Going Virtual: Making the Transition from a Physical to Virtual Sales Event

It was a call I’d been expecting. We had begun planning the global sales conference back in early December and had been due to gather 250 or so people together in Orlando on 16th March for 3 days of learning, engagement, inspiration and team building.

By the end of February it became apparent that the event was unlikely to go ahead; colleagues in APAC and Japan could not travel and things with COVID-19 were escalating in mainland Europe. Finally on 5th March the decision was made. Event cancelled.

A few days previously we were reading the writing on the wall and started exploring alternatives. Was it possible to stream content for colleagues outside the US if we were able to go ahead with just some of the attendees in Florida? Could we take the event 100% virtual? As the pandemic spread, an 100% virtual conference became the obvious option. We set ourselves a tough target to host the event on 21 and 22 April and got to work.

The platform

Early on we began talking to contacts with experience of attending and hosting virtual events. I had some experience of this from my days at Cisco and saw that just delivering hours of back to back webinars without some framing, theming and audience interaction would be horrible. We needed something which would enable engagement and communication between the participants. We needed a platform. There are certainly a number of vendors on the market who do this sort of thing but we didn’t have time for an extensive beauty parade to make a vendor selection – we had to move fast. A couple of years ago I met a guy from Arkadin at an event and in talking to him understood that other parts of IQVIA had already been looking at their platform but were yet to use it to host a virtual event. By no means are they the only game in town but in the end we proceeded with them as our choice of platform for 3 reasons:

• Capabilities – their platform did most of what we needed
• Timescales – they were confident they could help us to pull it off within 4 weeks (though they would have preferred longer, no doubt)
• Budget – we were able to land on a mutually agreeable budget encompassing what we needed to deliver

My advice in choosing a vendor would be: be clear about what format you need the event to take. What do you want to achieve? I was talking to a colleague this week about replicating our virtual event format but including virtual whiteboarding for the purposes of enabling workshopping and a hackathon amongst small teams. The platform selection would very much depend on its ability to carry these essential activities, or to interoperate with existing collaboration tools. For example, we use Microsoft Teams; you could definitely use that platform to support small group work, desktop sharing etc. linking out of a core platform or environment into a series of working ‘rooms’.

The agenda

In our early discussions we considered 2 principals:

• We wanted to deliver as much of the content and experience we had planned for Orlando but do it virtually
• We didn’t want people to feel imprisoned behind they PCs for too many hours

With this in mind we took our Orlando agenda and gave it a haircut – removing the obvious pieces we could no longer deliver (e.g. the giving-back session where people would work together to build a bike). We then reduced the time for almost every session – 60 mins together in a room can be engaging but it may prove hard for people to concentrate for that long behind their PC, so everything was shortened. And we made some hard choices about the sessions we had remaining. There was a cost impact for delivering each additional session which presented limitations, and we also had to consider the time we had as a team to pull it all off. This meant that our 25 breakout themes from Orlando were reduced judiciously to 12. In our live event we had also planned a live 3-hour expo experience where people could chat, watch demos and explore our solutions with the product and engineering experts. The platform could enable virtual demos so we agreed to continue with it, but only to host a one hour session in the agenda for this, and for fewer products than we would have had in the live agenda.

Ultimately our 2.5 day Orlando agenda was reduced down to just 4.5 hours of content/sessions per day, plus breaks, which seemed like a reasonable expectation of our teams to concentrate for. The eventual agenda contained:

• 3 general sessions per day – including 2 guest speakers
• 4 breakout sessions scheduled across the 2 days – during these 4 slots, participants could choose from 3 topics running concurrently
• 1 expo session – though the expo booths were only ‘staffed’ with experts during this hour, people could submit Qs to be answered and could download materials or watch demos at any time

Timezones

This is always the challenge with global events and is the big problem with switching to a virtual format. Try as you might you cannot create an agenda that allows everyone to join at a reasonable time from wherever they are geographically. We opted to start the agenda at 8am EST which was evening time in APAC and lunchtime in Europe. By limiting the daily agenda to 4.5 hours of content this meant it wasn’t too awful for anyone. Though for sure our colleagues in Japan and APAC would be up until late if they were to consume every session there are fewer of them in total so we optimized the timezone for the larger number of attendees we have in the US and Europe. In view of that, making content available immediately on demand at the end of a session was important – it would enable people to quickly catch up whenever they were next online.

As an agenda consideration to tackle this timezone issue, some people suggested offering 2 hours of content per day, across a whole week, but we decided against this; by doing this we felt we would lose the energy and impact of delivering a must-attend event. And our data seems to show that this was the right approach – our sessions were very well attended across the two days; we had been concerned that people would slope off or get distracted, but the attendee data shows that we probably got that balance right.

