How to win at B2B in-person events (without a booth!)

Meeting in-person used to be a no-brainer for B2B relationship-building. But since virtual meetings took over in our day-to-day, they’ve become somewhat of a novelty.

The question is, are in-person events still worth the investment in 2024?

To answer this question, we share some thoughts from the Amplemarket team’s past experiences at WebSummit and SaaStr Europa, plus our top tips for marketers and sellers to maximize their ROI on events!

‍

Why you should consider in-person events in 2024

There’s a good reason that in-person events have always been a cornerstone of B2B marketing and sales: they give you a ton of brand exposure with your ideal market over a very short period!

For Amplemarket, this is especially important because we’re normally fully-remote. 

We’re well-practiced at generating pipeline, closing deals, and supporting customers remotely, but there are plenty of reasons we still relish the chance to develop relationships in person:

1. For sellers, it’s easier to engage with prospects face-to-face over casual conversation or to offer them impromptu, on-the-spot product demos.
2. For marketers, it feels more natural to ask customers for testimonials or case studies.
3. For partnership development, there are more opportunities for serendipitous collaboration ideas or networking.
4. For customer management, it’s a chance to deepen existing relationships and get more candid feedback! 

And yet, 67.3% of B2B marketers say they’re reluctant to invest in field marketing because it’s hard to measure ROI. 

As we’ll show you, it’s not time to give up on in-person events yet.

Check out our how we took our a-game to SaaStr and WebSummit, plus our 10-step playbook to get the results you want!

Preparing for in-person events

1. Identify your target audience attendees

Our work for attending SaaStr London started weeks before the event.

First, we needed to build a list of target companies and personas who were planning to attend.

Our sales team started by compiling lists by:

1. Pulling contacts from the official SaaStr attendee list, enriched with Amplemarket contact data where necessary.
2. Filtering previous year attendees with Amplemarket’s ICP filters (to identify managers, C-level executives, founders, VPs in SaaS sales and revenue operations) so we could identify top decision-makers.
3. Searching for prospects in our ICP based in the UK and London to see if they’d be attending (using the location filters in the Amplemarket Searcher).
4. Re-engaging closed-lost leads based in UK and London to see if they were around to catch up.

‍

2. Reach out to potential attendees

The next step was to let these prospects know we were attending and start booking meetings!

Here’s an example cold email template we used to engage:

‍

{{first_name}}, let’s meet at Saastr Europa

I saw you're heading to London so I made a quick video for you, {{first_name}}!

Feel free to pick a time here to meet me and my team there.

Looking forward to meeting you!

‍

We leveraged Amplemarket's Multichannel Selling tool to push this message across LinkedIn, email, and phone in the weeks running up to the event.

‍

3. Planning your in-person selling strategy

Speaking from your prospect’s point of view, there’s nothing worse than turning up to an event and being on the receiving end of shard sales pitch before you’ve even had the chance to say hi!

With that in mind, we thought about unique conversation-starting techniques we could use to get people interested in learning about Amplemarket.

We figured that our swag would be a great way to get people talking, so we had some sweaters made up for our team members with a big number “10” on the back: 

‍Anywhere we went during the event we could ask: “do you know what this number means?”

Answer: “It’s the average number of tools a salesperson uses. With Amplemarket, you only need one!”

Remember, if you’re going to be creative with your soft-openers, they should still be easy to remember and relevant to your solution! Making them visually memorable will help you stand out from the crowd at the event, too.

‍

At the event

3. Host your own events

You don’t need to be an industry headliner or have a mega budget to get noticed at big events!

Think about organizing exclusive side events turn your target prospects into a captive audience.

At WebSummit, we booked a local cafe for a special Amplemarket breakfast session. Here’s how we put it together:

1. We carefully crafted a special list of 20-30 guests including:
   • Executives from larger companies in our ICP to attract other prospects and boost our event’s credibility (we had guests from Google, Salesforce, PandaDoc, etc.)
   • Selected investors and supportive partners to help create a buzz around Amplemarket
   • Target decision-makers we wanted to impress!
2. We sent personalized invitations out and name dropped some of the bigger companies in attendance to build a sense of FOMO.
3. We prepared personalized gifts and welcome cards for each attendee, including a branded mug to remember us by plus a QR code for the full enriched list of WebSummit attendees to show off Amplemarket’s data!

