Last week at INBOUND, we generated 162 opps (demos set) and $2.3M in pipeline (3x our goal).
I have no secrets.?Here’s what we did:
- The best decision: We partnered with?Ladidadi Events & Incentives, who executed a perfect booth: a casino with a professional blackjack dealer and a digital slot machine, merging our brand with an engaging way to interact with the crowds. (Note: Booths are absolutely not dead, despite what marketers will tell you. Prioritize the?location of your booth, and sign early so you get first dibs. Ours sat across from the HubSpot demo floor and opened up into the conference center’s space, inviting others in)?
- We brought 18 (!) people, including those from our executive, product, engineering (don’t sleep on your engineers for trade shows), marketing, sales, and CX teams.?
- We each had a quota, weighted by role, and had a QuotaPath leaderboard to track progress in real-time with an incentive on the line.
“Show me an incentive, and I’ll show you an outcome.” - Charlie Munger? - - - AJ Bruno
- When we hit our goal halfway through the second day, AJ, Ryan Milligan, and Graham D. Collins dropped a kicker on top of our bonus if we hit the stretch goal. (We did!) These “quotas” kept our team aligned, which we reviewed at a team meeting the week before to outline booth roles and responsibilities, schedules, travel, expectations, goals, and more.
Ok, there’s more:
- We held an event within an event. Graham invited HubSpot reps for a live demo at our booth so they could begin selling our latest App Cards in HubSpot.?
- Speaking of App Cards, we also launched our App Cards at INBOUND, which puts QuotaPath commission data and task mgmt directly in HubSpot (having a video on loop highlighting this at our booth helped)
- We participated in content collaborations (shoutout to RevPartners and hapily)
- We held a session featuring?AJ?and?Anne Pao?about how to transform pipeline reviews from chore to tactical (master forecasting and empowering your reps were two big themes during the presentation, and we pointed to HubSpot screenshots to guide the conversation, which included QuotaPath data).
- We co-sponsored a happy hour with other HubSpot App Partners, like PandaDoc, Arrows, Salesmsg, and Aircall that we promoted heavily.
- All this, while meeting with HubSpot C-levels, Solution Partners, App Partners, customers, and prospects throughout the week.
Our goal was to create noise (both figuratively and literally—our digital slot machine chimed all day), and we did. It was a company-wide effort.
Proud of this team, the risk we took (we invested quite a bit), and Graham and I for co-leading this gargantuan effort for a small but nimble team. However, we could not have done this without Sydney Golden from Ladidadi, who was simply the best.
Our success can largely be chalked up to our team, but here's a few things you can borrow:
- offer event incentives
- prioritize booth location
- keep your org. top of mind all week
