How Qualified Closed $1 Million in Revenue With Virtual Wine Tastings
For Episode 10 of Sips with purple cork, we sat down with Qualified’s Vice President of Demand Generation, Sarah McConnell, to talk about the revenue impact of virtual events.
A Taste of Qualified: Monthly Virtual Tastings
The partnership began when Qualified’s Founder and CEO, Kraig Swensrud, attended an event as a guest. He loved the experience, later recalling the cool vibe and how he felt transported to the California wine country, even though he was sitting in his home office. We hosted our first “Taste of Qualified” event together in March 2021 and have reconvened almost every month since then to host Qualified’s prospects and customers, often featuring a different boutique vineyard or Champagne house.
Although getting 40-50 people to an event each month can be time intensive, Sarah wouldn’t have it any other way. A true data nerd at heart, Sarah can prove the value of purple cork events thanks to the care she puts into tracking all marketing activities. Here are the results of purple cork events to date:
Five times ROI in direct pipeline
Seven times ROI in influenced pipeline
$1M in closed-won revenue
Attendee Mix
After ten events with purple cork, Sarah has perfected the attendee mix to meet Qualified’s objectives:
20-40% net new prospects, sourced from industry event lists
50-60% in-pipeline prospects
10% customers
Sarah invites customers to not only thank them for their loyalty, but also so that they can share their experience working with the conversational marketing solution and the company behind it.
One persona you won’t find at Qualified’s virtual events is Account Executives. Sarah explains, “We find that prospects open up more when their sales reps aren’t on the call. So, we take voracious notes during the event and provide them to the AEs after the call so they can follow up appropriately.”
Run of Show
Similarly, Sarah has landed on an event format that works really well. After a short winery introductory video so attendees can see the vineyard, they move into the first tasting, which lasts ~7 minutes. Then the group is broken into smaller groups for networking and conversation. Sarah takes one group and the CMO takes the other, asking a series of planned questions, based on the titles and companies in attendance. Then, the groups come back together to do the second tasting. By then, people feel loosened up and are a bit chattier.
For the last few minutes, Sarah invites attendees to stay on for a demo of Qualified, if they’re interested. She finds that most people stay on the call, even if they have already seen a demo:
“The SC-led demo at the end of our events is a big deal accelerator for us. Even if the prospects aren’t new, they often want to get another look and dive a bit deeper.”
With so much noise today in the B2B world, Sarah advises other marketing leaders to look to the data to understand what programs are working and what to cut. In her case, she looks at where she is sourcing pipeline, what’s influencing closed-won deals and which programs are driving the best conversion. In the case of Taste of Qualified purple cork events, the data proves that the events are working and driving ROI.
If you’re ready to discover your next impactful marketing channel, please reach out. We would love to discuss how repeatable purple cork events can work for your business!
