How to plan a sales presentation seminar

A great sales presentation is more than words and images on a slide deck.  It goes beyond firing off facts and stats.

A great sales presentation is purpose built for the sales stage of your attendees and is a surefire way to increase propsects attention, desire and help guide them towards that sale.

This guide will go through how to plan for a successful sales presentation.

What is a sales presentation?

To start, a  sales presentation is a live event where you or your team showcases your services to prospective customers.

A sales presentation is not a pitch. 

It can involve pitching throughout, however a sales pitch is what your sales teams do all day long over the phone, virtually or in person.

A sales presentation is the opportunity for your business to highlight why people should be buying. You might be presenting to a group of different people, a board of directors or a group of business owners.

Planning your Sales Presentation Seminar

You can follow these 8 steps to planning the perfect sales seminar.

1. Identify your audience
2. Determine your budget
3. Build a presentation
4. Find a venue
5. RSVP generation 
6. RSVP reminders
7. The big event
8. Post event followups

Identify your audience

The first step to planning your seminar is to identify your audience. 

You want sales, but you now need to determine what audience would benefit from a presentation seminar. Is it prospects who fell out of the funnel after a sales meeting? Is it ex-clients and your seminar will be a winback attempt? Is it a cluster of NDIS providers in a certain region?

You can do this through looking at your sales data, lead data and working with your marketing teams. If you don't have one, but have a CRM (e.g. Hubspot) you can export the data and take a look at some of the trends. 

Determine your budget

Now you know who your target market is going to be, you can work through some of the budgeting aspects of your event.

No event is free. You might be able to get away with reducing monetary costs through hosting the event internally with no catering, however planning a event can take over 60 hours across planning, on the day work and post event followups.

For a presentation you will need a screen/tv, and when coupled with catering for 15-20 guests you are looking at around $700-$1,000 for your venue.

For a presentation done in house, with external catering, you can get away with $25 per person for light snacks and tea or coffee.

From a labour perspective the potential breakdown is as below, however if this is a once off event you might be able to cut out some of these times.

• Pre event: 16 hours 
• Promoting the event: 26 hours
• Confirming the event: 5 hours
• Post event: 13 hours

Find a venue

Now you have your rough budget, you have three options to sourcing a venue.

1. Self-Source: Head over to your favourite search engine and start looking for seminar venues in the suburb of your choice. You might need to check out maps too to find nearby locations. Open up each of the links and navigate to their corporate events sections. From here you will need to download or request layouts and room options for you to then compare against each other. When you have a few options you can contact the venues for a quote and to see if they are available. If the venues aren't available head back to your search and head over to page 2 and 3. Depending on your finance team, you may be required to present up to 3 venue options to ensure the quotes are adequate. This takes a professional event planner an average of 4 hours.
2. BizziEvents Platform: Head over to the BizziEvents Platform, register for free and you will be shown hundreds of potential venues that match your event needs. Each listing will have their inclusions, images of the rooms and layout options. From here submit an enquiry directly to the venue. This should save you 1-2 hours vs self-sourcing.
3. BizziEvents Concierge: BizziEvents also offers a hands-free venue sourcing option. You can brief the team your event, and get back to selling. This means you are able to unlock 4 hours to spend on other elements of your event, or other work. We then find you up to 3 options that are available and present them back. Best of all, with our scale and reputation we often get discounts unavailable to the public.

While you can technically promote your event before having a confirmed venue, it is risky. We recommend promoting and generating RSVPs after you have confirmed your venue. 

RSVP generation 

There are plenty of ways you can generate RSVPs to your event. Your marketing department may already be running one, some or all of these avenues, so ensure you consider both the audiences and the media choices when planning how to get more guests at your sales seminar.

Promotion channels:

• Organic social posts
• Paid social posts
• Paid search keywords and sitelinks
• Homepage banner
• Partner promotions
• Email marketing
• Event websites
• Facebook groups
• PR to local papers
• Local business chambers

Audiences for paid channels:

• Existing Prospects in a certain area via customer list uploads or website remarketing
• New Prospects via look-a-like audiences
• Ex-customers via customer list uploads

RSVP reminders

After spending so much time and effort getting those RSVPs, you need to make sure people turn up. 

You have a few simple options:

• Calendar invites: you can hide the guest list or send them an iCal link in the RSVP Yes email.
• Email: Send them an email via your email address. You may be able to do this on bulk via Mail Merge
• Call: Call them and make sure they know where the event is, the time and ask if they are wanting to bring a friend
• SMS: Send out an SMS reminder

The big event

Preparation is key here. On the day you should have a runsheet that covers off timings, locations, contact details, guest lists and any other information that is needed.

Be sure to arrive early to inspect the venue, check and adjust the layout and make sure your media / AV  is working. 

If you have a table setup for you to do registrations get that ready and visible for your guests to register on arrival. 

Greet your guests, mark their names off and add any new names and contact details for those that didn't RSVP.

Present and engage with your audience. By this stage you should have practiced your presentation enough times that you don't need to read a script. You should have also tailored your event for some of the businesses or prospects in the audience, with stories and data that is more relevant for them.

After you present you should be spending time with each person to book them into followup meetings

Post event followups

The end of the event isn't the end of your slaes opportunity. You should be sending a followup email thanking attendees for coming, and emailing non-attendees too. After this you should be calling each person who hasn't already booked a meeting and offering deeper insights into how you could help their business.

Don't forget, during this time you should also be asking for a referral. Don't make this prospect an isolated lead, chances are they know other people who might need your services.

Finally you should be running a lookback session to identify and plan new ways to run the event.