Digital marketing is powerful, but sometimes you need more than a ‘register now’ button to get delegates booked onto your event.
This is particularly true if your tickets are more expensive, in the hundreds or even thousands of pounds, which is a common price for professional conferences, training sessions and workshops.
To clinch that sale, you’ll often need to have a phone conversation with your prospect, to better understand their needs and see if your event is a good fit.
In effect, you need to use delegate sales to complement your marketing, otherwise it’s likely you won’t meet your revenue target.
However the only thing worse that having no event sales team, is having an effective sales team, because they won’t make you money, but they will cost you!
The answer is having a well training, properly briefing sales person (or team) that is well equipped to have conversations with your prospects, articulate the value of your event, and close the sale.
A well briefed event sales team can be an incredibly effective tool for boosting your revenue numbers and running a sell-out event.
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Here are some top tips for ensuring your sales team – whether in house or freelance – will generate the revenue you need for your event to be a success.
1. Be prepared
First things first, you have to be prepared when briefing your sales team.
By the time you’re ready to brief them, it’s likely you’ve spent weeks on your event, speaking to people in the market, inviting speakers, negotiating with media partners and writing marketing copy.
You know it inside and out, so you might feel confident enough you can just ad lib the brief, but you’d be wrong. It needs structure.
One of the dangers of not being properly prepared is that you’ll assume knowledge that your team just don’t have, so it’s good to go back to the basics and run through everything in an ordered way. This ensures you don’t miss anything; and your sales team can digest things in a logical way.
Make sure you get a copy of the event sales brief to help you prepare properly.
2. Set aside some dedicated time
You might also be tempted to make your brief quite casual, and brief people at their desks.
Big mistake! They won’t be in ‘learning mode’ and ready to absorb the information you need them to. More than likely they’ll have one eye on their screens still, checking off emails or looking at social updates.
It’s going to be much more effective to take them out of their day-to-day environment and get them in the right frame of mind.
It could just be a 60 minute session in a meeting room; or if you’ve got a massive event and a larger team, you could book out a half day and workshop it.
3. Ask open ended questions
Once you feel like you’ve thoroughly run through the sales briefing document, it will be tempting to finish by saying “So, does everyone understand?” and everyone in the room will nod their heads.
You’ll feel great because they’re full briefed, people will depart back to their desks, and then a few days in you’ll realise that a lot of people actually didn’t understand!
The truth is, everyone will be just keen to a) finish and grab a coffee; or b) not look silly by being the only one to admit they didn’t really understand that thing you said 40 minutes ago (and they’ve been pretty much lost ever since!)
A better approach is to chunk the brief into sections, and then ask open ended questions before moving onto the next part.
Open ended questions actually test whether the information has been absorbed, and most importantly, can be articulated back properly (essential for them to sell the event well).
For example, don’t say, “So do you know the pricing structure?”
Ask instead, “Can you tell me the price for Super Early Bird and Early Bird tickets?” or “What is the team discount, and how many people need to register to qualify for it?”
This will give you confidence your sales team really do understand everything you need them to.
4. Practice makes perfect
By now you’re probably itching to get selling tickets to your event; and every day not on the phone is another day of sales wasted.
It’s true to an extent, but you only get one chance at a first impression, so you don’t want to waste that chance with your team making their first pitches live to your prospective delegates.
Much better is having them pitch to you (or each other) for a day or so until they become really slick.
Practice common objections and objection handling; ask difficult questions; make sure they refine their opening so it’s confident and engaging.
Far from losing you sales, it will be time really well spent, and will only help to increase their close rate – meaning more revenue in the long run.
5. Always be learning
A really important thing to understand about having an effective sales team is to not consider the brief a completed process after the first meeting.
It’s a living, breathing process (and document), and will continue to be refined throughout the sales campaign.
You need to solicit feedback from your team about what is working and what isn’t. Something you felt for sure would resonate on the phone might falling flat; or maybe you need to tweak your delegate persona slightly based on who is and isn’t buying.
Each week you should have quick round robin to get this input from your sales team, update the brief, and then rebrief everyone so they’re all as up-to-date as possible.
And remember, don’t skip the steps above for each rebrief.
They only need to be quick, but 30 minutes away from desks, taking a structured approach, asking open-ended questions and running through a couple of updated practice pitches will make a huge difference to the success of your team.
Conclusion
If you’re selling high value tickets to an event, whether it’s a 500 person conference or a 10 person workshop, you’re very likely going to need some help closing those sales over the phone and not just online.
Use our free delegate sales brief template to make sure your salesperson (or team) is well briefed, effective and successful in bringing in additional revenue for your event.
