Kabir Uppal on How to create and accelerate pipeline from virtual events.

Kabir Uppal   

Hello and welcome to the Video Prospecting Summit 2023 brought to you by Pitchlink and crowd sponsors, platform partners Airmeet. My name is Kabir Uppal, and I’m a Senior Marketing Manager here at Airmeet, and I’m responsible for driving demand through events, partnerships, email, content, working closely with other GTM functions here at Airmeet to make sure that we’re creating a great experience for our prospects and customers.

Honored to be here today and going to be talking about how to create an accelerated pipeline from virtual events. Right, so I just want to give a shout-out to the team at Pitch Lane and Subhanjan. Thank you for having me here, and I hope everybody’s enjoying the Summit so far.

So yeah, this is me, my name is Kabir Uppal, as I mentioned, and I live in New Delhi, in India and work remotely for Emmy, that’s my partner and our sweet dog Cherry. So just a little bit about me there.

So moving on, we’re talking a little bit about how you can create experiences across the funnel that will help you create and accelerate the pipeline. So as sales folks, it’s important for you to and for us to be able to kind of build relationships with the prospects and customers that we’re pitching to, right.

So what I wanted to kind of show you and of course, a lot of you will be familiar with this graphic and this definition of the funnel, right, we have top, middle and bottom of the funnel. And I’ll talk a little bit about event LED growth in the next slide, but essentially, we’ve broken down the funnel into these three stages with event LED growth, right.

So the top of the funnel, we refer to as the Discover stage, the middle of the funnel, we refer to as the Engage stage, and the bottom of the funnel as the Grow stage. In the Discover stage, we’re really working on creating experiences that bring us in front of our potential customers and prospects and our target audience, right.

We want to make sure that they know who we are, how we potentially solve your problems, the problems of our target audience and essentially just become kind of top of mind, right, and the kind of events and I’ll show you the kind of events you can do here in the next slide.

The middle of the funnel is more about finding folks that are kind of in the consideration process. Right, they’ve, they know what their problem is, they know that they want a particular solution to solve that problem. So the kind of events that you would do in this stage will be a little bit different.

The bottom of the funnel stage, which is the growth stage, will essentially be folks that have already made a decision to buy or are very close to making a decision to buy or there are already your existing customers that you want to convert into evangelists, champions or advocates for your particular product or service, right.

So breaking down what event LED growth is from for each of these stages, right. Our job with event LED growth as a go-to-market motion is to help grow revenue and customer loyalty with prospects, customers and community with your community through events, right.

And just some examples of events that you can do across these three stages in the discover stage, as I mentioned, you know, it’s really about bringing in new leads and prospects becoming top of mind. So you can think about doing thought leadership, webinars, summits, live group demos where you know, people can attend at their own kind of, you know, convenience. It’s not one to one or customized really it gives them a nice, you know, top-level idea of what your product or service can do.

And then there are VIP prospect experiences, right. This becomes a little bit more important when you’re doing, you know, account-based marketing or account-based experiences where you find like a target list of prospects that you want to create a particular experience for.

Engage stage people that as I mentioned are more in the consideration buying stage. You can do targeted executive events. You can do a large annual conference where there is a mix of thought leadership and a kind of more practitioner, more actionable type of information and experience is created. You can do product launch events and the last stage is more for your customers, right.

But as I mentioned, you’re trying to convert them into evangelists that can tell their story of how your product has helped them meet their goals or overcome their challenges, made their jobs easier, and added efficiencies. And these are more like, you know, celebration of your customers, right.

So there’ll be like customer showcases where you can bring your customers to talk about what the success has been for them, how specific features have worked out for them. User groups could be, you know, community meetups where you bring your customers together to share insights, best practices, sorry templates.

And the last one is new product trading, right. So you know your product marketing and your product teams can kind of use experiences to introduce new features or talk about features that are in the pipeline or in the product road map. Get real-time feedback from your customers to figure out, you know, what they should be focusing on, what they should be prioritizing now sticking to the kind of theme of the event, right these are all experiences that you create from a visual perspective yes, a lot of people are doing of course in-person events as well, but these are all events that you can design and launch in a virtual experience, which primarily uses video, right.

