When it comes to filling a room, most marketers put their energy toward sending email invitations, sharing social posts, and placing ads — anything that’ll reach their external audience.

But they often miss the opportunity to double or triple their turnout when they don’t leverage their internal audience.

That’s right, we’re talking about sales teams.

Sellers are trained in the art of persuasion and have networks full of potential attendees.

Who better to help marketers get the right people in the room than them? 

Here are six ways sales and marketing teams can work together to maximize event attendance.

1.

Build a Committee of Brand Ambassadors

Marketers know branding is critical to event promotion.

Branding goes beyond the familiar logos and colors splashed across your event page.

It’s the voice and messaging used throughout your event touchpoints — from your event title to the value props that inspire guests to sign up, and actually show up, on event day.

It’s the invites, social posts, and other event content created and promoted by your team.

But more often than not, that team only ends up being your fellow marketers.

Here’s why: Salespeople thrive on the personal relationships they build in a 1:1 or 1:few settings.

The post you want them to blast to their network about your event likely won’t happen without them feeling confident in what they’re sharing in a public setting.

Try creating a small host committee for your next event that includes a mix of sales and marketing team members.

Hold sessions to share your event details, messaging, and brand packaging with your committee to get them comfortable talking about your event.

The more they can speak to its value and who it benefits on their contact list, the more likely they are to help market to an audience they know will be eager to attend.

2.

Keep Everyone’s Eye on the Prize with a Little Competition

Motivate and maximize your team performance.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a sales team that isn’t up for a bit of healthy competition. And the prospect of a little something extra at the finish line only adds fuel to fire.

The reward for driving the most attendees is mutually beneficial.

Marketers benefit from filling seats with their target accounts.

The salesperson who drives the most registrations benefits from a reward or recognition for their efforts. Not to mention, getting their prospects to register for your event helps move them further along in the buying journey.

Consider how to unleash the full potential of your sales team based on your company’s culture. 

Would they benefit from competition to motivate and engage them? Try including incentives like a cash bonus, trip to a highly sought-after conference, or free ticket to a coveted event like SXSW to really up the ante.

3.

Connect the Dots Between Registrations and Revenue

To turn hosting into a team sport, you need a streamlined way to sync event registrations to your CRM.

 It’s all about serving sales the information they care about in a system where they already operate. 

When marketers empower sales to track which of their contacts have registered for an event in a Salesforce campaign, for example, they can expect increased motivation to drive that registration number up — especially when those contacts are tied to revenue opportunities.

Even better, when marketers can demonstrate the long-term impact of events on closing deals, it paves the way for a culture that truly believes in the power of events.

4.

Track Attendance Goals with a Visual Progress Bar 

Create a scalable way to track efforts.

It’s easy to lose motivation if you can’t see how you’re performing.

That’s why identifying a scalable way to track efforts is key for keeping your team on track for meeting attendance goals.

Try visualizing progress in the form of a leaderboard or a report and share it with your team at the beginning of each week leading up to your event.

This will not only help you understand which reps are driving the highest registration rates, but which sales language is resonating best with your audience, too.

Plus, creating a central place for tracking lays the foundations for inviting team members beyond your sales team to join in on promotion. 

You can take the competition up a notch by visualizing this tracking in the form of a leaderboard or a report.

5.

Give Your Team a Messaging Framework

The GIVE framework.

Attendance is dependent on your promotion, and your promotion is dependent on your messaging. 

So, empowering your sales reps to speak to the value of your events is worth putting somewhere near the top of your priority list.

At Splash, we use a framework called GIVE to create value-based emails and outreach.

Stress who else will be in the room. Surveys show attendees are showing up for in-person events to network since learning-based events can happen virtually.

Lean into who a prospect could become by attending the event.

Make it clear to attendees that they should or deserve to be at the event. This type of messaging works best for smaller events geared toward a specific group of people.

Inform guests of the sights, sounds, and memories they can expect to walk away with.

Once you give your team the tools to properly message your event, they can give guests a list of reasons why they shouldn’t miss your event.

6.

Share Real-Time Updates to Inspire Real-Time Action

When it comes to creating a culture that believes attendance is a team effort, it’s all about real-time updates.

Aim to provide regular updates in a shared space for your team, like a weekly meeting or team Slack channel.

When sharing these updates, make transparency a priority.

You might want to shy away when registration numbers are lower than expected or may worry your team will start to coast when registrations are above average.

But regardless of what side of the spectrum you’re sitting on, both high and low registration numbers can drive action.

High numbers could mean continuing to run with your theme by preparing an additional drip campaign or an ebook that sales can share with prospects, while low numbers can inspire your team to find creative new ways to approach promotion roadblocks.

Partnering with sales to promote your event results in a winning outcome for everyone.

You’ll have a packed house, while sales will see the benefits of pipeline generation and closed deals. 

The key for any marketer is to know your audience.

Once you know what motivates your sales team and what they need to be successful, they’ll be working with you in no time to help you reach your attendance goals.