Best Practices for Event Success - Part 1

Engaging Prospects and Driving FOMO

The beauty of virtual tasting events is that there are zillions of ways to make them your own and ensure that you meet your specific goals, whether you’re looking to build relationships, close a deal, show customer love, present yourself (or company) as a thought leader, or build team morale. 

While there’s not just one right way to structure your events, we have seen many winning combinations of activity and event format so we wanted to share some best practices from our experience working with your peers at hundreds of best-in-class companies.

In our first example, we share how a widely popular Bay Area SaaS company engaged its prospects and drove major FOMO with purple cork.

When envisioning this virtual event, the company’s goal was to create inspiration and urgency among prospective customers. To do that, the company brought together a group of prospects to hear about an inspirational customer, and how they found success using the the host’s technology.

The event agenda

Exclusivity was a draw at this event—not just among the attendees but also the tasting partners, Harridan Vodka and Urbani Caviar, who supplied an ultra-premium dirty martini and delicious caviar pairing.

Here’s the one-hour format that worked beautifully for the hosting company to engage its enterprise prospects.

Welcome from the event sponsor and/or purple cork

The welcome is your opportunity to kick the event off on the right note and set the stage for the next hour. It’s where you, or we, can encourage attendees to speak up and ask questions, use the chat, or share their video to make the event more personal. During the intro, we often ask participants to add their company or title to their profile to make identification easy.

10 min icebreaker and introductions

The host chose to use breakout rooms so attendees could connect with each other in a smaller, more intimate environment. Introductions allow key decision makers to meet executives at your company face to face, if they haven’t met before. These relationships can come in very handy later, especially at the end of the quarter when you’re trying to get a deal signed. 

15 min of tasting—the fun part!

The tasting partner for this event, Bridgette Taylor, Founder and CEO of Harridan Vodka, walked the group through how to make a perfect martini using the ingredients and tools they were sent in advance. This time allows people to learn and share tasting notes. As people make their drinks and try them, conversation tends to be fun and informal. 

And it’s an exclusive treat—Harridan uses the highest quality, locally sourced, and organic ingredients—distilling in batches of 1,000 bottles or less to ensure ultimate flavor and character in the vodka.

20 minutes of content

While the host’s prospects sipped on their freshly made martinis, they got to hear what it’s like to be a customer. The host chose to use slides to help tell the story, though we have seen it work well without slides as well. 

Wrap up and goodbyes

To be respectful of time, we like to end the official event on time but leave the event link live a bit longer, in case people want to continue the conversation. In this case, the customer story made the chat highly engaged with questions and comments for the customer, which is ideal. It’s always the best sell to have happy customers share the benefits of your product.

Ready to bring a group of prospects together to hear from a happy customer? We would love to help.