How to Overcome Appointment Hurdles

We all know the value of events for encouraging face-to-face interactions. Scheduling and completing appointments at events enables the personal, 1:1 interactions that drive business forward. Attendees want to meet with other attendees, and sales executives want to engage customers and prospects. Event planners need to enable these appointments and ensure that they happened. However, engineering one-on-one meetings is not always easy for attendees. They can face appointment hurdles that complicate relationship building and the ability to transact business.

Common Pain Points

Participants can encounter a number of obstacles when engineering meetings at events. Here are some examples:

• In some instances, attendees are unable to quantify how many meetings took place, who they met, and the value of those interactions.
• Scheduling tools that planners are using can be lacking.
• Executives don’t have access to the background information they need for customer meetings
• There is room for improvement in the reporting capabilities for customer meetings.
• Those manning the booth don’t have access to a unified sales and booth team schedule, especially on mobile devices.
• Sellers complain that they didn’t meet enough buyers, diminishing the perceived ROI from their efforts.

Cvent recently introduced a new tool, Appointments, as part of its event management platform to help attendees, executives, event staff, and buyers effectively schedule and track meetings for favorable business outcomes.  Some notable features are:

Appointments Portal

Attendees have visibility to all their appointments in one view, creating a searchable profile for two-way engagement with other attendees.

Quantitative Tracking

Planners can report on appointments to get a clear fix on number of meetings and level of engagement.

Meeting Preparation

Sales can tap into a “private notes” feature to give executives the background they need on prospects and customers to ensure they are fully prepared and well positioned for better results from appointments.

Booth Staffing Management

Those managing booth staffing can effectively align sales staff schedules with booth appointment needs in a single, readily accessible calendar.

Joining Buyers and Sellers

Attendees can search for sellers, buyers can check seller availability, and the two parties can use the shared platform to set up meetings. Planners can track meetings to determine gift redemptions to reward buyers for meetings with sellers. You can explore all the resources that Cvent has to help event planners here.