Sales and marketing teams invest a significant portion of their annual budget into event attendance. And to be honest, having an official presence at the larger events is simply table stakes for MedTech organizations. But marketers are also well aware that events can be a huge driver of MQLs and invest accordingly.
The most effective sales reps prepare for events the same way they would prepare for a big pitch. They show up armed with insights about the needs of certain healthcare providers and how their product provides a unique solution to their challenges.
Whether you’re an experienced sales leader or a newer rep trying to find your footing, you’re doing yourself, your team, and your company a disservice if you’re just showing up to events and hoping for the best. No matter how tight your pitch is or how great you are at striking up conversations, if you think you can just roam the floor or stand around the booth and bring home good leads, you’re kidding yourself.
That starts with knowing why most physicians attend conferences in the first place. I can assure you it's not to look for the latest new gadget. Their #1 concern by far is learning new clinical developments that they can use to improve patient care. That clinical breakthrough may very well come from a new product - even your new product - but knowing why physicians are attending is just the start. If you plan to use the exact same pitch on every doctor that walks by your booth, it’s going to be a long week. Like we discussed in our recent blog, How to Get a Physician to Open Your Email, you can’t approach a physician by asking what they do and what their needs are. You need to provide them with an immediate clinical value to differentiate yourself from the massive crowd.
I like to have a kickoff call with our sales and marketing teams at least six months before big events. For us, the discussion should be ending on the show floor, not beginning. You have a small window in an extremely noisy environment, so the discussions you do have need to be as purposeful as possible.
In that kickoff, I always want to answer three main questions:
Prospects
Despite how chaotic they can feel, events are still a great place to really get to know healthcare professionals. They’re away from the frequent interruptions of the hospital or office setting and focused on learning as much as they can to make their attendance productive. You can get their undivided attention if you deserve it, even if only for a few minutes. But if you make an HCP feel like just a face in the crowd, you’ve lost them. Once you have your roster of priority targets, you need to arm yourself with insightful details about them to make sure you’re fully prepared.
Insights
You should prepare for an upcoming event like it’s an interview. Trust me, somebody who has a command of a prospect’s challenges and pain points will stand out from the crowd. The most basic insight to have prior to an event is Who is attending? Is it mostly clinicians? Mostly healthcare professionals and administrators? Mostly MedTech reps like yourself?
Gathering insights prior to an event is where the AcuityMD platform stands out. Begin by cross-referencing the event attendee list with the Targeting module and apply Event Attendance labels to the healthcare providers that are expected on site. Now you have a subset to drill down into for your event planning.
Our platform has two more powerful tools here to assist with event prep. Peer Networks provides HCP details such as education, residency, co-practice, and co-publications. This information is incredibly useful for facilitating conversations on the floor or in the booth. Just showing a provider that you know a little bit about them prior to meeting immediately captures their interest.
We also have details on which HCPs are open to meals, which is helpful if you’re scheduling a prospect dinner around an event. Not only do you not waste time inviting somebody who’s not interested in dining with you, you don’t burn a shot with them on bad outreach.
Onsite
Ideally your company’s event schedule will be filled with prospect meetings, whether you gained those from a pre-event email campaign or spontaneous conversations on the event floor. But some of these convention centers are the size of city blocks. It could be a 15-minute walk from a speaking session to a meeting location, and everybody has a very full schedule.
Make sure when setting up calendar invites for meetings you enter specific details on exactly who your team will be speaking with and what the purpose of the meeting is. AcuityMD even lets you include a link directly to your prospect’s profile with some key takeaways for your team. You’d be amazed how much that little detail sets you up for success, especially when you have limited time to make your pitch.
While staffing your booth, you’ll also register plenty of new names from visitors. Rather than simply offloading a list of names to your marketing team post-event and letting them figure out how many MQLs you pulled, a quick look at the mobile AcuityMD platform can tell you how much procedure volume that HCP has (or if they use a competing product). That name can easily be sorted as a qualified lead or not.
Once an event ends, I only have one question I’m focused on:
To be honest, I’m actually thinking about this during the event because I’ve found that if you wait until you’re back home to begin this process, it’s too late. Events are stressful, busy, and uh…involve maybe a few late nights.
Only 2% percent of sales are made on first contact, and only 3% on the second. If you managed to make a sale on the event floor, congrats. The other 95% of us still have some work to do. But if you wait until you’re back at home base, not only are you trying to catch up physically, you also have to catch up on all of the work that piled up while you were onsite. And in the time that’s elapsed since the event, you may forget details, or your prospect may lose interest.
It’s so important to send a follow up email confirming post-event next steps each night at the event, and I always include a relevant case study or article to show I was paying attention to our conversation. This makes a huge difference in keeping a prospect in your sales funnel or losing momentum.
Marketing teams put a ton of effort into setting sales reps up for success at an event. Make sure you match their level, and I’m pretty sure you’ll be using events to create and close deals all year long.
Nick Smith
Director of Sales, Growth
AcuityMD
