Event Strategy: Maximising event sponsorship and attendance

Many businesses attend events with the intention of walking away with a bucketful of leads from eager buyers, with hands on half-opened wallets.

So many times a misguided sales leader expects the event-to-cash journey to be quick - doomed to be disappointed. However, looking at events in this lens is a surefire way to ensure disappointment and fail to appreciate the true value. The ROI of events is still there, but presents in far less obvious and longer-term horizons.

I’m not saying that a SaaS business shouldn’t scrutinise how they spend their money. Simply that obsessing on ‘leads’ captured on-the-day is a somewhat myopic approach. It also demonstrates a poor understanding of why customers attend events in the first place.

So here’s my 2-cents (and some extra change) on how to view events and maximise their value.

Don't just get a pop-up stand

There isn’t anything sadder than a junior sales person standing in front of a popup stand and a table with a stack of company literature and a bowl of cheapo branded pens, wearing an ill-fitting suit and a tragic ‘please someone talk to me’ look on their face.

Generally what happens is a bunch of conference attendees, and people with no buying agenda, cruise round during the coffee break asking surface-level questions as much out of boredom or pity while waiting for the next speaker.

Buyers can and do attend events, but their need is usually nascent and hoping they stumble across your booth among the sea of competitors that look exactly the same is a poor strategy. It's not that having a stand has NO value. Simply that they tend to be very expensive relative to the value that they offer.

I would only really advocate the value of a stand, where you are already leveraging a larger thought-leadership opportunity by speaking at the event and using the quality of that content to either drive awareness and people to the stand.

Pick sponsorship opportunities with a speaking slot

If you’re going to spend your extremely precious marketing budget to be at an event, seek out speaking opportunities for your leadership. Yes, they are pay-to-play and more expensive than a simple stand, but are far more effective at providing a platform to prove credibility.

Spring for the premium sponsor package, which though more aren't usually that much more considering the opportunity to differentiate and speak to a captive audience. Prepare your most charismatic story-teller, armed with a killer narrative centred around the problem your company was incepted to solve. No direct out-and-out feature-based pitching. You need to carefully wrap the narrative in such a way that it’s not too obvious, or you’ll lose the audience very quickly.

Select your events carefully

Make sure you validate that the events you are looking to attend are places your buyers are likely to go to.

Qualify events based on the likely number of potential buyers there. It's common for many events to be extremely vendor-heavy. You get no value from evangelising to a room full of your competitors! I once attended an event where I estimated 90% of the people there were from suppliers and almost no one from potential buyers - it was dire!

If an event has been running for more than 2 years the organisers will have the previous years attendance list - in fact they are probably using that as part of their pitch to sponsors to attend. I would recommend negotiating a clause that includes a rebate based on prospective customer attendance. If you’re paying to present to buyers, the event organiser should be prepared to put their money where their mouth is and face a stiff penalty if the day's attendance is far from what was promised. I would expect 50-60% of attendees to be from buyers.

It’s also easier to start assessing the investment business case to other marketing initiatives once you understand in absolute numbers how many attendees there will be from potential customers. If you’re paying to speak at an event which costs you £15k in sponsorship, and there are 500 people, of which only 50% are buyer-side it’s costing you £60 per message consumed as part of that sponsorship opportunity you paid so much for.. Its a lot easier to assess the business case of sponsoring that event with some of the other digital marketing campaigns you might be running.

If you do choose to present, please remember the importance of being engaging to the audience. If you put everyone to sleep with lots of text-heavy slides, it won’t matter how well attended the event is. As a company that intends to regularly utilise events, invest significant effort into building 2-3 killer presentations and re-use them across other events. It's better to have a small amount of narratives that are A-grade than many that are "meh". Reusing a quality presentation is fine (to a point) because the amount of attendees that are likely to attend both events is pretty small.

ROI is measured in years, not months

Attending events needs to be viewed NOT as a lead generation engine, but a BRAND building exercise. They do drive a positive ROI, assuming you attend the right ones and execute well. However, anything brand and thought-leadership returns on timelines of months and years, not days and weeks.

Accepting this is important because it will help you set the right expectations, and stop a burdensome and unrealistic weight of expectation on the poor salespeople that attend and can be expected to pull rabbits from hats.

It's helpful to understand that technology buyers don’t attend events with a wallet full of cash burning a hole in their pocket, itching to acquire something immediately. Unless you made a wrong turn on the way to the event and ended up in Lidl, you’re not going to bump into someone looking to buy on the day. They are usually either trying to stay current on the latest innovation developments in the industry, or at-best might be doing some long-range information gathering for an RFI 6-12 months down the line.

Attending events is like planting seeds. These are things that you will get to harvest far far down the road.

I’ve been in sales for over 20 years now. In all that time I’ve attended and presented at countless events. What’s far more common than collecting leads on the day is, months or even years later, someone that had a conversation with you or saw you present will engage you having shortlisted you based on that interaction.

Let me give you an example.

I was in a meeting with a C-Level buyer at a Tier 1 Bank – a big cheese. In the middle of the meeting he got up, exclaimed that he had seen us present at a particular event 4 years earlier and proceeded to grab a pen and recreate a visual that had been presented.

We closed the deal a few months later for several million.

Though it’s hard to measure such impact, the long-term value of brand-building through narrative needs to factor into how you evaluate the value of any content strategy, including presenting at events.

You can still try to get leads at events

Just because the odds are low and the ROI, as I described it longer-term, doesn't mean you can't graft to try and build relationships. Use all the tools at your disposal, and sometimes you can be in the right place at the right time.

You can absolutely pick up key contacts and have great conversations that develop into something. I’m simply suggesting developing a slightly more long-term appreciation of the platform.

Don’t forget side events!

Any marketer will tell you it takes multiple touches to build momentum, credibility and ultimately convert meetings and opportunities. Hosting your own side event is something that often gets overlooked entirely, or left til the last minute and rushed or abandoned. 

Create an environment where you can genuinely add value to a prospect. One where you can connect them with their peers and set the stage for more casual and less rushed conversation. Buyers can talk to customers, or other potential buyers. Their impartial opinions will always be given more weight than the obvious bias of a sales executive. Be a matchmaker for those conversations and you’ll be adding real value to prospects at events.

Creating a side event in a dinner or roundtable format enables you to pick-up conversation in a more casual format. It allows you to build rapport over an evening, rather than rushing things in a 5 min coffee break during the main event. 

One of the best approaches to side events is a dinner / lunch with around 15 people, with some open drinks which give way to a moderated conversation on specific topics. Rather than people pairing off in conversational groups of 2-3, and talking about whatever, there are common themes that everyone can chime in on.

Summary

These are just a few suggestions on how to view events as part of your larger GTM strategy. If considering issues like how much to allocate to events as part of your wider marketing efforts, or need advice on how to maximise those speaking opportunities by selling through storytelling, contact us for help.