Marketing and sales teams put in a huge amount of effort each event season, to make the most out of either attending or sponsoring in-person events.
All the heavy lifting in the form of well thought out booths, custom swag, personalized invite lists, and campaigns around the month of the events, ensure that you get the eyeballs, registrations, and footfall for your landing page and eventually our booth.
When you’ve done all this heavy lifting, and managed to get the attention of prospects, the last step is ensuring that they’re booking meetings with the team at the event, with as little friction as possible.
Booking meetings for Events
After conversations with marketing and sales wizards, who manage to book meetings by the hundreds for their booths and at their booths, we realized that scheduling for events is a different beast compared to inbound or outbound meeting scheduling.
Meetings booked for scheduled events need to ensure that:
- Availabilities are restricted to the exact dates of the event
- Window of availabilities aligns with your field team’s schedules at your booth
- Named account meetings are automatically routed to the appropriate owner
- Routing to the right reps happen based on minimal information collected from your prospect to avoid drop offs
- Log meeting details in the CRM, with the right information to distinguish event meetings and outcomes
With custom schedules by RevenueHero, you can now set up your scheduling experience for events to check each one of those boxes, and get your prospects to fill your event team’s calendars with meetings.
Let’s look at how.
First, save the date, or dates
The Event meeting type enables you to restrict meeting scheduling for a specific date range of your event.
Depending on your event schedule, you can set this up to either a date range ( for instance 18th to 20th for Inbound) or specific dates (for instance 18th, and 20th and 24th).
Assemble the squad
Depending on how your team handles the booths, availability can be fixed, or custom to suit each one of your team’s schedules to accommodate as many meetings as possible, and always with the right person.
Choose which of your field team members take meetings at this event and decide whether they still take other meetings during the dates of the event. We typically see teams blocking out time specifically for meetings at the event.
When you add members to the event, RevenueHero automatically detects whether these members are already taking calls for other events at the same dates, and ensures that you avoid any conflict. Important when Dreamforce and Inbound choose to host on the same dates and your team needs to cover both.
Invite them to your booth
Customize your meeting invite to automatically add your booth name as the location so your attendees know exactly where to show up! Add a link to the map on the location to the email description if you have one.
Wrap it all up
Once you’ve created your custom schedule for your event, create an Inbound router for your events page, and in the step where you assign the meeting type for the event, choose your event meeting type.
Add the router to your event page, and drive meetings for the right dates, to the right people, and for the right location!
Once you install the router in your events page and meetings start getting booked, RevenueHero automatically updates your CRM with the meeting activity, along with the name of the meeting and the outcomes.
As a field marketer, this now allows you to pull not just the exact number of meetings that you drove for your booth, you now even get the outcomes of those meetings updated in your CRM activity.
Booking meetings at Events using RevenueHero
When you’re at in person events, your booth and field team at the event now has the massive task of:
- Getting visitors interested enough for a conversation at the booth.
- Converting that interest into something more, at the right moment.
Badge scans and the rigamarole of lead uploads to the CRM with follow ups from your sales team, set to the tune of the Sound of Silence, is a futile attempt at trying to make something out of your events investment.
Instead, convert those moments into booked meetings on the right sales reps calendars right at the event floor.
There are some considerations to booking meetings at events to provide your prospects a smooth booking and meeting experience, while also ensuring that these meetings don’t end up skewing sales quotas.
If you’re attending or sponsoring an event, chances are you’ve made the choice based on the number of attendees from named accounts that your sales team is actively targeting and concentration of ICPs at the events.
When you book meetings on the event floor, you want to ensure that:
- Meetings are routed to existing owners for named accounts that they’re sequencing/in conversation with.
- Meeting activities are automatically logged in the CRM and outcomes tracked to attribute pipeline to the event.
- The scheduling experience is as frictionless as possible with minimal information from the visitors.
- There is always a fallback to get meetings booked with someone from the sales team even if they’re not a named account.
Let’s see how RevenueHero automates this, get those meetings from your events straight to your sales team’s calendars, while managing all the complexity of routing and CRM data sanity.
Depending on what works best for you at events, you can setup one or both of these scheduling experiences.
Inbound router connected to your booth landing page
RevenueHero’s inbound router connects to any webform, and lets you route meetings based on existing ownership, or based on round robin to your team.
When conversations at your booth turn into interest, make sure that you have a display setup at your booth (ideally an ipad/tablet) where the visitor can quickly type in their name and email in a simple form.
Create a new inbound router in RevenueHero, that’s connected to this form and install the router before your event begins.
Whenever your prospect submits the form at your booth, their email address will be used to look up your CRM to identify if they’re already part of a named account, and the calendar of the current owner of the record will be displayed to your visitor.
You get a meeting booked instead of just another lead from your booth.
Depending on whether meetings need to be booked with the sales rep on the floor, or handed off to an AE, you can create a booking page that assigns to the same sales rep or a booking page that routes to the right AE.
Book meetings right on the events floor
If your team consists more of those smooth operators who are able to walk the floor, build conversations and charm attendees into booking meetings right then and there, even before a visit to your booth, then RevenueHero’s booking pages are your best friend.
Once you’ve decided the team that is headed to the event create personal meeting links for each one of the users, and add a customized video/image to the booking page.
Create a QR code for the page, and mail it to your sales rep.
When the conversation turns into interest, your sales rep can quickly pull up the QR code on their phone and get the meeting booked.
The meeting gets instantly logged in the CRM, reminders automated, and you can even setup Slack alerts to a dedicated channel about the meeting.
From Event Floor SDRs to AE calendars - Instant handoff with relays
For instant handoffs from event floor to AEs, create a relay for the event, and generate QR codes for each SDR for the relay.
With relays, each scheduled meeting is automatically assigned to the AEs calendar, while the meeting is attributed to the SDR, and all this information is automatically logged in your CRM.
No matter which of the two methods you use, you now have a frictionless, end to end attributed, automated meeting booking machine at your events!
And the best part? Everything is logged right in your CRM for you to report on.