Video is the topic or the theme of this event and we’re really looking at how visual experiences can help you build deeper relationships, get more customers on board, right so all of these experiences are possible now thanks to the growth and innovation that has come in event technology all of these kinds of events are possible through platforms like Airmeet, where you can create these experiences for different stages of your funnel.

Now talking a little bit about where we are as with events as a channel, right of course as a lot of you know, you know with the pandemic people were forced to kind of you know move to in from in-person events to virtual events and that space kind of exploded.

Everybody was doing web webinars, everybody was doing virtual summits, everybody was hosting large conferences on platforms like Emmy because there was no other option. The last year, year and a half, as the pandemic has opened up, we’ve really seen a lot of innovation, creativity and balance coming to, you know, doing in-person and virtual events. And what we know right now is that events are thriving right now.

Teams have fewer budgets; they have fewer resources. They’re trying to make do with the best they can to bring out the most amount of revenue and value from as low a customer acquisition cost as possible, right? And events are a great way to do it because it’s more organic in nature. You are providing a ton of value upfront in terms of content learning, networking, connections. So it’s a better way to build relationships. And that is why we’re seeing this huge amount of growth in events because leaders across the globe have realized that this is a strategy that helps you build relationships fast or keeps you top of mind and helps you build that relationship so that when your buyers are actually ready to buy, you are top of mind for them. You are who they think of, right? So we are kind of in this golden era of events post-Pandemic. That’s a healthy balance of both types of events happening, and a lot of recent research has shown that a lot of ROI is generated from people that actually attend your event, right. In event marketing, we talk a lot about what are the metrics that are really important, of course, registrations, how many people were you able to attract is important.

But even at Airmeet, we have seen the most amount of value come from people that have actually attended an event and actually been there for a particular experience, had an opportunity to meet your sales team or meet your success team or meet your marketing team – people that are actually on the front lines talking to prospects, talking to customers so they have the best idea of what, you know, the challenges, the goals are of that particular target audience and it creates an opportunity for you to create that relationship. So more importantly with events, you might think that yes, it’s important to get people to sign up for events, but it’s really more important to get people to show up, right? And more and more, we’re seeing that it’s not as important for us to say, hey, a thousand people registered for events, even if 100 people show up and 50% of those are from our target audience – they have high alignment with our ideal customer profile, they have high alignment with the buyer group that we are going after. That’s a much bigger win for the US versus having a thousand people sign up for a particular event, right?

And also looking at the future of where tech is going, where privacy is going, how marketing and sales is changing. We’re now moving towards a cookieless GDPR, CCPA world, right? All of these things will impact the amount of information we have at our fingertips to be able to personalize, to be able to do better outreach, to be able to build relationships and events are a great way to tackle this, right? Events are first-party data. These are things that people have consented to signing up for, consented to attending; they are giving you information. This information is not coming through an enrichment tool; this information is not coming from a list that you are buying from somewhere. It’s not coming from an advertising platform where you are collecting information; where they are collecting information and presenting it to you based on how much money you’re spending – this is first-party data, right? So this is really high-quality data, and you have the ability to use this to build better relationships. And that is why a lot of people are thinking about mechanisms like events and trying to innovate and be creative with them because first-party data is going to be crucial.

Other examples of first-party data and 1st party, you know what’s also being called owned media will be your own newsletter, right? A newsletter that you have command over, not another media publisher’s newsletter that you are sponsoring, but a direct relationship with your content that people can have, right? And again that is information they are giving you willingly because they like the quality of content you’re creating. Same thing with the events. And this first-party data then becomes very important for sales teams because they are able to leverage this while building relationships. Everybody talks about personalization. Personalization also depends on the hygiene and the authenticity of the data that you’re collecting; first-party data is directly from your buyers delivered to you that you can then use at the right time, at the right place with the right messaging to build out that relationship. So we are very bullish on events for the next year. And I believe like a lot of companies will start leveraging different types of events to create experiences to build relationships with their target audience.

