Maximizing ROI: Planning a successful sales event
Maximizing ROI: Planning a successful sales event
Sara Iannacone · 8/28/2023
Corporate event strategies typically incorporate internal and external events. Today, we’re focusing on external events and how you can maximize ROI for your sales events.
Did you know that 85% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a business after attending an event or experience? The ability to see, touch, feel a product and create a relationship with your sales rep is most often best done in person. So, if your company isn’t incorporating sales events into your corporate event marketing strategy, it’s time to change that.
Today, we’re sharing everything you need to know about planning a successful sales event that yields financial ROI for your business.
What is a sales event, and why is it important?
As far as corporate events go, sales events reign supreme in terms of importance for many organizations.
But what exactly is a sales event?
Well, it's a strategic gathering designed to showcase your business's products or services, typically featuring discounts and promotions that encourage attendees to sign a contract on the dotted line.
These events provide a unique opportunity to bring together current and potential customers, build brand awareness and recognition, and ultimately, boost sales.
So, why are they so crucial?
Simple—sales events allow businesses to directly interact with their customers in a fun and engaging way, creating stronger relationships and in turn, increasing brand loyalty. With a well-planned sales event, your business can showcase its products or services while also building meaningful connections with your target audience. And that, my friends, is the power of a sales event.
Types of corporate events that can be considered sales events
Now, the next question is, what can actually be considered a sales event? Here’s a list of sales event ideas:
Trade shows or conferences
Product launch events
Experiential dinner parties with VIP clients
A traveling pop-up event series (roadshow event), touching key markets for your business
Channel partner meetings and/ or trainings
Demo day events at your location
Customer appreciation and networking events
While the planning strategies for optimizing these sales events may differ, there’s a general strategy you can deploy up next.
Steps for maximizing your sales and corporate event ROI
While every event is different, sticking to a step-by-step process like this will help you maximize your sales event ROI every time.
Define your goals, objectives, and important metrics
Maximizing your ROI, of course, starts by defining what your ROI actually is.
For a sales event, typically, that ROI is going to be something like the number of leads generated or the number of sales made. Determine what matters most to your organization and how you will measure success prior to planning.
This blog outlines strategies for setting those goals, objectives, and metrics. While it’s geared toward offsite and retreat experiences, it’s highly applicable to client events as well.
Design your planning timeline and assign roles
Crafting a successful sales event hinges on meticulous planning and a well-orchestrated timeline. Marketers, sales teams, and event organizers should work hand-in-hand on this to navigate this dynamic process with a methodical and comprehensive sales event planning timeline.
Begin by outlining key milestones, from initial concept to post-event follow-up. Assign clear deadlines for tasks such as:
Venue selection
Logistical planning and staffing
Budget allocation
Content creation
Promotion strategy development & execution
Sales strategy development & execution
Follow-up strategy development & execution
By breaking down the timeline into manageable phases, your team can ensure that each aspect receives the attention it deserves.
Furthermore, assigning well-defined roles and responsibilities is paramount.
Designate a project lead (ideally a professional event planner) to oversee the entire event while entrusting specialists with specific areas outlined above.
Sales team: Invitations and sales strategy
Marketing team: Content and promotion
Event team or contractors: Logistics and execution
Effective communication and collaboration within the team are essential to ensure seamless execution. So, the event team or whoever is serving in a project management role needs to maintain contact with leads of each area and provide periodic status updates and organize joint check-in meetings.
Aim to host bi-weekly stand-ups for updates and weekly for the last month prior to the event, perhaps increasing in frequency if attendance isn’t looking ideal or logistics are falling by the wayside.
Promote your event and invite key stakeholders
For sales events like dinners or channel partner events, you may only need to extend personal invitations to VIPs and key stakeholders from your sales team or C-Suite. But, for larger events that depend on attendance for success, like trade shows, conferences, pop-up events, or product launches, you’re going to need a full marketing strategy in place.
