Virtual Networking Event Ideas

In today’s hybrid workforce, it’s essential to understand how to continue to grow your business virtually. One of the biggest advantages of virtual events is that they allow people from anywhere in the world to attend. They cut across countries and cultures. Here are some ideas for virtual events to consider:

Pre-event contest – this is a great way to build anticipation and engagement prior to a virtual event. It can be something as simple as a photo contest where participants post a photo of themselves eating the foods/drinking the beverage/using the product prior to the event. It’s effectively another way to break the ice and get people conversing.
Speed Networking Events – just apply the concept of speed dating to a networking event. Each participant will be coupled with another attendee for a set amount of time (5-10 minutes is a good rule of thumb). It’s a perfect opportunity to learn enough about the business needs of each participant and determine if a follow-up meeting would be beneficial.
Interactive Games & Icebreakers – meeting someone for the first time is challenging for many people. Icebreakers are a great way to diffuse the tension because meeting people in a fun or informal way takes off the pressure. Overall, it humanizes the experience. You could host games such as Two Truths & a Lie or Wanderlust to help break the ice and get people talking.
Two truths and a lie – this classic ice-breaking game provides a playful opportunity for participants to share details about themselves or their businesses. Each participant provides three responses on a specific theme or question — only two of which are true — and the other attendees must guess which is a lie.
Cocktails With a Twist – cocktail events seem to put people at ease. Think about structuring a virtual one to help people connect with each other. Assign each attendee a number. You can then rotate the numbered groups through the breakout room so they have an opportunity to talk to different people.
Gamification to Engage Attention – a big challenge with virtual events is keeping people engaged. It’s easy to tune out and get glued to your text, email or social media. Gamification uses the attendees’ smartphone to keep them engaged. Real-time polls, interactive quizzes or even scavenger hunts are just a few games that have proved effective. Once they’re engaged in activity, reward and recognize them by posting updates on a scoreboard for everyone to see.
Challenge attendees with a virtual escape room – this idea is akin to a virtual scavenger hunt. It encourages communication, cooperation and delegation between the participants. After people have connected over this experience, they’re more likely to engage in lively discussion about their business needs.

Infuse Sales Techniques and Approach

In addition to mastering virtual networking events, today’s successful salesperson must meet the needs of buyers who expect sophisticated, consultative, and technology-enabled salespeople. The stereotypical B2B salesperson, who fights over leads, only works the phone, and takes clients to golf, is obsolete. Instead, successful selling techniques require the salesperson to negotiate data deals, leverage relationship analytics, and attend industry events. The quintessential 21st century B2B consultant seller will:

Make quick and nimble decisions. The consultant seller must consume and process data to learn about buyers’ affiliations, challenges, and objectives and make informed decisions.

Use an omnichannel approach. Today’s business consumers want to interact with sellers in meaningful and personalized ways, and they want a contextually relevant and positive experience across all of their preferred channels.

Won’t underestimate the importance of empathy and trustworthiness. While machines can never foster trust or empathy, they can alleviate B2B sellers’ time constraints. With more time in their day, sellers can develop a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ roles and business challenges, build trust, and project more empathy.

Lean into strategic collaboration. Internally B2B sellers will partner with data scientists to identify patterns that help uncover additional revenue streams and will partner with marketers to increase the level of personalization of their messaging.

Consultative Sales Principles

While there are many successful selling techniques you can employ, don’t forget to lean into the 4 key principles of successful consultative selling:

Know your products: It’s imperative that you understand the features and functionality of the products you’re selling. This can be especially challenging as the product you’re selling may evolve over the course of the sales cycle. Don’t rely on others in your organization to explain the value of your product to your customer. You must have this knowledge and the ability to expertly explain the features, benefits, and unique advantages of your product.
Know your customers: You need to research the marketplace and your customer. Even more importantly, you need to experience your customers’ products and services. All the reading and research in the world won’t match actually experiencing your customers’ products and services.
Know how your products can become solutions to your customers’ needs. It’s not up to your customer to connect the dots for you. You need to be able to articulate how your product delivers solutions to real business problems. Often this means being able to provide relevant case studies and success stories at the right time and in the right words.
Ultimately, successful enterprise selling requires the building and nurturing of strong, long-term relationships.

Elevate Your Status as a Consultative Seller

Salespeople are stretched, but it’s also an exciting time to be in sales. New sales technologies are maturing at breakneck speed, consultant sellers are evolving, and marketers are turning their attention inward to help their sales forces succeed in a digital-first environment. Strategic deployment of personnel and tools and a robust sales enablement plan will allow B2B marketing and sales leaders to rebalance the inequities of the current buyer and seller dynamic. To begin recalibrating your sales organization to succeed, we recommend that you discuss these topics with your sales team:

Assess your existing team
Update sales profiles.
Pursue talent from new channels.
Infuse technology advocates into the organization.
Reevaluate your sales tech stack.

What is sales enablement?

In a nutshell, sales enablement means equipping sellers with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With a wealth of information available online, buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, enterprise buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they reach out to a seller.

What does this mean? It means that sellers must take the initiative to reach out to buyers, winning the buyers’ attention much earlier in their journey. This is a task typically associated with marketing. So, sellers need to think more like marketers, and marketers need to think more like sellers – about the day-to-day experiences of buying and selling.

Sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.

Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, a sales enablement strategy is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

Want to learn more about Showpad?

Show Me How