Tami Plourde, director of sales and marketing for the Pearl Street Brewery, is a first-time Virtual Event Bags customer. Tami decided to try the platform for two of her brewery’s events this year. Despite being new to the platform, Tami was able to sell 42 sponsorship placements for her event in La Crosse, WI and 21 placements for her event in Madison, WI.
When asked if she had any advice on selling sponsorships, Tami said “I think that person to person contact on the benefits of putting out a high quality offer is helpful to get companies to participate.”
Tami continued, “I didn’t have trouble explaining the concept to companies who were sponsoring my event. [On face-to-face sales calls] it helped to bring my phone to show potential sponsors examples of offers that had already been done in a demo bag.”
Tami also did a good job of coaching companies to create quality offers for participants, rather than just advertisements. She found that, with a little creative brainstorming, the company quickly understood what was possible.
As a result, her event bag delivered mostly discounts for local restaurants and businesses, with very few advertisements. Tami said, “Our sales approach was: you want participants to ‘redeem’ the offers, so companies should create offers which were something worth using.”
What was the participant reaction? Tami states, “We had a great participant reaction to our bag. I think a lot of people used their phones. Basically, the better the deal, the better the participants liked the offer. A lot of the deals were buy one get ones, but they also liked the combination offers such as: buy a beer, get 10% off a meal.”