Pro tips for winning over your sales team

Robin Clark [00:00:00]: we take all of our, what is called the attendee journey information, and we put that into a digestible, attainable, at the fingertips of the sales rep document. And they're able to see exactly how and where their contacts engaged at Cvent connect over the course of the event. What sessions they attended, what survey feedback they may have had, what appointments they may have attended, and they're able to kind of create a custom story for them coming out of it. A rep that's able to say, "I see that you sat into x, y, z session. What were your takeaways?

I know that that was really leaning into x, y, z product, which we really see a future with your company. Let's talk about that." they're able to lean into what they know was just digested at the account level.

Hosts [00:00:46]: great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village and we're that village. My name is Alyssa. I'm Paulina. I'm Rachel. And I’m felicia. And you're listening to great events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Paulina Giusti [00:01:10]: my name is Paulina Giusti and thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of great events. This week we're going to be taking a deep dive look into Cvent’s very own sales enablement strategy, process, essentially how to best engage with your sales teams when it comes to your total event program. And for this week's episode, we have a very special guest who is returning to the podcast with us. Her name is Robin Clark. Welcome Robin. Please introduce yourself to our listeners who didn't hear you on the first podcast.

Robin Clark [00:01:44]: yes, Robin Clark. I am the senior manager of trade shows and event marketing at Cvent. Been here just shy of a decade and as the title explains, I get to oversee our trade shows, those events that we attend and everything that goes into that. And then also our event marketing for our tier one events both attended and hosted.

Paulina Giusti [00:02:09]: amazing. And I would just like to reiterate that Robin is our sales enablement queen, and I do think there are some unique personality traits that come with being a really successful sales enablement professional. Many of which are being able to keep a high energy, high engagement meeting experience. So for any Cventers tuning into today's episode, they know exactly what I’m talking about. When you finish a sales or customer success kickoff call with Robin, it is alarming how much energy you are leaving that meeting with because of how much energy she puts into it.

And so with that, I would like for us to lead today's episode with just as much energy and gumption that you do for all of our internal sales enablement meetings. So I’m going to do my very best impersonation of Robin Clark as today's host. But i think before we get into so much of the details of process and strategy, Robin tell us and our listeners a little bit around why an effective sales enablement strategy is critical to your event program.

Robin Clark [00:03:22]:thanks for that buildup, Paulina. I love to hear it. I do love to get into those sales and see us kick off some pull-ups and rallies with all of the energy because I do believe it's contagious. I do believe that it's incredibly important. And so, it's fun. It's a whole lot of fun. Sometimes I fall flat on the floor immediately following because all of my energy was used up, but it's still a lot of fun. So, thanks for that hype. So in my opinion, the data reflects that the success of your event is going to rely almost squarely on the shoulders of your sales enablement and your sales team.

Because there is only so much that you can do without some one-to-one, without some human-to-human interaction, which we know really does sit in the power of our client-facing, our front-lines colleagues. And so when it comes to sales enablement, I get the pleasure of speaking with clients and prospects with some frequent regularity about the importance of... Everyone wants to know about the importance of Cvent technology, Cvent technology. They also want to know when you're using appointments, when you're using lead capture, how do you use that to your advantage?

How do you get that information into your tech stack and back into your data? And so much of it does still rely on the human aspect, which in large part comes down to our sales team. So, the importance of that sales engagement and sales enablement comes down to creating a really strong partnership between your marketing team, between your executive team, and your leadership across that sales org. Because what you need for your sales team to do is understand the importance of an event, is to understand that they need to champion the event. They need to understand the value of the event.

So by understanding all of those things, you basically enable your sales team to go out into the market, to hit those front lines with all the gusto, with all the gumption that I can deliver in that kickoff call, they then take it out to the market, and they're selling that passion for the event. They're selling the importance of the event, which is not something that I as a senior manager in marketing can directly face-to-face do. And so, it's my job to put words on a page, to put assets... Not exclusively my job, but my incredible team's job. I'm a talking head half the time. But my incredible team's job to put the resources in place, to put the talk tracks in place, to bubble up the value props.

