In an increasingly digital world where businesses put a premium on virtual experiences, face-to-face interactions are still vital. From conferences and events, to 1-day seminars and user group meetings, going to events is a powerful tactic for raising awareness and driving engagement for your brand or business. 

But measuring return on investment can be pretty hard to gauge when you attend an event. It’s tricky to put metrics in place, as there’s no quantifiable output involved. It’s up to you to maximize the value of your attendance and find ways to make it grow your sales. 

Why attend conferences and events in the first place?

People buy from people. Different businesses go to events for different reasons. Some attend primarily due to learning new information and getting up-to-date with industry trends, while others use events as an opportunity to network and grow their business. Ultimately, the whole point of going to an event is to forge a personal connection with your ideal customer or client. Even meeting just a handful can already be advantageous for your business, thus making your attendance worth it. 

Costs involved in attending events

Of course, attending events requires spending money on the necessary materials and manpower. Typical expenses include the following:

• Reservation fee for your stand or booth
• Exhibition graphics
• Printed collateral like tarpaulin, flyers, brochures, and posters
• Wages for the staff manning your stand
• Miscellaneous costs like food and transportation

Ideally, you need to assemble a team to set up and operate your stand, as well as assign a couple of team members to roam around and network with other attendees. Adding up all these costs may seem daunting, but it’s worth it if you know how to maximize your stay.

How to maximize your ROI in events

Make sure you nail your message. In the brief interactions you’ll have with attendees, you only have a few minutes to deliver a message that conveys high value for your product or service. It needs to be clear, unique and memorable. Everyone on the team should be able to communicate this message effectively.

You can leverage your message with social selling and digital marketing instead of just relying on traditional sales methods. While you can still do things like hand out business cards and flyers, you can infuse modern sales tactics like search engine optimization (SEO), Facebook targeting, artificial intelligence, and other methods popular in the tech space today. You can also opt to employ location-based marketing to reach out to everyone in the vicinity and introduce your business and your offerings. 

Networking

It’s extremely important to use a CRM tool to track everyone you’ve met or engaged with so you can follow up after the event. One way to collect business cards or contact information from potential prospects and partners is to have a contest. You can have people put their cards in a jar and draw one for a reward at the end of the event. We’ve given away a collection of our favorite sales books during one of our contests. 

Networking is one of the most important aspects of these events, so it’s important to make a plan ahead of time on how to collect as many contacts as possible. 

Wrapping up

Here’s a list of the top sales conferences you should consider attending this year. 

1. AA-ISP Digital Sales World 2019
2. *Outbound 2020
3. SaaStr
4. Rainmaker
5. Sandler Sales & Leadership Summit
6. TOPO Sales Summit
7. Pulse
8. SiriusDecisions Sales Leadership Exchange
9. Unleash 2019
10. INBOUND
11. HYPERGROWTH
12. LeadsCon
13. Accelerate
14. Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference
15. The Sales Development Conference

We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when building a framework for sales conversations, so we’ve developed a Sales Conversation “Cheat Sheet” you can download HERE.

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If you need help developing a clear message that communicates value to your prospects, let’s talk.