How to Get Sales Team Buy-In for Your Event

You’ve built your guest list, and you are ready to move on to recruitment! A major key to attendee recruitment and event success is ensuring that your team is fully engaged and aligned with the event’s goals. Without their buy-in, you risk missing critical opportunities to connect with attendees and drive business impact. For our clients, we have noticed that the biggest recruitment struggle exists between field marketing events and sales team recruitment of attendees. So this blog focuses on how to align your sales team with your event strategy and empower them to become your event’s biggest advocates. The principles we outline below can be applied to any event where you need to rely on additional internal team members to assist in the marketing effort to recruit quality attendees. Interested in diving into your event strategy first? Head here. 

Why Sales Team Engagement Matters

Many corporate marketing teams face a common hurdle: sales teams fail to see the value of events and are not fully engaged. This disconnect can lead to missed opportunities to build or deepen relationships, close deals, and achieve the event’s intended ROI goals. Stuck on how to get your sales team involved in event planning?

4 Proven Strategies for Aligning Sales Teams with Event Goals

1. Build Excitement and Clarity
   Clear communication is essential for sales team engagement. Host dynamic pre-event meetings or send out personalized presentations to share the event’s purpose, benefits, and goals. When your team understands how the event can help them succeed, they’ll be more motivated to actively participate.

2. Create Attendee Avatars
   Remember that your sales team thrives on prescriptive and specific instructions. So build 2-3 ideal attendee profiles to include their position, industry, location, age, income, hobbies, etc. This will help your sales team connect the avatars to their deep Rolodex of contacts. If you can provide specific examples of current clients this makes the avatars even more realistic and relatable. 

3. Set and Gamify Attendee Quotas
   Require each salesperson to invite a specific number of high-value clients or prospects in order to earn their ticket to your super cool event. By setting measurable participation metrics, you’ll create accountability and ensure that sales teams are actively working toward event success. Elevate the interaction and tap into their natural desire for competition by adding sweet carrots to the top contributors. Maybe it is time off, a monetary bonus, or super exciting giveaways? Additional recognition for the salespeople that go beyond will motivate them and in exchange motivate the whole team to be like them. 

4. Provide Enablement Tools
   Equip your team with resources that make on-site engagement seamless. Pre-event client strategy briefings, key conversation topic checklists, and digital tools to track interactions can empower your sales team to connect with attendees effectively and confidently. And again, it doesn’t hurt to gamify the on-the-floor sales effort. Who can close the most deals at the event? Who can funnel the most new prospects into the pipeline? Who spent the most time on the show floor? Who dressed to impress? Any recognition will go a long way.

Your sales team plays a pivotal role in your event’s success. By aligning their efforts with your event’s purpose and giving them the tools they need to engage, you’ll maximize the impact of your corporate event. Remember, when your sales team thrives, your event’s ROI does, too.

Need help with sales team buy-in and maximizing your ROI? We’d love to talk.

---

Bash Creative is an event planning company that specializes in incredible gatherings that go beyond just great design. We’re known for teasing out smart goals for your event and serving up a stylish execution that will keep your guests buzzing. Located in San Francisco, but often found in New York, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, and beyond.