So that sales has a super clear understanding of what it is they're taking out to the market, how they can go out there with just as much conviction and just as much passion and sell the event. Because without them, we're left with a bunch of screens doing the job for us and god loves a screen. But I’m way into humans, and so that's what our salesforce does for us. They're the boots on the ground, they're the front lines. And so partnering with them, making sure that we have a healthy working relationship, making sure that they understand their importance and how much we entrust to them, is critical to the success of our events.

Paulina Giusti [00:06:29]: i love that. I think you absolutely nailed it. For people who really are sort of maybe starting their sales enablement journey or strategy for their programs, I think we're all at different phases in terms of maturation of what sales enablement strategy can look like because I also think it changes. We've seen significant change with solely in-person events to just virtual events, to this hybrid experience environment that we typically offer for our customer-facing hosted events. And I think for those tuning in who are thinking, "I don't have a huge sales team, or maybe I’m a membership-based organization."

There are certainly takeaways I think from this conversation that can be attributed to perhaps your unique industry. So, kind of unpacking at sort of a tactical view of what Robin just shared. Big headline from what she just said was it's communication. It's being able to communicate to the internal stakeholders, whether they be your sales teams or your membership, those who oversee your membership organization or fundraising or alumni engagement. The thought process is you have to know how to engage with those people and that is aligned with her tone and tenor and delivery and excitement.

And like she said, it's supported with plenty of actual tangible assets that our teams populate that can just add a little more grit to the conversation that takes place over the phone or in person. So as we sort of think about this more tactically, let's talk about, "okay, I’m going to do a sales enablement strategy." let's start with step one, timelines. For a hosted event, what are sort of the scenario timelines that you think about when having your first kickoff call? What goes into that and are there timelines associated to before the kickoff call?

I think there are things that we talk about as marketing partners. What are the goals for registration? How does that impact to level of business? Let's unpack that a little bit and say timeline is you are six to nine months out from the event. What are we talking about? What are we thinking about from the marketing side here?

Robin Clark [00:08:38]: first off, you do have to be mindful of what sales is going to hear, what they are going to be asked of from their clients and prospects, and then what we want them proactively taking out to their clients and prospects. So we always want to get ahead of any gotcha moments for our sales reps and for our cs teams. So as soon as we have nine to 12 months out, that's around the timeframe that we're making sure we've got pre-registration for our next year's hosted event launched. That's relatively low lift. That's relatively low impact, but we want to make sure that sales and cs, our client services are aware.

So that usually looks like an email blast, we're excited, we've got the dates, we've got the venue. Pre-reg is open, we're going to be launching registration around nine months out, call it. So just be aware and that can be a very passive driver for sales and for CS. We're not going to see a lot of impact interruption there. When it comes to launching registrations, call it about nine months out from the event. That can vary, we'll call it about nine months. That's when we want to do our initial kickoff. We want to... Because this is something... Registration launch, that's something that we and the marketing team are going to take out to the market in as many ways as possible.

We're going to leverage email, we're going to leverage digital and social. Banners will start popping up. Our website's going to get launched out there, so the market is going to be aware. Massively notified when registration launches and they are going to have questions for, in our case, Cvent representatives. So we want to make sure that our sales and cs are armed and dangerous to answer every question that they might have coming to them. And at the time at registration launch, a lot of questions, the answers will be more to come, but sales and cs won't know that unless they tell them.

Here's what we know, here's what to come, here is what you can communicate out to your contacts so that expectations are set across the board. So we do a full rally around that registration is launching, here's what that looks like. And that allows a lot of that inbound curiosity questions to be met with confidence and knowledge. We also at that time... Cvent CONNECT, our annual hosted conference is something that we've been doing for over a decade now. We have a really well-built year-over-year database of knowledgeable past attendees. They really understand the rundown of what to expect to connect.