Now what we’re talking about today is how you can use virtual events to create and accelerate pipelines. Events have to be created keeping the target audience in mind, right? It has to be attendee first. So one of the most important things that we consider is that we do not want to be pushy in terms of what we are selling, whether it’s a product or a service. We prepare for every event that we do at Emmy; we prepare what’s called an event brief template where our sales marketing, product marketing product and customer success teams come together to contribute to this event brief template, which keeps in mind the audience that we’re building for so things like why should they sign up to the event, why should they actually show up to the event, why should they participate once they show up to the event, what is the value that they are going to get out of this event, right? And to be able to come up with these points, to be able to come up with this content experience, there has to be very tight alignment between the marketing and sales team. So as sales folks, you know, talk to your marketing team, ask them what type of events they’re doing, how are they deciding the content, the topics, the formats, the experience Play an active role in suggesting what those topics should be and why. Because you are on the front lines, you are the ones that are talking to prospects on a daily basis you understand what are the problems they have, what are the factors they consider while buying technology or you know, purchasing services. You know exactly what they are trying to solve for. And if you are able to give that intelligence to your marketing team, if you’re able to contribute that intelligence to the creation of the format, topic and experience, these events will be way more meaningful for you they will be closer to the audience and it will not feel like fluff or just another webinar that is being done for the sake of it, right so tight alignment is essential for creating pipeline because if you attract the right audience, if what you are showcasing to them matters to them, if they come away from that event feeling like they have learned something, they have met somebody that you know they can work with or they can you know grow with that, they will always remember you they will remember that experience and when you as the salesperson, reach out to them, they’ll be more willing to have a conversation with you they will be more willing to give you information that is crucial for you to be able to put yourself in a position where they move the deal through the pipeline, right?

Topics that help you keep you top of mind and where you are adding value so you have a very big role to play in helping your marketing team be able to decide what is the best content, what is the best topic, what is the best experience. The other thing that sales needs to be a part of, right, and we learned this a little bit later than we should have, is that you should be involved right from the start. It shouldn’t be that, hey, you know, the marketing team does the events, gives the leads to sales team, and then you start doing follow-ups reach out to your prospects, send them the landing page, send them the value points that you feel like they’ll be able to get right so the next time you want to be able to reignite the conversation, instead of saying, hey, I haven’t spoken to you in three months or hey, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks, why don’t we get on a call or, you know, sending them a blog 1st instead, send them an event say that, hey, our team is hosting this event. I think it’ll be valuable to you because of XYZ reasons. I hope to see you there. And if you do end up seeing them there, you know, message them, reach out to them, ask them what they liked about the event, take feedback from them so it’s not just a pushy sales relationship. You’re actually help driving registrations and attendees. You’re getting direct insights from them on how you can improve that experience so that the future experience that you host are more relevant and valuable to them, right so get in the trenches with your marketing team help them drive registrations and attendees. This will also help your follow-up process as well right now if you know that you have, let’s say, sent out a hundred emails to your prospects, right? Hundred prospects you invited to an event. Now fifty of those, let’s say in an ideal world, that’s a high number of course. But if 50 % of those actually sign up and then 20 % of those people show up, those twenty people are the people that you should prioritize and that you should personalize because one, they discovered the event through you. They saw something of value on that landing page or through the email that you sent they felt when they looked at it, they said, hey guys, I think this is going to be good. I need to be there I want to be around these people I want to see this content I want to see these speakers I want to participate I want to ask questions then the follow up becomes much easier for you, right you’re not just following up saying, hey, I saw you attended the event, would love to chat if you want to kind of explore our product, no, you don’t need to do that. Ask them specific questions: what did you like? Did you like this particular point that this speaker made, right? So it’s much easier for you to be able to build a relationship when you’ve had that kind of existing multiple touch points with them, right? And prioritize based on this and then the work that you need to a lot of people, everybody talks about personalization, right that one to many is not working anymore. If you are able to prioritize, you know that these are the 20 best people that I want to reach out to then spend the time on personalizing for those 20 people as well.

Prioritize your outreach to those 20 people; send them a video, send them an email based on which session they attended. Did they ask a question, and we’ll talk a little bit more about this in terms of signals that you can see in events and how you can use that in messaging. But this is a great way for you to be able to create a pipeline, right, for you to be able to actually generate a deal, get a deeper understanding of what their requirements are, what their budget is, and what kind of plan they may fit with your particular product. And this gives you the ability to have continuous engagement with these people as well, right.

