Virtual events: how to turn a participant into a hot lead for the sales team

Why are virtual events an essential lever for lead generation?

Online virtual events allow you to attract prospects (participants). If your participants feel supported, listened to, or even pampered, then they can become hot leads. They will be more likely to buy your products/services. Online events must be part of your sales strategies. It is not only the post-event stage that matters when it comes to turning a participant into a hot lead. It is a whole process that must be put in place, before, during and after.

The key role of hot leads in the sales process

Hot leads play an essential role in your sales processes. They are high-value prospects for your company, because you are more likely to convert them into customers. By identifying them, prioritizing them and personalizing your sales approaches while ensuring follow-up, you can optimize your sales processes and improve your conversion rate.

The different types of virtual events

Nowadays, virtual events for businesses can take several forms:

➡️ The webinar: the best known of all, it is quite simply an online seminar. Different speakers talk around a theme.

➡️ Demos: this event makes it possible to present a product or a service. Interaction with participants takes place live.

➡️ Live sessions : this event can be useful for conducting an interview or a live business case.

➡️ Remote training courses: training courses allow you to support people on a specific subject or theme.

The advantages of virtual events

Virtual events offer many advantages, here are a few:

There are no geographical constraints, your participants can be anywhere at the time of your event. ?
There is no, or very rarely, any registration limit. So you can invite as many people as possible! ?
You can interact instantly with participants. ?
Your events can be watched endlessly thanks to the replay. ⏯️
The costs related to your events can generally be low. ? Since there are no expenses to plan for such as travel, accommodation and logistics in general, your margin will be better.

Preparing a virtual event

The phase before the event is crucial. This is how you attract participants, in other words your potential leads. You will therefore need to make sure to properly plan several actions in advance. For example, choosing the format you want, whether it is a webinar, a demo, etc. Define your objectives, in other words why you are organizing this event. Is it to build loyalty among your current customers? Is it to generate leads? Which speakers should you call on? In short, ask yourself the right questions. It is essential to define the target you want to reach. To do this, create personas. Once you have made these choices, you need to promote your event! In other words, run campaigns, whether through emails, on social media, ads, etc. For your campaigns to be effective, you need to create relevant, high-quality and above all targeted content.

To measure performance prior to your event, you can take indicators into account, such as the number of registrants, the email open rate (in the case of email campaigns), the click-through rate on registration links, etc.

To help illustrate my point, here is an example:

Let us assume that I am a business strategy consultancy. I want to organize a webinar on the theme of “entrepreneurship” and target my entrepreneur prospects. My main objective is to generate leads so that they become clients of my firm. I have chosen a speaker who succeeded in launching their company thanks to my firm. Now, I am going to create email campaigns to reach my target. So I send several emails to promote my webinar and follow up with registrants so that they do indeed attend on the big day. I can automate my campaigns thanks to marketing automation software. ?

The date of my event is approaching, so I decide to carry out an analysis to find out how many people have registered. I monitor the click-through rate on the links that redirect to the registration form…

If you want to increase the number of registrants for your webinars, watch the replay of our webinar ?Boost webinar registrations with marketing automation

What to do during your event

That is it, it is the big day for your event. Once your event is launched, you need to make sure that it works properly. This mainly depends on your responsiveness. It is essential to engage in conversation with your participants so that they feel comfortable and interact actively. You must make tools available, such as chats or polls, for example. This will allow you to collect important data. Questions may be asked, or additional information may be of interest to your participants. Thanks to the data collected during registration and participation, you can identify potential leads.

Performance indicators can be taken into account during your event, such as the participation rate or the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Still within the framework of my example:

My webinar is launched, my topic is being properly addressed. Several participants ask questions, so I make sure to answer them correctly. I have also set up a poll in order to identify trends among my participants. I make sure to be constantly responsive and to keep my content dynamic. I plan to have a person in addition to the host to ask the questions.

Ensuring post-event follow-up

Now that your event is over and you have been able to collect all the necessary data, it is imperative to carry out an analysis to identify hot leads. The most qualified can be called directly by the sales team. For the others, ensure follow-up to make sure you convert your participants into leads. Set up new campaigns, such as an email campaign with a recap and a replay of your webinar. Continue to nurture the interest of your participants in order to maintain their engagement, this strategy is better known as “lead nurturing”.

Also think about registrants who did not participate! You can make the replay available to engage them or include them in additional campaigns.

Performance indicators to take into account after the event include, for example, the satisfaction rate, the average number of participants and participations, as well as return on investment (ROI).

Finally, to conclude

My virtual event is over, which now allows me to carry out an analysis using the data I was able to collect before and during the event. This analysis allows me to identify people potentially interested in my firm (hot leads). Once the hot leads have been identified, I pass them on to the sales team, which will make sure to turn them into customers. I make sure to run email campaigns by sending a recap email as well as the webinar replay to all participants (lead nurturing). My lead nurturing campaigns are still ensured thanks to my marketing automation software.

By ensuring follow-up before, during and after, as well as good organization of your online events, you are almost certain to turn a participant into a hot lead.

A participant needs to be guided and reassured in order to become a lead.