How To Craft An Event Strategy That Sales Will Love

B2B marketing is going through a big change. Marketers are realizing that the broad scale lead generation approach isn’t as effective as it once was. At the same time, B2B companies have moved almost entirely to inside sales. Generating leads and blasting them with marketing automation emails is no longer enough to build pipeline for inside sales teams.

These new realities led to two major changes in B2B marketing strategy: the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) movement and a renaissance of Field Marketing. Account-Based Marketing is gaining momentum because it changes marketing’s focus away from lead generation and towards pipeline creation and acceleration within the right accounts. Field Marketing is making a comeback because inside sales teams need to connect with their prospects in more meaningful ways.

One major component of both ABM and the new Field Marketing is hosting strategic events to to engage your target accounts. This event strategy, called Revenue Event Marketing, focuses on building and accelerating pipeline to drive more revenue through in-person events. In Revenue Event Marketing, the emphasis becomes targeting and attracting the right attendees, maximizing face-to-face interactions, and driving timely follow-up. There are a few strategy changes that need to happen to make way for this new approach to events.

Shift Focus From Leads to Pipeline

Despite the shift toward ABM, the top metric for determining event success is still lead generation, according to Regalix’s State of B2B Event Marketing. When you only look at the number of leads generated through events, you miss the opportunity to use events as a strategic way to to create and accelerate pipeline with your target accounts. Events become much more valuable when the focus shifts away from just generating as many leads as possible.

In B2B, events are better suited as targeted efforts to drive conversion among a known group of prospects and customers. A recent study reports that events are the best method for engaging with c-suite decision makers, where high-touch relationship selling is critical.

For businesses that have adopted any part of Account-Based Marketing, Revenue Event Marketing is an extension of that approach focused on engaging your target accounts with events. This new approach requires a change in expectations and measurement related to marketing events.

Sponsor Less, Host More

Revenue Event Marketing moves away from sponsored conferences and trade shows to self-hosted events. Sponsoring trade shows and conferences can help generate top-of-funnel leads, but those leads are only valuable if they convert. Booth conversations are usually short and meaningless. They often only accomplish an explanation of what your product does to people who aren’t a fit. The trade show environment can also be wildly unpredictable as there is no way to guarantee traffic to your booth.

As a reaction to these issues, 40% of businesses are cutting back on larger sponsored events in favor of more targeted gatherings according to the CMO Council. This trend is being driven by a realization that smaller, more intimate events allow you make better use of your event budget while prioritizing on the accounts and contacts that will help you drive revenue.

There will still be some industry events you’ll want to sponsor because the attendees fit your ideal customer profiles and personas. But your event strategy shouldn’t be made up entirely of sponsoring booths at trade shows. At the very least, you should be hosting events like dinners or cocktail hours around the conferences you sponsor.

Align Marketing and Sales

While marketing and sales alignment has been a battle for years, the shift toward Account-Based Marketing is helping to change the rivalry into a partnership. Of any area where sales and marketing intersect, events are the most critical. The stakes are higher given that events are the biggest spend in the marketing budget and sales and marketing need to interact in-person in front of your target audience. That makes Field Marketing’s role as the link between sales and the marketing team even more important.

Sales used to view events as a waste of time when the focus was on lead generation. Reps would complain about being forced to make conversation with bad leads when they could have spent that time going after their targets. When sales starts to see that events can help them close deals at those target accounts, things change.

Companies with marketing and sales alignment are 67% better at closing deals and extract 208% more value from marketing according to Marketo’s research. Knowing that, you should start thinking of your sales and marketing teams as one “Revenue Team.” When Field Marketing aligns marketing and sales to work together on a Revenue Event Marketing strategy, events can become the biggest driver of revenue for your business.

These strategy changes make events more than just another way to collect contact info for top of the funnel leads. Revenue focused events provide an effective way to engage your target accounts and win deals. When you align marketing and sales, host events highly targeted events, and make pipeline acceleration the end goal, events have the opportunity to become your top revenue driving activity.

To learn more about how to drive revenue with events, check out Attend’s free eBook, The Complete Guide To Revenue Event Marketing.