Now the second part of this, how can you accelerate pipeline, right so acceleration of pipeline means there are prospects that are already that you’ve already done discovery with that you’ve shown a demo to you have an understanding of what their budget is, what their requirement is. You’ve already kind of put all of this information together right now, if you are not being able to get those people to move on the deal, you can use events as a way to be able to move those people through the deal, right? It’s again, like I said in the last slide, it’s an additional touchpoint that you can use that is not pushy, right so if they have attended events that you think are valuable to them or if they did not attend an event that you may think is valuable to them, use content from there. Make a thirty-second, you know, ask your marketing team to give you a thirty-second clip of the most valuable information that is relevant for that particular prospect so repurpose that content send them an email will take away send them a link to the recording saying, hey, it’s been a while, you know, not putting any pressure, but I thought this would be interesting for you to take a look at, right? We did this event, there were these great speakers, they discussed XYZ, and I feel like this is going to be good for you, right? That makes something you care about them, that you want to add value, that you know what their problem statement is, and that you’re really trying to help them in their professional journey, right so leverage events and the content that is created there.

And also the next step, right, I talked a little bit about how you can do executive dinners or executive events, right? Creating elevated executive experiences is an excellent way to accelerate your pipeline. So work with your marketing team, go to them and say, hey, I have these 50 deals right now in my pipeline that are open, right. But twenty of these I feel like are really high match in terms of use cases, in terms of ICP, ideal customer profile in terms of persona. And I feel like I just need one additional plus touchpoint where they are able to interact with us that will help move this deal forward, right so just create a very tight engagement strategy with these twenty people have like an elevated experience, just 20 people send them a gift, whether it’s you know, whether it’s beer, whether it’s cocktails, whether it’s coffee, tea. Send them a gift that they can use during that experience maybe it’s an UberEats gift card, something like that, right but they can come together, they can have a shared experience, they can meet senior leadership from your team, whether it’s, you know, your head of sales or your CEO have one of these every month and give them that FaceTime with your leadership right it will create an elevated experience for them and it becomes an additional way for them to interact with your company as a whole. And I promise you this will play an active role in influencing your pipeline and moving it towards revenue.

Now the next part of this is actually using customer stories, right and your product roadmaps to build hype with your existing deals, right so anytime your marketing team or your product team or your product marketing team is doing an event with a customer, make sure that you know that’s being recorded that that’s being chopped up. Use again a nice 30 second, one minute clip that talks about what is the value that your product has added to that customer, what is what were they able to achieve as a result of it. And if there is a high match with that type of customer and a prospect you’re going after, use that to send it out to them, right so you can build, this is social proof and also showcase to them what you’re working on, right so if you know that you’re selling, let’s say I’m going to take my example as a marketer, there are certain features that I want that do not exist in your product right now, but you know those are coming out, send them the road map right show them what you’re going to be building out, when it’s going to be coming out and tell them, hey, why don’t you give us some feedback on it, right this is a feature that you want to be able to solve specific problems for you. Get them involved, make them feel like they are heard and that you want to build something that will provide value for them in the future as well.

The last bit I want to mention is also connecting your buyers and customers, right so also creating experiences where your potential buyers have the opportunity to meet your customers. People do this with in-person events all the time, right they invite their prospects and they invite their customers as well so that they can see in real-time that there is, you know, there are people like us that are using this product and using this service and are being able to be successful. They love the product, They love the team that they’re working with. They’re able to meet their goals that will give them signals that you cannot provide by yourself, right so connecting your buyers and customers is a great way to accelerate pipeline and move things towards revenue.

Now metrics to consider, most of this sits within your marketing team. But as a sales team when you are involved in virtual events, right, you want to make sure that the people that and there’s a lot of time being spent, right like I said, if you are getting in the trenches with them, you’re inviting people to come to that event, you’re prioritizing and personalizing the follow-up. There’s a significant amount of time that you will put into building relationships with the people that have registered and attended these events. So let’s go deeper into the kind of data we’re looking at; we don’t need to just look at the registration attendees or the types of accounts that signed up. We should be looking at what percentage of the people that are signing up attending are from our ICP. Is the audience that is coming to our event even relevant? Are they in the buying stage? Do they fit the profile of people that can you know that can use a product like ours and potentially buy it? You know, again, buy a persona match as well, same as ICP, little deeper on a level it does the title match to you know the stage of the company match does are they in the buyer group, right. And time spent in the event session, you don’t want to be reached. If somebody’s attended an event, it could be that they just showed up for 5 minutes, it could be that they were there for the entire time, right so if you are able to pass that data and look at Okay, I’m going to prioritize the top 10 % of the list I have built by seeing how much time they spent so if somebody spent has actually attended the entire event, it’ll be much easier and more likely for you to be able to build a relationship them relationship with them versus somebody who was there for just 5 minutes, saw the intro and decided hey I have something else to do so I’m going to go do that, right. So this is data that’s going to help you.

