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What is a Buzz Day™? They are improved sales call-out days!
Historical sales call-out days
Sales call-out days have been commonplace in many organisations for the last couple of decades at least. A typical call-out day commonly consists of getting together a sales team on the sales floor. The objective is to conduct a concentrated effort on a particular product or vendor. This usually involves calling prospects or partners to generate new leads. As well as, book meetings, arrange demos and even close deals, with prizes on the day to reward individual performance.
The rewards available and the coming together inspires competition among participants. That extra push to ‘make things happen’ is often the impetus organisations need to build and close more pipeline.
Often these sales days involve an exclusive, time-limited ‘offer’ to promote to prospects. The offer is designed to be valuable (e.g. a discount) and time-based to push a decision quickly to help get more results on the day that you’d otherwise not achieve.
The impact of the Pandemic – the birth of the Buzz Day
The Covid pandemic threw a spanner in the works, preventing sales teams from coming together for call-out days. If you couldn’t get the whole team together, how could you replicate that sales floor hive of activity and friendly competition amongst colleagues? At Essential we knew this would be a challenge for a number of our clients, so we got our thinking caps on and the Buzz Days was born!
We turned your run-of-the-mill sales call-out day into a virtual event (and later a hybrid one!) with in-house ingenuity, web conferencing, and a dynamic, interactive social wall. The pandemic may have locked us all down in our homes, but it was still business as usual for our clients. By running virtual Buzz Days, our clients could continue to build pipeline and generate momentum in their sales funnels despite the challenges of working from home and being physically parted from their prospects, customers, and colleagues.
Our clients were so happy with the increased visibility and results from the Buzz Days that once the lockdown lifted, they didn’t want to return to the old ways of doing things.
It’s our core methodology that has transformed the humble sales call-out day into an activity with greater transparency and measurable results.
Buzz Day key components
The Buzz Day is built on solid objectives:
“Win new customers, build new pipeline and market share, raise knowledge and awareness within the sales team, and drive measurable activity with demonstrable ROI”
At its core, a Buzz Day is a hybrid call-out day that centres around a social wall or an online leaderboard platform which increases team engagement and competition and, critically, captures all the activity on the day. It can be virtual (using web conferencing), in person or both!
What does a Buzz Day™ consist of?
- Planning and preparation to set objectives.
- Marketing activity to warm the target audience.
- Focused sales activity with pre-defined target data, objectives, and metrics.
- Raising awareness of your organisation and participating partners through targeted callouts, emails, and social media activity.
- Friendly competition and ‘buzz’ generated through interactions on the social wall and web conferencing.
- Generating demonstrable ROI through comprehensive tracking and reporting.
- Booking meetings, registering deals and building pipeline.
- Continued pipeline impact post-event.
Key components of a Buzz Day™
- Clear objectives and goals.
- A clean target prospect list.
- A marketing campaign to warm the audience.
- An agenda for the day.
- Prizes to reward sales people during the day.
- A sales team!
- A web conference call or a sales floor – a place to meet and share results, experiences, and ideas.
- An engagement platform such as a social wall or leaderboard to post activities and updates, and create competition.
- An end-of-day report of all activity by rep and including the end user details and product.
- A post-Buzz Day check-in call to follow up on progress and deal registrations after the event to maintain long tail pipeline.
- Project Management – to keep the day on track, keep the teams motivated and ensure you achieve your results!
The ideal Buzz Day timeline
Next level sales call out days
Keen to try something different? Our Buzz Days are proven to create new pipeline but don’t just take our word for it check out our client testimonials on our dedicated Buzz Days page.
Our Buzz Days include:
- Support and guidance to ensure you achieve your goals for each Buzz Day.
- Pre-event planning call to agree on objectives, metrics, and timelines.
- Attendance and support at the kick-off call on the day.
- Set up of your own co-branded private social wall or leaderboard for your Buzz Day.
- Full moderation of the social wall/leaderboard activity for the duration of the day.
- Social wall/leaderboard technical support, if required, to facilitate all users.
- Activity monitoring and regular leaderboard updates.
- A comprehensive report in CSV format of all sales leads, including sales rep, end-user name and opportunity details, for import into your CRM.
- Guidance and project Management throughout.
Testimonials
“The Buzz Days really brought the partner sales teams together and created some healthy competition whilst they were working from home. Vitally, they also provided excellent visibility of the leads generated as Essential provided a report of all leads posted to the social wall so that we could measure and track the pipeline generated.”
Miranda Allen, EMEA Distribution and Commercial Marketing Programmes Manager, Palo Alto Networks
“The Buzz Day virtual events I have run with The Essential Agency have resulted in a positive outcome and exceeded the estimated number of leads generated. The partners that I have been working with have been very happy with the results.”
Maria Ferrara, Channel Marketing Manager for Western Europe, Palo Alto Networks