The Theme

When we started planning the in-person event, we decided upon a theme – Game On! We retained the theme also we nuanced it slightly. In these times it felt less appropriate to go heavy on aggressive ‘big sales energy’, but rather to encourage our teams to take an appropriate tone with customers where we can help and guide them through these difficult times. Never has there been a better time for a consultative, solutions-led sales approach!

The Audience

Early on our IT teams expressed concern about the potential impact of hundreds of people attending the event, logging in via the VPN and its potential impact both on the experience of attendees streaming content, and other IQVIANs going about their day jobs. We agreed that we would make efforts to limit the invitation list to people who had originally been invited to Orlando, but to extend it a little more to colleagues who also wanted to attend. We reviewed these requests carefully in advance of the event – it would have been easy to open it up to almost anyone, but it was important to adhere to the guidance of our IT teams. In the end we had something like 330 people approved to attend the event, and gladly there was no palpable impact on audience experience. A strong benefit of the platform is that people can go in after the event and watch content, session recordings and demos for up to a year. This is also important for our colleagues in timezones for whom joining live was a challenge.

Live, simulive or prerecord?

Delivering 9 hours of content 100% live would have been stressful so we took the decision to prerecord certain segments of content. We made sure that speakers ‘sent’ their webcam video during prerecording so that people could see their faces, which helped. We used pre-recorded videos during 11 out of 12 breakouts. Not only did this take the heat off the presenters, it also meant that the organising team knew that the presentation was in the can, and wouldn’t stretch longer if a speaker ended up talking longer than planned, leaving a decent chunk of time for a live Q&A panel during each breakout. The sales enablement teams hosted these breakouts, orchestrating our experts and picking up on Qs and themes posed by the audience during the session.

Similarly, we prerecorded all Expo demos so audience members could watch these at any time, whilst offering a live Q&A and chat session with the experts. This seemed like a good combination to take the heat off our experts and ensure the audience could access good quality demo material at any time.

I would highly recommend considering a blend of prerecord and live content. Nothing can diminish the impact and energy of live content BUT as an organising team we successfully limited opportunities for things to go wrong by including prerecorded content in suitable places.

Engagement

The beauty of using a platform like the one we created was the opportunity to utilise tools like live chat, polling, quizzes and gamification to drive engagement. You may think this is a little cheesy or that cynical sales people won’t engage but it was amazing to see the audience taking the opportunity to live chat alongside mainstage and breakout sessions. Our execs led the charge here which increased the engagement and gave the Sales Enablement team a tonne of feedback on topics we may need to bake in to our future plans, things that salespeople need more of or messaging that resonated with the teams. We made sure that the Q&A was manned throughout all General and Breakout sessions so that Qs could be asked of the speakers live. We also made use of polling in both general sessions and breakouts to gather information from the sales people about what they are hearing from customers, as well as their knowledge on certain topics. And we asked them to complete quizzes to check if they were listening to the content shared. All of this was gamified. The platform we used allows for an engagement competition to be supported where each attendee gains points for attending sessions, asking Qs, responding to polls and quizzes etc. A leaderboard allowed us to keep track of who was paying attention – data that’s also useful for our regional sales leaders to see.

We also chose to give out 4 sales awards during the general sessions to recognise sales peoples’ efforts and celebrate success. Knowing that awards would be announced encouraged people to keep attending throughout the general sessions.

Videos on!

IQVIA doesn’t have a strong ‘video culture’, but like many companies this is starting to change due to the lockdown. We felt it to be really important to have our teams ‘see’ one another and not just hear our experts so we asked all presenters to share video if it was technically possible for them to do so.

Communications

A big thing about introducing a wholly new platform to people who don’t know what to expect was the communication. We used a series of comms, shared with our audience via a dedicated Teams channel, as well as via email, to achieve a few things:

• Build excitement – we used video to convey elements of the platform, generate enthusiasm and punctuate the countdown to going live
• Educate – we provided a recorded walk through of the platform, a ‘know before you go’ comms, specific guidance on the technical set up to optimize the audience experience, and clear comms around the agenda and how attendees would navigate between sessions. More is definitely more here – despite telling people several times to use certain browsers, many ignored that advice and suffered tech issues as a result!
• Assist – the use of a dedicated Teams channel ensured we could handle the many Qs we received in advance and during the event quickly and efficiently as a team

Organisation

For event planning, training and enablement teams I would say that the amount of work to pull off a virtual event is probably more rather than less than a physical event. We agonised over many more decision points than we had to consider when planning our ill-fated Orlando event. Strong project management and clear communication is an absolute must here to keep a handle of all the moving parts. We chose to assign individuals to different ‘tracks’ in the event organisation. For example, someone was in charge of the breakouts (though we all had our own to deliver and facilitate), someone was in charge of general sessions, we had two people on the Expo since that included coordinating across many stakeholders. There’s nothing surprising about handling it in this way; each track lead fed in to the overall project plan but had control of their own area.