So the moment that we launch registration, that population and anyone that has pre-registered for the event, those two populations are really ripe and ready to get phone calls from their sales reps. To be reached out to say, "we're so glad that you've attended in the past and we're so glad that you've expressed interest in this event. We are excited to let you know registration is launched. We've got the earliest possible pricing for you. Let's get your foot in the door." We offer lots of advantages to those that register early down the way when it comes to launching the agenda for the event.

And so sales is really equipped at that time to go out to the market and say, "it's launched." We know that a good amount about this event, so in lieu of a full agenda launch, we think you have a foundational knowledge to go ahead and register for the next event. Let me outline what the cost is looking like. Let me outline what we're really excited about in the agenda at a glance that might be fundamentally changing year over year, improving year over year, just really the things that we're most excited about in the coming year. That's kind of reg launch and again, that handles those inbound inquiries as well as proactively going out to the market.

When we do that reg launch, pull up with cs and sales. We will try to include what our registration goals are looking like for that year. We're always looking for growth, but we're methodical and we're data-driven about what that growth looks like. Right now in our reality, we are doing a really consistent, steady, year-over-year growth that gets us pretty much back to where we were pre-pandemic and in the industry. We know the pandemic timeframe took a dip on what we saw in the in-person events, but we are really climbing back up to exactly where we were sitting pre-pandemic, and so that's what our goals look like when we roll those goals out holistically.

We also try to break that down. Our organization is divided up into various lines of business and that's determined on size of accounts, that type of thing. And so we have different targets, quantifiable goals by these various lines of business. It's not just this pie in the sky, overarching, can't quite wrap my head around it goal. It becomes pretty granular because we've defined it by line of business. We take it the next level. We're able to really do some pretty easy math around that. We've got, here's your line of business goal and then you've got 10 reps divided out. Great.

That gives us a per person goal that's super attainable and incredibly digestible for our sales, for our cs reps to really go after, to go hit it. It's very much, we're all in this together too. So we're combining sales performance, marketing performance, cs performance. We're all driving the same ship, and so we're working toward that one holistic goal, but everyone gets a good understanding nugget of really what their personal contribution can look like to that.

Paulina Giusti [00:14:09]: let me ask you a quick question just while we're on the topic. So like you said, a variety of stakeholders involved in both setting the goals and meeting the goals in various ways. Now, I think there's probably a handful of people listening today thinking to themselves, "so I can certainly speak with enthusiasm about the importance of this event. I can give them the data about what they just need to do to call this an event a success." Historically, we've also seen that there is some friction sometimes in the business where sales has so many calls to action, they're calling on trade shows that we are attending that you also have visibility into.

They're calling on other customer programs. They're calling on just generic account conversations and account hygiene catch-ups. So talk about what conversations have to take place with perhaps sales, leadership, client success leadership in understanding the prioritization around this. Or are there ways that we incentivize some of these respective teams to further understand the importance of this programming?

Robin Clark [00:15:20]: it does have to fall in line with the bandwidth, with the capacity of these various sales and cs teams. Absolutely. And that is a huge part of the conversation when working out our task strategy basically. I mentioned that getting ahead of any of those frequently asked questions, presenting as much of the conference information as we can to sales and cs so that they're able to tackle questions and just steady account conversations that they might be having. They're able to very knowledgeably refer to connect ongoing.

However, when it comes to our outreach, what we want to methodically do, the question always comes down to where does this line up in all of those other priorities like you mentioned [inaudible 00:16:05]. And it can vary team to team. We have junior and we have senior sales reps. They take task assignment at different rates. The various lines of business might have different programming that they're focusing on at different times. And so when we are assigning out these tasks to go out to the market, to proactively promote this event, we make sure that it isn't going to compete with and otherwise sabotage any of our other sales and marketing priorities.

It has to fit nicely in there. I can't just come in guns a-blazing, say, "I’m giving you 10,000 tasks, figure it out." we've got to be very methodical that our enterprise accounts, what volume can you handle in the next three weeks? And we back into that. As we move forward from registration launch, we hit other milestones in our event promotion and with those future event milestones come additional segments of outreach. And we define what data, what criteria we want to go for in those future task rollouts. So at that reg launch we talked about pre-registrants and past attendees, we're going after them and we're promoting.

