How Comp Tickets Can Double Your Event Revenue

The world we live in is becoming increasingly visual. We need something that's engaging and will connect with us on an emotional level.

Can complimentary tickets bring in more revenue and drive more pipeline than paid tickets? We show you how it's actually more likely to benefit your event strategy.

In this Run of Show Weekly video, Splash's CEO, Ben Hindman, outlines the reasons behind a comp ticket strategy, and helps you figure out if it'll work for your own events.

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Video Transcript:

Can comp tickets be more profitable than paid tickets for your B2B conference? We're gonna find out today on this week's Run of Show.

Taking the Comp Ticket Bait

As the CEO of a software business, I get a lot of cold emails. And I rarely open them. But, a couple weeks ago, I got one that I just had to open. It said, "Will you be our guest to our upcoming conference?" Now, I opened the email and it was relatively short, and it just said, "We'd love to comp you some VIP tickets."

So I said yes, and the person who'd emailed me was very excited. I said, "Hey, can I invite a plus one?" They said yes. Then they sent another email and said, "Hey, by the way, we should meet at the conference." I said, "Terrific." Then they sent another email, and they tried to schedule a demo with me before the conference happened.

This is when I started to really understand what they were doing. This was part of an outbound cadence that they were using. They were using the comp tickets as bait to get me, the CEO, not just excited about the conference, but excited about their product.

Partners are incredible -- they help you bring in new audiences, they can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. So, how do you get great partners?

The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. You find the right partner, you wanna pitch that partner, and then you really wanna lock it in, and execute, and get the most value out of that partnership.

We're gonna walk through each three of those things right now.

Make Your Event Flow

Let's walk through a real life scenario. We're throwing a 100-person event. So, in order to fill the room with 100 people, I like to send out about 10 times the number of invitations, so that's inviting around 1,000 people.

Then, I like to try and get about 4 times the ratio of RSVPs to the capacity of the room. That comes to 400 people. In an event, you typically see what's called a flow, in and out of the venue throughout the event. You're really gonna try to get about 150 people or more to actually attend the event, so we're gonna look for about a 1.5x attendance rate.

The goal that we're gonna talk about today, is how to improve the percentage between RSVPs and attendees.

2. Combine areas of expertise

Even if you’re looking for a snapshot of an adorable dog, you definitely won’t be disappointed.

3 Reasons Why Companies Give Away Tickets

I started asking many of our clients, do they use comp tickets? Do they give away tickets to their B2B conferences, and why?

1. To bring in high-value attendees. The first one is pretty straightforward, event marketers were using these comp tickets as what they defined as "whale bait." This is the idea that they were able to get people who represented higher dollar value in the room when they offered a comp ticket. A CEO or a CMO would actually pick up their head for a very expensive, but free, ticket.

2. To transform the relationship. Changing the relationship was a reason we heard quite often. Often, when we're reaching out to our customers, or clients, or prospects, we're asking for money. This is an opportunity to begin the chain of reciprocity, and actually giving them something, especially if this is the first time we're reaching out.

3. To make events more profitable. The best reason, is that it can actually be more profitable. Now when I heard this, I was really excited because I always wonder how many tickets I should comp for my next event. How will the numbers eventually shake out? After doing a lot of interviews with event marketers, I've learned that it indeed can be a lot more profitable. But I had to see for myself. So we developed a bunch of scenarios and I wanna walk you through one right now.

3-Step Reciprocity

I've developed a three-step process to use reciprocity to drive the RSVP to attendance ratio. The three steps are: (1) get that attendee to invest, (2) confirm that they've made a good decision, and (3) lock it in.

Let's prove this. Let's pretend that we're talking about a B2B marketer named Melissa, who is hosting a user summit. It's their annual user summit and she's deciding how many comp tickets she should give out to, hopefully, attract more quality clients and prospects.

How many comp tickets will work for you?

Input your numbers in our downloadable template and find out.

Scenario 1: The Paid Ticket Strategy

In scenario one, she's comping zero tickets, and let's assume that her production cost on the event is about $100,000. She's gonna sell the tickets for about $500 and there'll be about 200 attendees at the event, and she's gonna sell all the tickets. It's gonna completely sell out, so she's gonna make about $100,000 in total ticket revenue. But, of course, the reason that we're hosting this is to drive sales, so let's look at how the funnel could impact the actual net gains on this event.

In a healthy B2B business, you're usually looking at an opportunity to close ratio of about 15%. We're just gonna add that in here and assume, for this event, we're gonna see about 10% of the attendees that attend actually turn into our opportunities. Be them new expansion opportunities, or prospects that become opportunities in the pipeline. We’re gonna call this 10%.

Now, let's run the numbers. She has 200 attendees and they're gonna convert opportunities at 10%, that's gonna be 20 attendees. Her average contract value is about 25K. In that scenario, we're looking at a $500,000 opportunity pipeline as a result of this event. Then if we run that through a 15% opportunity to close ratio we're looking at about three deals. That's about $75,000 in net new opportunities closed, so actual dollars in the bank. That's what the net profit is on this event, $75,000. Not bad.

