The Marketing Event Of The Year Is Coming!

You are in sales, marketing or customer success and the event of the year is upon us, the excitement is building, the entire company is expecting good results this time, and…

What do you think happens?

A ton of great conversations and a fantastic opportunity to build relationships in person but did was it the moment you did enough to convince your prospect to buy from you? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows is the question. Granted, you can’t beat in person events and there’s nothing quite like meeting in person, seeing the body language, reading the facial queues.

But, how many deals have you done since COVID that was as a result of that in person meeting? I’m sure there are a few.  

I’ve spent 2 years going to events to meet new people and I’ve had a great time but not one single in person encounter has resulted in a piece of business. Some fantastic conversations but no revenue. 

After 23 years in B2B sales I stopped advocating 3rd party in person events almost 15 years ago, the real connections happened when organising our own initiatives, more intermittent settings like dinner, breakfast or lunch and learns. My favourite was a networking panel discussion about a relevant topic with a few drinks.  

Events are time consuming and can be expensive, I find that when they’ve been organised by a different team they can appear disjointed and the team organising them struggles to get the sales teams buy in and attendance is light. When pipeline is assessed and strength of pipeline looked at closely its far better to use this insight to inform the topic to cover and the location to choose. Then it’s about understanding the strength of relationship the team has with their prospects - is someone willing to travel to meet in person or are you willing to throw enough money at the venue and speaker line up to secure attendees, not necessarily the quality of attendees you might hope for to move the needle on revenue this quarter.  

The revenue has either come from:

• My reputation 
• Credibility 
• Referral 
• Someone I know

Visibility and engagement with our target audience has come from our social selling & influence program. Having a large event is great but if you want a consistent flow of engagement that results in an inbound engine of new conversations week after week after week then this approach is what you need. 

In the last 8 weeks, since 2nd January 2023 our team of 3 sales reps (me included) have focused purely on social selling activities, following a tried and tested methodology. We are achieved the following performance in 8 weeks;

• Our collective networks grew by 1,449 relevant contacts.
• We’ve published 119 posts (blogs and articles) of which 48 of them have been human posts, showing our personable side, helping our audience get to know us.  
• We’ve received 123,985 impressions on our content, which our target audience has seen as that's who we connect with on a daily basis.
• 2,131 pieces of engagement from our target audience (likes and comments).
• We engaged with 1,377 contacts within our target audience, increasing our visibility with them and through our content showing we are credible and can help them with what we do.  
• We asked 1,786 contacts for a call and 121 calls have been completed, not booked but completed, which is a 6.8% meeting acceptance rate. 
• 44 calls are progressing with a clearly defined next step, which is a 37.4% meeting progression rate - this is what we’re working on in March and April, how to position value in the first call and increase call progression (watch this space).  
• 15 pitches completed (not bad since Christmas), though we’re going to be working on a new approach over the next 4-6 weeks, better align when we pitch to when the buyer is ready to buy. It’s a good job we’ve got enough volume of conversations to run a conclusive test in that time. The goal being to manoeuvre conversations towards an evaluation where we can learn enough information from our prospect in order to provide a tailored solution.  

And all this without a single dime spent on sales and marketing pipeline initiatives.  We rely on being disciplined with our time and prioritising activities that drive growth whether new business or delivery.

If you'd like to learn more drop me a DM or give me a call on +447951 220113

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