Well, when we get closer into agenda launch, that gives us an opportunity to go for some folks that have attended the event maybe five years ago, the agenda is going to look very different. The program is probably going to have morphed and evolved significantly five years later. And so they're going to need to know, "well, what is the agenda here? What are we talking about soup to nuts, I really need to understand." and that's when we're able to look at, "okay, if we look at 2018 to 22 attendees, that volume looks like x thousand." and then we start to break that down by those of business, "hey, how much of this can your team handle over the course of three weeks, four weeks?"

And we start to kind of negotiate it, massage it, and we work it out. Assignment is to these reps. Assignment timeframe is according to these dates. We anticipate that we can get through this wave of tasks by this time and we're able to really get into it. And we have a really fantastic machine and so many partners across our organization now that are able to influence and kind of peep on this engine as everything does get assigned out so that we are doing it methodically and at no point sales is overloaded because what we don't want to do exactly to your point is assign a volume of tasks...

Our hosted event is always a priority. And so what we don't want to do is sabotage these other programs that might not stick out in a sales rep's mind as quite the same priority level and/or they're working on something else and they don't give connect the love that it deserves. So we've got to be really, really mindful about the volume of tasks. And so we're looking at it from the jump, from when we know we're launching registration. We're looking at the number of months that we have about the number of tasks in total that we want to be able to assign out over the course of that six to nine months.

And when those inflection points need to happen along the way so that sales can handle it and it's manageable.

Paulina Giusti [00:19:07]: we've come in an incredible way. So I think we've really refined this process. It started out certainly different, but I think that comes with learnings year over year and truly our event marketing team, our marketing teams, our m and e team partnering so closely to understand our customer base. And it's like you said, getting ahead of those questions, no ah, gotcha moments. It's really a matter of understanding our customers, their questions, their priorities, and then of course arming those who are on the front lines essentially with the right talk tracks to meet our business priorities.

And I think we've kind of alluded to a number of support areas that can aid our sales teams and client success teams when they're doing the outreach, but there's a lot of other components of support, if you will, that happen across the org. While we see the majority of registration conversion coming from sales and coming from successful email, there are obviously other channels that we lean into and other members from across the company that help drive registration for these events, which candidly, I think does roll up into sales enablement though it's really conference enablement.

And let's talk through some of those tools. We've got internal technology that we leverage that I think has been an incredible efficiency in terms of communicating out priorities, announcements, significant changes, scenarios where there are errors. Let's talk about maybe the value impact of slack channels. Let's talk about the value add of what we call wiki internally. Maybe you have an intranet at your company or an internal sort of project management system that you share with a department or with your org. Let's talk through some of those tools that compliment your regular meetings, your kickoff calls and other efforts.

Robin Clark [00:21:05]: core to every pull-up that we have, every meeting that we have, we are always pushing and communicating at the start, middle, end. And throughout the duration of the chat of these meetings, make sure that you do have that intranet, our wiki internally at Cvent bookmarked because that is your gospel. That is where we are going to house every piece of information, because a pitfall always is going to be holding information and not making sure that it's at the fingertips of your teams. And that's your marketing teams, your stakeholders, your sales teams, your cs teams, it doesn't matter, cross... Your tech teams, you name it.

You've got to put the information categorized, filterable, easily identifiable at the fingertips of your colleagues because they are your partners. Again, we're all in this together and we're all driving the results here. And so everyone needs to know exactly where to find something. If somebody asks a great question on slack, it's like chatter on salesforce. Some of you might be familiar with that or like legacy, aim, AOL instant messenger. That's right. That's right. Slack is our internal, first off, savior. It's glorious, but slack is our internal system for very quick chatting, really getting quick answers, questions and answers out there.