When it comes to preparing gifts, try to offer things that add real value to your guests and will make you stand out from the hundreds of other companies there!

‍

4. Share your swag

When you’re deciding on merch to give out to your prospects, remember to think about logistics: 

• Will you have a have a booth to store things? 
• Is it easy for prospects to carry? 
• How will you transport everything to and around the event? 
• Who exactly will you share things with?

We didn’t have a booth at SaaStr Europa or at WebSummit, so we opted for smaller items like stickers and a stress ball that were easy enough to carry in our backpacks. 

Everyone loves free goodies, but not if they’re not bulky or awkward! We learned this the hard way after some of our breakfast guests left our branded goodie boxes behind because they were too big to carry around the event!

‍

5. Create content to start conversations, engage prospects, and build brand awareness

We sent our marketing team on a mission to film fun interviews with WebSummit attendees.

This actually served three purposes: to help us generate relevant content, to engage with new people, and to book more meetings!

To incentivize people to take part, we offered them exclusive access to our list of enriched leads powered by Amplemarket data. Everyone we spoke to was happy to give us their time to answer some fun questions and it naturally led to conversations about our solution.

If do something similar, we recommend keeping your questions light, fun, and easy to answer on the spot. Some of the ones we asked included:

• “If you had a magic wand, what one pain would you solve in sales?”
• “If you had to share one piece of sales advice on a mega billboard, what would it be?”
• “What’s one thing about sales you wish you’d known sooner in your career?”

6. Connect with partners, customers, and other network friends

Events aren’t just about generating new leads - they’re also a great opportunity to connect with clients and partners face-to-face! 

We dedicated time to connecting with existing customers to gather feedback, share new updates, and arrange new case studies. Tagging them in photos on LinkedIn helped bolster our sense of community and our love for our customers.

‍

7. Coordinate social media

Before, during, and after the event, you need to plan how you’re going to spread awareness around your brand and your team’s activities. Think about attention-grabbing and original ways you can entice people to visit you at the event and leverage your brand’s community.

We posted regular behind-the-scenes snapshots, funny moments, and video snippets to nurture a sense of FOMO and boost brand awareness online, too.

‍

8. No booth? No problem

As we mentioned, we didn’t have a booth at either Websummit or SaaStr Europa, so we had to get creative when meeting customers in-person!

We found an open meeting space and made it our own (shame on us!) thanks to our vibrant swag.

The important thing is that people know where to find you if they’re looking for you (so try to be consistent in where you hang out) and that you’re easily recognisable.

Give people a reason to come over and say hi! We printed out our B2B sales report as an extra value-packed giveaway that gave attendees actionable, data-driven tips for their outbound.

‍

After the event

9. Follow up with special sequences

After the event, we created personalized multichannel sequences to follow-up on all the leads we’d met:

• We engaged with our breakfast guests to thank them for attending and inviting them to learn more about Amplemarket where relevant.
• We connected with new prospects on LinkedIn and followed-up across email, social media, and phone call to get meetings booked.
• We followed up on meetings held during the event to progress deals and make the most of our recent in-person connections!

‍

10. Measure results

Finally, were our in-person events worth the time and investment?

Measuring event ROI is difficult because:

1. It can be hard to quantify the value of lead generation and deal attribution when sales cycles are long (i.e. deals won’t be closed immediately)
2. Event marketing serves multiple purposes. In our case, brand awareness, lead generation, conversion, and even content generation!

If you’re concerned about measuring ROI, we’d recommend you start by being very clear in what you want to achieve. 

If you’re looking for immediate return on investment, you’ll have to create frictionless conversion opportunities at the event.

But if (like us), you’re taking a longer view, you can qualify your success in a range of ways, e.g.:

• Number of meetings booked during or following the event
• Number of new interested leads identified
• Number of upsell opportunities identified with existing customers
• Number of new partnership opportunities
• Quantity of content generated for future sharing

The bottom line: why in-person events are still worth it in B2B

The beauty of in-person events is that you get to choose how you tackle them and what you get out of them! 

There’s no reason to pay for a booth or bag a speaking slot if you’ve nailed your outreach and engagement strategy.

By making sure sure you’ve:

• Defined your goals
• Identified your target attendees
• Thought through every aspect of your team strategy at the event
• Planned how you’ll follow-up and create buzz

…it’s perfectly possible to get great results, even in our remote-first world.

We hope you found this guide useful - and see you in-person soon!

‍