High-quality customer and prospect meetings are the largest contributors to building the sales pipeline at events. For companies, building a sales pipeline during an event is crucial to showing ROI for the events. Usually, the meetings that contribute to building ROI do not exist in a vacuum. Any business from meetings that you scheduled at the event but happened after the event can be attributed to the event itself. This is because the sales cycle is spread out over a series of interactions, and the engagement at the event is a crucial part of the puzzle.
To ensure the continued success of the sales cycle, meetings need to be followed up with a set of action items agreed upon at the event, and the relevant attendees to move the sales deal forward.
Following up with your leads after the event
Gather all your leads and prospects
Adding quality leads to your sales pipeline is important to signal the value of the event. The first step would be to collect and organize all the leads, badge scans and opportunities collected at the event. We’d imagine you’d have personalized marketing campaigns set up for fresh leads, and a sales follow-up process for ongoing opportunities. Bucket these according to their categories.
Once you’ve segmented your leads into hot and cold leads, you can assign them to the relevant team to be pursued. For prospects you’ve had a meeting with, ensure that every single meeting has a clear follow-up meeting plan, and an agenda to discuss.
Get the timing right
When following-up with fresh leads, the best practice is to always reach out to your prospects as soon as you possibly can. That way the event is fresh in their minds and they are much more likely to respond. This leads to higher conversions, which translates to higher pipeline that you can attribute to the event.
When it comes to a sales opportunity, ideally the sales representative should have scheduled the time and the place of the next meeting, along with the agenda at the end of the meeting at the event itself.
Increasing sales success with follow-up meetings
In many companies, follow-ups at events largely seem to be limited to just email follow-ups. But actual face-to-face meetings have a much larger impact on the sales pipeline. Leads that were engaged during the event needs to be followed up with to maintain the continuity of the sales cycle. Meeting managers need to identify meetings that have the maximum impact on the sales pipeline and prioritize those meetings. Meanwhile, here’s what the sales team can do to ensure maximum meeting success:
End the meeting after booking the next one
While wrapping up the meeting at the event, ensure that the time, agenda and place for the next meeting is already decided. Any delay in deciding this reduces the chances of a prompt follow-up meeting, unnecessarily dragging out the sales cycle. Do not put off deciding the date for the next meeting for later either. The delays caused leads to leaving sales $ on the table.
Along with the time and date, deciding the agenda of the next meeting saves time, and ensures that attendees come prepared for the meeting. This increases the chance of meeting success and accelerating the sales deal.
Map relevant users to that meeting
Once you have a list of meeting follow ups, start mapping the relevant meeting attendees that you’ll need to make the meeting successful. Getting the right meeting attendees is always a first come, first serve proposition. Send out those meeting requests as soon as you possibly could.
Closing on customers you meet at an event depends on the quality and promptness of the follow-up interactions. If you happen to close the deal, don’t forget to attribute the event interaction to the closure. This opens up budgets to attend more events, increasing the chance for more deal-closing meetings.
