and events are back in full swing and probably more important than ever. In a world where everyone is working from home, in person events are what the people want more of not less of.

Events can get a lot of bashing for having a poor ROI but just like anything if done right the channel can be huge for your business.

So I thought I would share the playbook for how we ran over 100 events a year at G2 that generated tens of millions in revenue:

Alignment on Goals - be crystal clear before hand on what success looks like and how you will measure ROI. Is it new pipeline generated? Closed won deals at the show? Customer upsells or renewals? The worst thing you can do is drop $10k on a booth without any idea of what you hope to get in return.
Sales Alignment - Once you know the main goal of the show you can align individual reps to goals that ladder up to it to ensure success. 100 new prospect meetings is the goal and you have 5 reps attending? Each of them needs to do 20. Be very clear on expectations.
Pre-book meetings. If 20 meetings is the goal, you should be working with the sales team to book some of those in advance. We used to set a target for pre-booked meetings ahead of time and if you didn’t have that booked, we didn’t send you. The event starts about a month before it actually happens. Don’t wait to show up and expect magic to happen.
Run a booth schedule. Nothing worse than a booth where everyone is off running meetings and you miss out on capturing the floor traffic. Sounds simple but I have walked by enough empty booths to know it is not something everyone does.
Have a hook. Why would someone want to come by the booth? What value can you offer to get someone there? We leaned into 90 days of free intent data and used that to pre-book meetings - Find your value. If it’s giving away a "free" demo you might be in trouble :)
Build in accountability - We would send out a post event report to the executive team the week after - outlining how we did - how many meetings did we run? What pipeline was generated? How did each rep perform against their targets? This is the easiest way to make sure every convo and opp are actually logged and you can measure the impact. Nothing motivates a sales rep to log their activity than knowing it is going into a report to the entire executive team.

Oh and don’t spend your nights drinking and partying until the show is over the last night or get ready for the worst hangover experience of your life - working a tradeshow booth.

Thanks for reading!

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