TEDxWhiteCity - Sales Recap

TEDxWhiteCity - Sales Recap

Purpose of this Sales Recap

The purpose of this document is to share our insights from working on a large scale sales TEDx event, such as TEDxWhiteCity.

We believe such a document would have helped us with our Sales strategy and execution. We hope that this will bring value to the TEDx community, especially with large TEDx events.

We encourage you to share this document and use it as you see fit!

Background

TEDxWhiteCity took place on October 12, 2015 in the Tel-Aviv Port, Tel-Aviv, Israel

The theme was Entrepreneurship & Innovation. The lead organizer was Yossi Vardi, co-founder of Mirabilis (ICQ) and an angel investor

TEDxWhiteCity was a full day event - 8:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.. 1,850 guests participated in the event

TEDxWhiteCity was, by far, the largest TEDx event in Israel to date

Sales Team - Responsibility Scope

The Sales team was responsible for two things: Sales & Crowd

‘Sales’ includes: a. tickets & revenue; b. customer service; c. on site registration process.

‘Crowd’ includes: a. crowd quantity (actual attendance); b. crowd quality (diversity, composure).

Main challenges: a. a long holiday season prior to the event during the sales ‘crunch time’; b. 1,800 tickets to sell; c. the event was scheduled to 10am-6pm on Monday - a full work day.

Online Registration

Goal - make the online registration process quick & easy

All links published by the marketing team linked to our tickets section. Later on, we added the tickets widget to the home page on our website.

Check Out Process - our platform worked exclusively with a PayPal checkout. Since the PayPal credit card checkout process is longer and more complex, we needed the support of a dedicated PayPal customer service team.

Customer Service - we viewed this as an integral part if the TEDx experience: a. emails were answered within a few hours; B. issues resolved within 2 days; c. always refund, no questions asked

The overall conversion rate was 2% (registrations/website visits). We monitored the conversion rate closely, it was a good proxy to discover website technical issues

Tickets & Revenue - Overview

H

H = Holliday

W = Weekend

W H W H W H

(in local currency)

Tickets & Revenue - Overview

Goal - 1,800 registered guests, $39K in revenue.

Ticket Price - We made a special effort to present an affordable price, by focusing on sponsor recruitment early on. A regular ticket price was $35, and a student ticket price was $25.

Results - we were sold out 2 days prior to event day.

Results - Total revenue - $46K, revenue from promotions - $12K (25% of total).

All proceeds above the original $39K goal, went towards the event (better screen, more refreshments, etc).

People buy close to event day - 35% of sales ($16K) were generated during the last 5 days

52% of the sales period were weekends and holidays. This imposed a major challenge, since people bought 50% less tickets on average during these days: $1,000 daily on weekends and holidays, compared to $2,000 daily on a work day.

Promotions

This pie chart shows % of promotion channel out of promotions revenue (not total revenue).

25% of total revenue came from promotions.

We used a 10% discount in several channels - we felt we needed to give something ‘in return’ to help in distribution.

We prefered an email distribution over social networks.

We used our team’s personal network to quickly reach the decision makers.

Crowd - Distribution Channels

Community Leaders - individuals who have a large following on social media, such as bloggers.

TEDxWhiteCity Community: MeetUp community, Bizzabo community and people who attended our pre event at Google Campus).

Student Unions

Entrepreneurs: cooperation with the Office of the Chief Scientist, Co-working spaces (such as WeWork), accelerators and developer communities.

Alumni networks: Military, Academic and Jewish organizations.

Municipality: Tel Aviv municipality, Entrepreneurship centers, city benefit card.

Job seekers: Job openings Facebook groups focusing on the startup ecosystem

Promotions

Automatic Promotions #1 - The automatic promotion is a Bizzabo feature that enabled guests who registered to share it with their network (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). Their friends who registered via the link received a 10% discount.

Automatic Promotions #2- this was the most efficient channel (work time vs revenue) - it required no work (just activation) and accounted for 20% of promos revenue.

Community Leaders - another excellent channel was using local community leaders -- they accounted for 24% of promos revenues.

Promotions

Students - our goal was to sell 440 student tickets (25% of total tickets) for crowd versatility. We made student tickets affordable at $25 (~25% discount). We reached our goal, mainly from organic sales (cooperation with student unions yielded only 8% of promo revenues).

TEDx community - we sent twice a special discount to our TEDxWhiteCity community via email. This channel yielded only 10% of promo revenues (2.5% of total revenue). This was below our expectations, since this was an already engaged crowd.

We recommend starting out with a wide array of channels and later on focusing on what is most efficient for you (sales/time).

Crowd - Diversity

Goal - attract a crowd which is engaged, diverse and relevant to the Entrepreneurship & Innovation theme.

We decided that a good networking experience was key to a successful customer experience at TEDxWhiteCity. That’s why we put special effort in attracting: entrepreneurs, investors, students, engineers.

We gave special attention to the Arab community and the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Both these communities are still excluded from the startup ecosystem, but show a very positive trend. Our efforts yielded over a 100 participants from these communities.

Event Day - On Site Registration

36%

23%

20%

Event Day - On Site Registration

Goal - create a pleasant TEDx guest registration process (keep the lines moving).

The sales team was responsible to monitor and troubleshooting the registration process

Preparation - 3 days before the event, we shifted our focus to event day preparation. We did the following: a. we prepared a list of scenarios, to reduce on site troubleshooting time; b. coordinating on-site logistics with the production team; c. visiting the site a day before for finalize event-day plan.

Team Position - we had out 10 registration posts, which were manned by professional sales stewardesses. Our team remained dynamic and present where we were needed for troubleshooting. We conducted a preparation talk with the stewardesses team an hour before the event, so they knew our position and responsibility.

Event Day - On Site Registration

On Site Registration Policy - since we had 1,800 registered guests, we had one goal in mind - keep the lines moving and create a positive TEDx experience from the get-go.

Since we had reached our revenue goals and since there were a few technical difficulties with online registration, we decided that when in doubt, we will let the guest enter the event.

This policy ‘cost’ us a few dozen tickets, but resulted in quick lines and a pleasant experience to the rest of the guests.

1,451 people (80%) came during 3 peak hours. Good preparation enabled the lines to move swiftly.

Links

TEDxWhiteCity Website

Facebook page

Event pictures album

TEDxWhiteCity Talks Videos

The Sales Team

Roi Ben Daniel, Sales Director

Let’s connect on LinkedIn - http://goo.gl/wl1z6P

Yaron Fishelson, Sales & PartnershipsLet’s connect on LinkedIn - https://goo.gl/Sn9atQ

Hila Rosenfled, Sales & Partnerships Let’s connect on LinkedIn - http://goo.gl/J8UaPj

Thank YouRoi, Hila & Yaron