CES 2021 is now all-digital. With almost all events canceled, postponed, or gone virtual, businesses are doing everything to ensure that sales pipelines are not badly hit. Budgets are being diverted from in-person programs to other marketing channels such as virtual events and webinars. Companies are spending quite a bit to convert all their content to suit a virtual format and make it as interactive as possible.
Driving real customer engagements online is the key. Real customer engagement does not just mean interactions at the booth (albeit virtually!), it means follow-up meetings that take your association with the customer/partner/prospect ahead.
One of our customers realized quite early that they need to quickly transition to not only a virtual event format, but also covert all their in-person meetings to virtual meetings. Here’s a case study on what they did and the results they achieved.
Challenge:
The company has its largest corporate event in the first half of the year. Every year they have hundreds of B2B customer meetings and demos that directly contribute to the sales pipeline.
The event covers the three most important global regions for them – America, Europe, and Asia. Due to the Coronavirus impact, the in-person event had to be canceled even though there were hundreds of pre-scheduled B2B meetings already booked for the event. Knowing how crucial the B2B meetings at this event were for pipeline generation, an alternative was needed to still have the meetings.
Solution:
The in-person corporate event was converted to a fully virtual event. The company, however, was worried that a pivot to virtual wouldn’t necessarily translate all the pre-scheduled in-person meetings to virtual and would affect their pipeline goal.
They leveraged a virtual event service provider for the event and pivoted their Jifflenow process for booking 1-1 meetings at the event from in-person to virtual. It was critical for them to manage these meetings across multiple timezones namely America, Europe, and Asia. In order to accommodate this, they decided to open up the customer engagement scheduling from just the 3 days of the event to full 6 weeks following the event. This gave them a lot of time to drive meetings with people who attended their virtual corporate event.
Impact:
- The company was able to drive 16,000 participants to the virtual event.
- Extending the engagement scheduling timeframe from 3 days to 6 weeks provided the flexibility to mitigate the loss of meetings without an increase in cost.
- They were able to achieve 65% of their pre-scheduled in-person meeting goal despite having to quickly switch from in-person to virtual. This was a huge success for them.
Interested in virtual event use cases that have helped our customers mitigate the losses due to the lack of in-person engagements? Schedule a demo with us to know more.