Note: If you're interested and you're gonna be pitching for partnerships soon, I included some of my best templates as a downloadable in the article with this video. So feel free to go download that and use my one-sheet template. But this is the general outline of what I think makes the best one-sheets. The point of a one-sheet is to communicate visually how legit and real your event is.

Scenario 2: The Comp Ticket Strategy

Now, in scenario two, Melissa's actually comping about half the tickets. In order to do this right, we have to make sure that we're keeping a lot of the variables consistent, so we're comparing apples to apples.

We're gonna keep it so that Melissa's still spending $100,000 on the event. There's still 200 people attending, tickets are still $500 and, as I said, this time we're actually gonna comp half the tickets. So we're only going to sell 100 tickets. Jumping to the bottom again means we're gonna sell about $50,000 worth of tickets. Still not bad, but it's only covering about half the cost.

More Qualified Leads Means a Higher Attendee-to-Opp Ratio

This is what we found, if you're hosting an event and you're being really targeted, and you're doing a lot of outreach with these comp tickets, you can actually fill that second half of the room with much more qualified leads. As a result, we've seen that the attendee-to-opportunity ratio increases substantially if you play this game.

In this scenario, the opportunity ratio actually jumps to 25%, from 10% to 25%. and we'll keep that opportunity to close ratio consistent at 15%. Now, let's run these numbers. With 200 attendees, we're looking at 50 new opportunities in the pipeline. At a 25 KACV, we're looking at about $1.25 million dollars of opportunity generated, as opposed to $500,000. More than double, and we're eventually, with that 15% opportunity close ratio, looking at 7.5 new deals in the bank. That's more than $180,000 of new business as a result of the event. Despite the fact that she only sold $50,000 worth of tickets, the net profit on this is $137,000.

I wanna walk through a couple of vital considerations. If you're considering comping tickets, because, as you can see, we're working with a lot of assumptions, I wanna show you the major levers here.

Consider These 3 Things Before You Comp Tickets

(1) Percentage of attendees-to-opportunities: Assume it is going to increase if you comp tickets. What I mean to say is, do you think you can fill the room with a better attendee list that are more likely to turn into actual revenue? If you think so, make an assumption. In this last formula, the scenario you saw, we assumed that it would jump from 10% to 25%. I'll leave it to you to determine what percentage you think you can drive it to, if you had higher quality attendees.

(2) What is your ACV? In our scenario, we talked about a 25K ACV, that's great. That's a nice ACV. Candidly, if you've got that average contract value, you have to comp tickets. It’s a no brainer. If you've got $100,000 as an average contract value, it is really a no brainer. But what we have found is that, if your average contract value is about $15,000, it might not make sense. You really wanna be above $15,000 for comp tickets to make sense for you.

(3) What is your Sales Cycle? Ask yourself, are you willing to wait for a good amount of time to actually see that revenue recognized? We've been looking at our data, and especially for some of these larger user conferences, you can see a sale cycle be about a year. That means that, from the time that person became an opportunity to the day that that dollar is deposited in your bank account, it could be a full year, if not more. So you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to wait that long, as opposed to getting the little dollars in now, with the ticket revenue? Can you wait for a much larger contract in a year or more?

Increasing Your Budget

The next step to locking it in is to treat every partner really like a sponsor, like a paying sponsor. These people, whether or not they're adding value or they're giving you money, you need to treat them as if they have really paid to be part of this event. That means consistent follow-up emails. That means being attentive to their needs. That means sending them a really beautiful recap report after the event. I find that if I treat my partners like sponsors and I really put that in my brain and in the brains of the people on my team, I get a lot more out of that partnership. They end up coming to the table and really delivering the value that I originally expected.

Last but not least, own it. Own the entire process. I’ve found that the best way to really get the most out of a partnership is to put one person on your team on that partner. Make sure that reminder email goes out. Make sure they bring their brand VIPs. Make sure that they have strong collateral at the event, that their booth is set up on time. It's that type of stuff. Giving them a very clear and thoughtful Gantt chart, leading them through that process, that really squeezes all of the juice out of a potential partnership.

To Comp or Not to Comp

As you're planning your next B2B conference and considering how many comp tickets to sell versus how many tickets you should sell for full price, I'll urge you to consider some of these numbers. You can download the formula, and you can play with your assumptions internally.

It's definitely at least a healthy exercise to try to run some of these numbers. As I said, we found that this can be an extremely lucrative effort. While it's not always straightforward if and how some of these deals will close, no matter what, you're gonna be generating a lot of goodwill and building a lot of great relationships with your clients and prospects by offering them a free ticket to your next event.

Want to figure out how many comp tickets make sense for your strategy? We got an easy formula for you to use.

Download the template now.

3. Show that people are attending your events.

Last but not least, people get people. If you can show that people are attending your event, and they're telling other people, you can display that. That's the type of stuff that actually drives attendance.

So, you're gonna want to show and get RSVPs early and often as you can. Then get those people to commit and tell their friends about it. We found that that is the number one way to drive RSVPs.

Invest, Confirm, Lock it In

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.

Best of luck with your events.

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.

