As part of our partner community, we want to give you the chance to hear best practices from fellow partners. In this post, InsideView gives their top tips and tricks for maximizing booth ROI at Dreamforce. Be sure to stay current through the Salesforce Partner Community and this blog.
Year after year, Dreamforce proves itself as THE place to be for those offering solutions for sales and marketing professionals. Not only is it a great branding and lead generation event for us at InsideView, it pulls a huge swath of our key target audience to San Francisco so that we can meet face-to-face with thousands of customers and prospects.
InsideView is continuously expanding our solutions to offer sales, marketing, and other roles 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.
1. Start With Clear Goals
Each 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. On 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!
2. Try New Things
Last 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 qualified opportunities for our sales team.
3. Train Your Staff
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.
4. Use Multimedia Tools
We also leveraged multiple video product demos, 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.
5. Create Social Buzz
Also, 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!
There’s no doubt that events, especially big ones, are time consuming, stressful and chaotic. But if you’re organized, have a strategic plan and concrete goals, and collaborate across your whole team, you’re sure to have a successful event.
See you at Dreamforce ’14!
Heather Holdorf
Event Marketing Manager, InsideView