So if something comes up so frequently in slack, this is ongoing, real-time chats that pops up to us as this is a great frequently asked question. Let's go ahead and address this. Let's get it on the wiki, which is internal facing. So to our internal customers. They're able to reference the wiki at all times. We then similarly put that same information. We leverage the commonly asked questions internally to identify and define what are frequently asked questions are also going to be by our attendees. Again, taking feedback from the front lines, passing that through, anything that we might be generally and routinely communicating in wiki and on slack.

We also take advantage and put that into our Cvent connect website. We take advantage and put that into our attendee hub instance for Cvent CONNECT. So that all of this information, you can hit any of these resources and get the most up-to-date, most relevant information. So again, wiki, our intranet, that is our resource, our gospel for everyone right up through the event date. We leverage chat ongoing through slack real time, very quickly, a really quick issue. I need help and it gets done. We've set up a lot of logic so that the right teams can be tagged, so it's the right POCs.

We have help channels for various lines of business so that your question is going to be answered by the correct experts and that everyone is included in those appropriate channels. And then we do also leverage outlook. We leverage our regular old email. I think the only thing we don't routinely leverage at this point is the carrier pigeon, but it's all about finding your right balance. And again, anything that we might communicate by email that still lives as gospel on that wiki site. Anything that we might put into talking about our external attendees, we leverage Cvent communications. Every registrant communication comes straight out of Cvent.

So any email that we might send out to our attendees, we're going to put that as gospel with an attendee hub and as gospel on the website. So we always want to create a hub of information so that anything that might be very passively ongoing, brought up, questioned, there is a centralized location for all of that. And that again, internally for us is our wiki and just making sure that we're prioritizing and reiterating at all points. Frequently in the slack channel it's, as a reminder, bookmark wiki. As a reminder, we rolled out these new resources that are on wiki.

As a reminder, we've just done this kickoff and the recording is available on wiki. So continuing to ingrain, "this is where you find the information. Please refer there first. If you still have questions, come to the team, even though we are small, but mighty."

Paulina Giusti [00:25:00]: everything you just shared has been significantly impactful in terms of seeing our sales teams feeling much more confident about having their conversations. I think there's a couple other resources that we have that maybe are not reg generating necessarily support tactics, but there's certainly sales enablement, communication facets, and some of that includes reporting. So like we said, in slack, we have a daily workflow that shows this is how many registrations we have, and there's a breakdown. And so you can just put in a command and that information is output in real time to you.

So if you're having an executive call about something completely different and someone says, "what's the latest registration?" You can do that and it'll be an immediate command. Other areas of support that I think we found some significant benefit, and it's really on the programming side. But because our conference has a ton of customer case studies and content that's curated from our customer base, sales account reps are wanting to know client success... Reps are wanting to know how does registration or enrollment look for my client's session?

And so we're able to leverage really great reports right out of Cvent in our internal portal that shows live enrollment for all of our sessions. Someone knows that there's client speaker on one of them and they're able to communicate saying, "hey, sally, just wanted to let you know your session is almost sold out. I'm really excited to be a participant in it. Just wanted to give you the heads-up that it's tracking really well." That kind of ongoing communication is just fantastic in nurturing those relationships. And it's just another piece of technology that shows you that it can serve the sales enablement process successfully.

So we're kind of getting low on time here, but I do want to touch on the sales enablement experience post-event because I think we've talked a lot about, and candidly, the importance of sales enablement is getting people to the event. But we also want to make sure that we're communicating out to stakeholders and those who got those people on site, the success or the impact of their work. And I think, Robin, maybe just quick summary, let's talk through some of the post-event resources that maybe we make available or how we share the output of ROI for these particular stakeholders efforts.

Robin Clark [00:27:16]: starting first, a little more granularly with the teams and how sales is directly impacted following the event. We take all of our, what is called the attendee journey information, and we put that into a digestible, attainable, at the fingertips of the sales rep document, and they're able to see exactly how and where their contacts engaged at Cvent CONNECT over the course of the event. What sessions they attended, what survey feedback they may have had, what appointments they may have attended, and they're able to kind of create a custom story for them coming out of it. A rep that's able to say, "I see that you sat into x, y, z session.

