We Crush Our Event ROI at Dream force Each Year—Here’s How We Do It!
If you’re even slightly targeting sales and marketing professionals, Dreamforce is the one event that you must not only attend, but also have a strong booth presence. Dreamforce is, without a doubt, a great branding and lead generation event. It pulls a huge swath of this key target audience to San Francisco each year and allows you to meet face-to-face with thousands of customers and prospects.
If you have a booth at Dream force this year, we’d like to share with you a few tips on how we’ve consistently crushed our goals related to our booth’s traffic, leads generated, and quality of leads.
Offer something truly interestingwe’re continuously expanding our solutions to offer sales, marketing, and everyone in the enterprise with accurate data, insights and connections, so as we enter an event of this scale, we like to introduce and showcase new products to the attendees. We’re well known within the Salesforce ecosystem, so we can take advantage of the massive exposure and create as much buzz as we can around product launches and announcements. In fact, last year, we launched “InsideView for Marketing” and were overwhelmed with interest at Dreamforce.
This year, we’re announcing…well, why spoil it. You’ll have to stop by our booth (North Hall 1106) to find out.
Three reps and a laptop will not drive leadsEach year, our primary goal at Dreamforce is to get people to explore what we do, mostly through pre-event programs, on-site product demos and deep, one-on-one conversations with attendees. Sure, we’re there to meet people and shake hands, but we want to engage with people, not just scan badges and go for quantity of leads. One quality engagement beats 100 random leads every time.
Always be closingOn our sales side, we treat Dreamforce as a closing event, since so many sales and marketing decision-makers are there in person. If you don’t go in with a purpose and a clear set of goals, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve what you’ve set out to do, which in our case is create awareness, build pipeline and drive revenue—all very quickly and all with our key sales and marketing targets.
Each year we build on and learn from our previous year’s approach by gathering feedback from our entire organization. It’s truly a team effort and we’re always excited to do more to surprise and delight the attendees!
Preparation ensures money well spentLast year, there were a few things that we did at Dreamforce 2013 that were completely new to us and which also changed our event process moving forward. First, we leveraged Dreamforce resources to hire professional booth staff, which increased our reach tremendously. For a nominal investment we were able to capture 400% more leads than the year before, which led to more and more qualified opportunities for our sales team.
Of course, to increase their effectiveness, we spent time training the hired staffers on our product, pitches and one-on-one product trainings so that, when they arrived, they were informed and powerful brand advocates. Most importantly, they were an extension of our own employees: They dressed like us, were friendly and knowledgeable, and vastly increased our reach.
Interactivity drives engagementWe also leveraged video product demos around our display, which kept our employee staff from having to scan thousands of leads and allowed them to spend more time on qualification. The demo videos helped us to focus on the people that were interested in learning more about our product while also giving everyone a quick overview of our newest product release.
Always be socialAlso, social buzz is a must! InsideView had one of the most popular hashtags at #DF14 – check it out for yourself: #IVDF14. Using it as our social marketing core, we were able to connect our social programs, giveaways, internal incentives, session alerts, prize contests and more. This gave us added visibility and interest at the event, which is very important, especially since we’re a company focused on social selling!
Hard work pays offThere’s no doubt that events, especially big ones, are time consuming, stressful and chaotic. But if you you’re organized, have a strategic plan and concrete goals, and collaborate across your whole team, you’re sure to have a successful event.
Source: InsideView Blog