The other thing to consider was the communications amongst the core team before and during the event week. We had regular meetings with our platform partner, of course, but we also met with our core team with increasing frequency, until the week before the event we moved to a daily stand up to help us focus on the critical items of the day. During the event week we switched away from email and even Teams to start using a whatapp group so that we could communicate critical updates and get answers quickly amongst ourselves. That really worked well for us.

Practice and Rehearsal

I cannot overstate the importance of rehearsals with speakers, facilitators and experts. We arranged a number of them, and the better planned these were, the better outcome for our speakers. We did these together with the platform partner though our team led these sessions and that proved important to ensure that the correct context was provided to our experts. When you are delivering content in a webcast type environment with video there are two things that seemed to be challenging:

1. The audio – prepare for there to be problems. Local bandwidth meant that for some speakers the combination of video and audio was a problem that couldn’t be overcome, so we had to make a choice to turn off their video to ensure they could be heard. Do spend time ensuring people understand the need to mute themselves to prevent feedback if you have several panellists as I did…it made for a very noisy session that impacted the audience experience
2. The video – several people struggled to get their videos to send for a number of reasons e.g. bandwidth, not using the right browsers, having another tool open that was using their inbuilt webcams. This is why having everyone dial in well in advance to troubleshoot was really important

The follow up

Our event closed on Wednesday night and we’re now spending our time on a number of things:

• Posting slideware, videos and other assets into our sales content repository for future reference – though the platform remains open for up to a year after the event we want to ensure relevant content is searchable in places our sales people know to use
• Opening up the platform to others – we had many people who couldn’t join us live due to our prudence with capacity. We are now opening up the platform to enable many others to consume the content and recordings on demand
• Scrutinising the survey results – the amazing thing about using a virtual platform like this one is the amount of data you get about who attended what, did they ask Qs etc. Combine that with results of the event survey (that we incentivised to complete as part of the gamification), plus the comments and themes appearing in chat and you have a really rich set of data to look at. We are starting to work through all of this now so I don’t have all the detail to share right now, but what I would say is that we were thrilled and more than pleasantly surprised by the engagement, positivity, attendance and feedback we received
• Scrutinising the chat, polls and Qs – again, spending time looking at themes coming through in the Qs and chat gives us a wonderful steer about topics that resonate, areas of confusion or concern, and gaps in our current enablement or training plans that are worth considering. You simply don’t get the opportunity to pull this together in the same way during physical events so we are excited as a team to use this as a rich source of insights for our future planning

What’s next?

So one of the big things to consider is what’s next for sales training and kick off events. We had a very successful virtual experience so now the Q is – will this format become part of our future strategy by design rather than by urgent necessity? I don’t think this is the end of physical events. I think they will always have their place (when practically possible in the future), but we were certainly encouraged by the interaction of our attendees, their hunger to participate and share – and that is possible in a virtual environment. Several of our attendees commented that ‘nothing is better than getting people together in person’ so I can’t imagine virtual events will mark the end of the physical meeting. But I expect we will be looking at a combination of physical and virtual events in our future calendar.

In general, the event has served to elevate the engagement we have with our sales teams as a sales Enablement team. It’s almost as if the move to a virtual environment levelled the playing field on communication and interaction right across the organisation as we all learned how to manage in a very different event. I think this generated an additional level of trust and appreciation amongst our stakeholders, which is a valuable and very welcome side-effect of the project.

Additional learnings

The very biggest thing I would have changed here is the timeframes. Four weeks was aggressive; despite being part of a good-sized team we really had to put in the hours to pull this off and it was stressful. Six to eight weeks seems a more reasonable timeframe to reduce the stress levels. Do not under-estimate the amount of attention to detail required; it requires the same aspects to consider for a live event, in addition to managing and branding the platform, which brings a whole new and time-consuming set of actions. Finally, and this is a big one…Execs are used to being able to make tonnes of last-minute changes to decks and content during a live event. That is not advisable, nor is it possible with this sort of virtual event. Things need to be locked down in advance. Listen to your vendor or tech team here; they will give you deadlines that are realistic and about safeguarding a successful event. It's best not to introduce risk to an event when there are already many things that could go wrong!

If you want to talk about any element of this write-up or our experience…drop me a line. Thanks!