What were your takeaways? I know that that was really leaning into x, y, z product, which we really see a future with your company. Let's talk about that." they're able to lean into what they know was just digested at the account level. Additionally, we take very thorough notes throughout the course of the event through Cvent lead capture and through our Cvent appointment system to identify those that met with... They may have met with their account rep, they may have met with the product team, they may have met with our CEO, Reggie Aggarwal himself. What were the notes from those conversations?

What did the client have to say? What did steven have to say in response? And the follow-up from that is so compelling because they're able to get all of that information, all of those conversation notes again at their fingertips, compiled with what the full view of the attendee journey was throughout the course of the conference. In addition to that, we make sure that the full attendance report, you referenced earlier about getting the reg report and the reg tracking at their fingertips in our access portal reporting system.

Similarly, we have the attendance report as easily available and summarized. So we do spend a lot of time and effort for months following the event really, making sure that we are analyzing, that we are bubbling up, that we are summarizing the major stats for the event. What our show rate was, what our breakdown was across client prospect, what we saw from the various lines of business, what were our top performing sessions. Just major, major takeaways that enable our sales and cs to go to their clients and present a lot of our learnings. A lot of what will help them ultimately in their event programs and help us to drive them back into the program the next year as well.

And this is something that's ongoing. We keep a corporate statistics file, stats and zingers, we call it. Always live and relevant. And so the moment that we're able to disseminate exactly what those key stats are from Cvent connect, we bubble that up and make sure that it's available at the fingertips of every Cvent rep regardless of department. So I think hopefully that helps to address exactly what it is and how we are. And of course, we leverage our salesforce integrations to make sure that all of this information, the attendee journey, the lead capture notes, all of that is going back out to sales via post-event tasks.

And similarly to the amount of time that we spend with sales planning what pre-event tasks we are assigning and at what cadence to whom and when. We have very similar, incredibly methodical, definitely, sometimes time-consuming conversations with sales leaders to get all of that ironed out, tracked everything year over year, what we've done to whom we've assigned it, when all of that is tracked in another wiki and assigned out via salesforce following the event. And again, all of that points right back to those resources, the attendee journey, the attendance report, et cetera.

Paulina Giusti [00:30:47]: I think you summarized that post-event value of sales enablement perfectly. Today's conversation could be certainly at least four episodes worth of content, and we only scratched the surface of what your sales enablement strategy can do and how it can impact your total event program. I think the big takeaways from today are ensuring that you have a very clean communication timeline and communication plan for activating not only the sales junior and senior leaders, but all stakeholders who are engaging with your prospect or customer bases.

And it's ensuring that you're communicating both the value of the event for them and the value of the event for the business. And I think those two things are really huge in getting started with your sales enablement strategy. I think the next part that we touched on is really understanding your customer and attendee base and defining what they're looking for proactively and arming your respective sales and client success partners with all of that information. And thinking about them very strategically, meaning not everyone that is in your database is created the same, like Robin was saying.

So lean into a pre-registrant pool of individuals, lean into a pool of people who previously attended the event, and think through how you want to drip out your task strategy so that it doesn't feel like all hands on deck at the same time. And then lastly, I think the second-biggest piece is lean into technology and the data wherever you can. It is your friend and it certainly has created efficiencies for us. So with that, we want to thank you, Robin, for joining us for today's podcast and all of your sales enablement wisdom and bringing just all the energy to today's episode. Thank you again.

And to our listeners, we are both on LinkedIn, so be sure to follow us for a recap of today's episode. And if you want to just be friends, send us a message. Love it.

Robin Clark [00:32:51]: absolutely. Thanks Paulina. Thanks again for having me.

Hosts [00:32:55]: thanks for hanging out with us on great events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And you can also help fellow event professionals and marketers, just like you, discover great events by leaving us a rating on apple, spotify, or your preferred podcast platform. Stay connected with us on all your socials for behind-the-scenes content, updates and some extra doses of inspiration. Got a burning question or an epic story to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on linkedin and send us a dm or drop us a note at greatevents@Cvent.com. And a big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event includes great people. And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.