Now moving back to the first party conversation as well, intent data, the way that event technology has evolved, you’re able to collect many types of data points, right and platforms like enemy like us allow you to now do various activities inside an event that would collect data about that audience, right so if you send out a poll depending on how they answer the poll, you can use that in personalization you can learn something more about these prospects so an example that we I’ll use for air meet specifically many events that we sponsored or we Co-hosted with our partners. We would throw out a poll to all to find out one what percentage of the audience is marketers because we sell to marketers. What percentage of those marketers are doing events or have done events or want to do events that gives us a good breakdown of Okay, these people want to invest in events like growth but they’re not currently doing it or they are currently doing it they have a particular platform. So you can use polls in many ways, Get creative to be able to get that kind of data out from them. Question and answers, look at the kind of questions they’re asking, right. Call to actions we have the ability to send out a call to action in the middle of the session so you can send a link to a particular landing page. You can send a link to an ebook you can send a link to any resource that’s being discussed. If you are able to see that, hey, they clicked on this, read this or downloaded this, that gives you more information about that, right? Depending on the topic, depending on the type of content that was you understand what they want to learn more about and you can again use that in your personalization on-demand resources anything that you upload during the event share with them that they’re able to download either directly from the event or in the email that goes in a follow-up again gives you more insights into what are the things they care about, what are they trying to learn and how you can potentially add value.

Now repeat attendance is a great one, right we’ve actually been able to see that, OK, if a prospect is attending 6 out of 10 events that we’ve done in a quarter, they are definitely interested in what we have to see and the kind of people we’re bringing together at our events, right so that is another way that you can, that is another metric that you can use in your prioritization every event that they attend, right you can use that, build further context, use it as an additional touchpoint to build that relationship. So I know that you may not be looking at these metrics as a part of your job, but ask this of your marketing team, right? Ask them to say, hey, if you’re giving me a lead list, can you break down which percentage of these fit our ICP buyer persona how much time did they spend in the session? Do you have any data around the kind how they answered polls what are the questions they asked? Did they click on any links that we shared in the session and how many events have they attended in the past? All great information to be able for you to be able to use to personalize the messaging that you’re sending out.

And last but not least, this is where the magic happens. You, as a sales team, are a core part of the go-to-market function, right? So events, the great creation of pipeline, acceleration of pipeline cannot happen in isolation, like I said. Teams have to come together to plan these experiences, plan the topics, plan the format together so it has the maximum value add for the audience that you’re building for.

So the magic does not happen in isolation, right? It needs tight alignment between product, sales, customer success, marketing to be able to create wonderful experiences that delight your customers and your prospects and keep them engaged with you, right? Also, a deep understanding of your ideal customer profile, what are the use cases they have and the pain points is essential. Not only from creating the experiences but also for you to be able to do the right type of follow up, the right type of relationship building so that you, your prospects don’t feel like you’re wasting that time. They feel like, hey, this person understands what I am trying to achieve; they understand my role, they understand the goals and challenges that come with the kind of role I’m performing. And for that reason, they will be more likely to want to have a conversation with you or want to build a relationship with you.

Nail the messaging, right? All of the messaging that you have in your events, that you have in your emails should be driven through a deep understanding of your ICP, use cases, pain points, and always give first, right? Like I said at the start also, you know, don’t make these events about you, your product, or the service that you offer. Maybe at the bottom of the funnel, yes, when you’re doing customer success stories or talking about product roadmaps, but try to give as much value upfront as possible, and I promise you, your events will be successful in helping you build relationships and convert those relationships into customers.

So that’s it for me for today. I hope you enjoyed this. Again, my name is Kabir Uppal. It was great to have you here. And if you have any questions or you want to understand how events can help you drive more business, I’m on LinkedIn as Kabir Uppal. Please feel free to reach out, and thank you for being here today. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the summit. Bye, bye.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

So that’s Kabir. We are ready for the next session. Our speaker is waiting. Before I go, I’ll quickly play this from another expert. 

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