Reinventing Virtual Events

CHAPTER 21Booking Post‐Event Meetings with Strategic Unconventionality

The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good' sense.

— Pablo Picasso

If everyone else is zigging, zag. Look out across the messaging templates in business‐to‐business (B2B) endorsed for cold calls and emails. Notice a pattern? A great deal of it looks the same. When you receive an event follow‐up email, it typically comes across as identical from each vendor in the category. In a best‐case scenario, you'll get a gated white paper on the event's theme. Perhaps a sales development rep (SDR) will call you with little research (didn't even glance at your LinkedIn profile), treating you as a lead assumptively mistakenly believing just because you attended, you're qualified. Ironically, when Julia worked in revenue intelligence, almost every competitor tried to sell her when she downloaded content on its website.

When you connect, a more customer‐centric approach is to foster a conversation around the event's themes. Spark up convos with prospective customers, share insights and trends, and give them time to “make it their idea” with the freedom of saying “no” to using your technology versus pitch slapping on LinkedIn or treating them like a warm lead, marketing qualified lead (MQL), or another number. Think of this as Ms. Right Now versus Ms. Right. Customer‐centric approaches require better analytics: for example, ...