Typically, we recommend a multi-channel marketing strategy, including, but not limited to:
Social media
Email marketing campaigns
Paid advertising
Influencer marketing
Blog posts leveraged via the sales team’s LinkedIn profiles or emails
Strategic personal outreach
Print invitations
Speaker and sponsor marketing requirements
We recommend no less than 6 weeks of marketing an event for ultimate success, but timelines will always depend on what type of sales event it is!
Ensure the right team is in place on-site
At sales events, ensuring your top salespeople are in the room is critical for success. Give them all the tools they need to close a sale, including:
Print and digital collateral
Video screens with marketing videos to pique conversations
A clear sales offer that aligns with the ROI goals
Scripts for newer sales team members or those who haven’t been to a sales event before, as well as demo scripts if they’re showcasing products
Swag to give away
A clear follow-up strategy to land more sales post-event with leads captured
Plus, you can put together some sort of incentive or competition, whoever sells the most gets a bonus, an additional entry for an incentive trip, an extra PTO day, etc. The best way to determine what will be most motivating is to do a survey of your sales team at the beginning of the year and see what they think.
Beyond your sales team, you also want to have:
Your on-site event planner: The person to manage all the logistics, rentals, caterer, registration, etc. Ideally, this person is involved in the planning from day one and is a professional planner, so they know what needs to be done and can troubleshoot seamlessly on-site.
Support staff: To help the planner with registration, giveaways, hosting clients when the sales team is busy, etc.
Your C-Suite: Having your President, VP, or Sales Directors on-site will ensure clients feel like VIPs. Plus, that face-to-face time builds relationships and can lead to more sales. These individuals can also step in and help close bigger deals on-site, as needed.
Pre-event communications
Host a meeting the day before with all of the team members that will be on-site to cover roles and responsibilities, event goals, and answer any last-minute questions. There should also be a pre-event email to all of these team members outlining the schedule, the goals, the client attendees (with salespeople assigned to host them), and FAQs for company sales events. This way, you’ll have fewer questions on the day of.
Measure the results
After the event, it’s time for metrics! Take the KPIs and metric goals you set in the start of planning and measure your event success against those goals. Here are a couple of things to consider:
Tangible metrics
When it comes to tangible financial results, use this formula: Net revenue/net cost.
Here are things you’ll want to include as revenue:
Ticket sales
Product/service sales directly attributed to the event
Sponsorship dollars
And for expenses, everything on your traditional budget expense line should be considered.
Then, you’ll have the actual financial ROI of your event.
Intangible metrics,
But you may want to revisit the ROI, 6 months to a year down the line, too.
Why?
Because there are intangible metrics like future sales that haven’t happened due to relationship building at the event, press mentions of the event that may lead to sales, etc.
The key is having a comprehensive event software or client management system that can attribute sales success to your event, even at a later date!
Host a post-mortem and refine for future sales events
After the event is over, it’s time to analyze and re-group. Typically a post-mortem, which is a meeting after the event, is led by event organizers, project managers, or the individual that led the event planning team. In that meeting, you should review:
What worked and what didn’t during the event planning process
What worked and what didn’t during event execution
What worked and what didn’t for event marketing
Sales metrics—are you on pace to reach the ROI desired?
Customer feedback—what did they think of the event?
Budget—did you come in on or under budget? If not, what came in over cost?
The meeting notes can then be compiled into a “Start, Stop, Continue” breakdown.
Start: List things that weren’t done for the event but should be started in order to improve a situation, achieve goals, or address challenges.
Stop: Identify actions or practices that were done for this event but should be stopped because they are ineffective, counterproductive, or no longer aligned with the desired outcomes.
Continue: Finally, the actions or practices that were used and worked towards yielding positive results. These are practices you want to keep doing because they contribute to reaching that ROI and planning effective client events.
With this, you can create a clear plan that can be used as a standard operating procedure for these sorts of events in the future. Your ROI can only increase with a solid strategy!
Recruit expert sales event planning support
If you don’t have an event planner to support your corporate event goals, we have a solution for you.
While our BoomPop team is known for their stellar offsite and retreat planning services, that’s not all our team offers. We also help craft custom corporate events, including sales events, from A-to-Z. We will help manage project timelines, budgets, and ensure your events are set up for success.
Want to learn more? Let’s chat.
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