Best of luck with your events.

Bring Out the Urgency

Urgency is one of the most powerful techniques that I've seen in terms of driving ticket sales. You can use urgency in things like "Early bird sales end soon," or you can say something like, "We're almost full," or "This is going to be a really important event for you to attend." Drive that point home with frequency and urgency, and make sure, in all your communications, to go through that checklist, G-I-V-E.

After you've outlined every single step in the process, your next step is to figure out who the major players are. This might be someone who's actually at your organization, or an agency, or even a freelancer. You're trying to figure out who's involved. I find that a really great framework for figuring this out and defining it in a very visible and transparent way is something called the RACI model. It's a great model that I see some of the top event planners that we work with use.

How RACI Works:

RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.

(1) Responsible is the person who ensures that the work gets done.
(2) Accountable is the person that actually executes the work. Who presses "play," clicks "go," presses "send."
(3) Consulted is the person who gives approval that this work has been completed.
(4) Informed is the person who's an FYI for that stage.

A quick example: during the promotional stage, the person who is responsible might be your demand gen person. This is somebody who has to make sure that the right people are invited and we get the right RSVPs. The person accountable is the person who actually presses "send." That might be your marketing ops person or a promoter that's involved in the event. Consulted, is a leader in the promotional stage or VP marketing or VP sales. This is somebody who needs to make sure the right guest list is being promoted.

Probably informed for the promotional stage is your CEO or a salesperson who just needs to know that we're sending out invitations, or your client's RSVP. That's how you RACI. And your job is to RACI each of these different segments. This process is something that we call roleing [SP] up, R-O-L-E, roleing up. I found that identifying who is involved and what they need to do at early, early stages in the process, is paramount to having a great event. You really want to understand the players and what they're supposed to do, and to communicate that early and often.

Rolling Out: Timelines and Deadlines

The next step in this process is called rolling out -- that's identifying when. We know who and we know what they need to do, but when do they need to do it?

As you can see, this rolling out process looks a lot like a Gantt chart. We've layered on top of themselves all of these different stages. You want the promotional phase and the creative phase to overlap because we're going to learn a lot in the very early stages of our promotions. We're going to know how we might need to tweak things, and you need that creative team involved in the process. You do want to create deadlines. Make sure that everything has a clear beginning and a clear end, otherwise, I found things just don't get done.

The Final Step: Pulling It All Together

1. Get everyone involved early

I can't tell you how often I see people overlook getting the entire team, or at least as many people who fall under the responsible category as possible involved in the process early and often. If you can, get everyone in the room during the ideation stage. If not the ideation stage, make sure they're in the creative stage. I love the old adage, "If they plan the fight, they won't fight the plan." So you wanna get them involved.

2. Use data

Use data. I like to use data at different stages of the process. You can use data and measurement as an energizing tool, as your energizing bunny. The best way to feed this bunny is with carrots. But, you might also use the stick. What I meant to say is you can use a dashboard to show people how many RSVPs somebody is driving and get them really excited, or you can show them where you're not hitting, what's not working for you as a way to get people onboard and focused on their goal. I do find that using data at every single stage helps you sprint this marathon that is an event.

3. Communicate a lot

Last but not least, you want to communicate. Communicate a lot. I always would say to my event planning team, "Our entire job, not just part of our job, our entire job is communication, both with our attendees externally and with our team internally." Setting up a communication cadence early in the process, makes this whole machine work.

That's our role up and roll out process that we've found work great for us. Have any extra tips we missed? Let us know how you run your events in the comments!

Here’s an example of how to build a pass-along story from events that I hosted a couple of months ago for some of our top clients. Our clients are some of the top event marketers in the world and we brought them all together in a cool venue here in New York.

I went with my team in advance to think about what emotion we wanted them to feel. The emotion that we came to after a lot of debate was them to feel love, and appreciation for their job and for themselves and for the craft that they do.

That's where we started, but how do we get them to feel love? We threw out a lot of ideas for storylines that they would take away. One of the most important things that we could focus on was the format of the event and how their experience would play out throughout the day.

Fast forward 'till after the event. I wanted to test this pass-along story and see how effective we were. I called up a lot of the different attendees and asked them, what was the story that you told when you got home? More than that, who did you tell it to? Retell me that story.

The stories, more often than not, weren't really about the content that they learned or a certain data point that they heard. Instead they started talking about what had happened. They spoke about somebody that they met at a cocktail hour or a piece of swag that they're really excited about. Or even a musical interlude that had happened right before a speaker such as the violinist and how amazing she was. That's what they focused on.

What was even better was that interwoven into each of those stories was the emotion, and they were using interesting adjectives. Over and over again, we started to hear words like excitement and appreciation and inclusion. It was those adjectives that we wrote down because that was our goal, and our focus.

Remember, it's not about how you communicate your content and what you say. Instead, it's really about what people are really going to remember inside of these stories and how they feel.

❤️ Special thanks to our Tech lead, Guillermo de la Puente, for his hard work on this project.

There's only one metric that matters when driving the ROI of your event -- here's how to measure the opportunity in the room.

author

Ben Hindman

Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.

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