5 Creative Solutions to Increase Engagement in Your Next Virtual Event
It is that time of the year again for Sales Enablement. Sales Kick-Off (SKO) is one of the most anticipated events of the year. Drinking, partying, musical guest, fine dining, and yeah, I guess a little learning. SKO is the time to let your hair down and reset the clock for the new fiscal year.
2020 disrupted the way we sell but it also impacted SKO for most U.S. based companies. We had a highly successful, critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning SKO and I’m here to share some of my top 5 creative solutions to increase engagement. Some of these are more tactical than others, but each one will help you achieve an engaging SKO that leaves your team wanting more.
- Define the Metrics Upfront
My previous post introduced you to the idea of creating a goal early on in the process. With this in mind, scope out the type of metrics that you want to use to measure the success (or lack thereof) on said goal.
This makes the next step of the process much easier because now you can use these metrics to qualify or disqualify tools that you are reviewing for your event. If a tool is flashy, multi-faceted, and packed with features that look super engaging, but it has poor analytics and doesn’t meet your metric requirements then it is a lot easier to pass up if you have a north star to follow.
Don’t get caught up in the flash, think about the overall outcomes you hope to measure and then weigh it against the user experience between Tool A and Tool B.
2. Scope Solutions that deliver those metrics
You have the goals. Know the KPIs, metrics, or values you want to capture. Now you just need to pick the correct tool for the job. This can be the fun part of the virtual event but it can also lead to most headache if you don’t scope correctly. For example, we found one tool that had a simple UI, great UX, metrics that supported our goals, and moved forward in the process. What we didn’t scope was SSO and this didn’t come up as a concern until 2–3 weeks out from the event. Yikes.
Be sure to ask all these questions and include your team, your cross functional partners, and the security/IT early on so you can flag them much earlier in the process.
3. Go Big
Chances are if you are planning a virtual event then you are saving a significant amount of money. If your budget comes out to 1:1 then you need to seriously evaluate your procurement team and your own choices because somebody messed up.
Use the free money from hotels and food to invest in the type of engagement you want to see. When we were planning for our virtual event we knew that nobody wants another Zoom call, they surely don’t want to hop into back-to-back meetings, and they don’t want to be talked at. So how do we plan an engaging virtual event that is well…engaging?
Get creative! We found a tool with chat functionality, a simple UI, and a great, easy UX. This allowed us to focus on creating great content. But content is useless if people don’t engage with it. So we reached out to a vendor to create an entire snow-themed virtual world based on our brand for the event. The VR world held all our content, partner material, games, a photo booth, trivia, secrets, and plenty of opportunity to get your name on the leaderboard.
Could we have saved money by doing the bare minimum and putting people into a virtual event tool? Sure! Unfortunately, that gets really boring, really fast. We practically had people banging down the virtual door to play in the VR world. You can’t pay for that kind of engagement.
Take a look at the public facing example of a VR world from Tableau.
4. Include Cross Functional Partners
As much as I want to take credit for a job well done, the audience was more excited about hearing from the cross-functional teams than from our sales team. The stories, win/losses with customers, challenges in the field, and ways to beat the competition invigorated the field like no other.
Engage your audience early and find out what they need. We wouldn’t have chosen the topics that we delivered if it weren’t for the voices from the field expressing interest, filling out surveys, attending meetings, and sharing their thoughts with their leaders and the enablement team. While it does require a lot more work, it does result in a much better outcome for everyone involved and attending this event.
5. Think Differently
An unintended consequence of having your speakers pre-record their content means they won’t be on stage sharing all their glorious knowledge. So now what? What do we do with them?
Well, they are freed up to engage the audience. We assigned each of our SMEs and their team to monitor the chat, answer questions in real time, and engage the audience. It was truly inspiring to see people engage with the content and receive feedback in real time. This is a learning professionals dream and it couldn’t have occurred if we were in normal circumstances in a face-to-face event.
Now that you’ve read the 5 creative solutions to increase engagement, take some time to check out my 9 Lessons Learned from Planning a Virtual Event. Much like our virtual audience enjoyed learning about the wins and losses from their peers, I took some time to share my top lessons learned from planning an event like this. Share in my wins but learn from my losses.