One of the best ways to build a community or even to sell to large audiences is to do an event. Of course, anyone who’s ever done an event knows that is
tons of work to get it off the ground, so often, they never even start to organize it.

Fortunately, most administrative tasks can be automated with SalesAutopilot when doing events. What more, everything is easier and more eloquent at an event when automated.

So how do you put on an event with not much staff

Get more attendees

…and sell more at higher value! Once you are armed to communicate and sell more effectively, you will convert people on your email list at a higher percentage to your events. Effective communication is based on effective email marketing… for which you need 2 things:

• knowing your audience
• having the technology to target each segment with the right messaging and offer

The process starts by getting to know your market better. Thanks to the quick-to-launch surveys, creating a questionnaire for your audience, is very easy and fast. There is tremendous value in surveys but one of the primary reasons people don’t use them is because it takes a different service provider like Surveymonkey to do it. With SalesAutopilot, everything is a few clicks away – in your marketing platform.

Admission forms for your event are just as easily created… be it simple one-page forms (which is what suits most events!) or multi-page forms with fields displayed according to conditions that you set along the way (e.g.: “Only display this field if they answered “B” to question #3”.)

So, once you have a system in place to easily segment your visitors and your platfomr is able to easily alter your communication’s content according to the segment, you’ll be on a roll. And when event day comes around, it’s really cool to check people in by scanning a barcode from their phones – and having it sync with your admission list in real time 🙂 Of course, this is a breeze in SalesAutopilot as well.

Automate communications

You can still impress people by sending them a reminder SMS on the morning of the event on where to park and any last minute reminders you want them to keep in mind.

If, on the other hand, you have last minute changes and you need to notify all (or just part) of the attendees, then it’s no longer about impressing people – it becomes crucial. Let’s say, the location of the VIP reception changes 3 hours before the event. You don’t want your VIP’s floundering about pointlessly looking for the reception, right? You need a system in place that’s able to instantly send them the update – and email is not an option. SMS saves your life.

You need to try the system to see it!

Automate all possible processes

Organizing most events starts easy but gets painfully complicated due to unexpected things popping up. Take registration, for example. You can easily have the following scenarios:

• Ann registers herself and Bob and Ann pays both their tickets
• Ann registers both herself and Bob, but they pay tickets separately
• An attendee needs a VAT-free invoice (if they are based in a complicated European tax environment)
• An attendee cannot come – they need to be refunded, their spot needs to be freed up and this obviously needs to be administered fast.

The above are all typical cases that come up at most of our clients’ events and at our events. If you’ve done an event, you can probably add “weird cases that need handling” to the above list.

In order to let your staff actually get some sleep before the event, you need to automate as much as possible. This is done by

• mapping possible scenarios and processes
• setting up the workflows in SalesAutopilot

Automating an average event takes no more than a few hours for one of your staff. Afterwards, every scenario and weird case that needs attention and administration is just a few clicks. When you’re doing your next event, all you have to do is clone these established processes.

There is an alternative to automating the organizing and administration of your events. It’s called chaos. If you’ve tried it, you don’t want to go back. Chaos comes from trying to handle stuff manually – it involves searching for data, making phonecalls and stressing out big time.

It’s time you waived goodbye to stressed out, chaotic event-management and said hello to automated, stress-free and fun events.