In our most recent post, you saw that we created a guide on how to do ABM during Covid because understanding online marketing is critically important if marketers want to thrive in this new environment.

As offline channels have withered, research and purchase decisions from enterprise buyers have moved online. We’ve already shared the top-level takeaways of strategies covered in the guide, and in the next several posts, we’ll dig deeper into each story. But if you’re more of a ‘binge-watcher’ than an ‘episode-snacker’, you can always download the full guide here.

First up in our series is Outreach.

Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps companies accelerate growth with excellent tools for managing customer interactions across their entire lifecycle. When the pandemic hit, Outreach realized that typical webinars were losing effectiveness as quarantine stretched on. Zoom fatigue is a real thing.

You can imagine that for a platform that caters to the needs of sales professionals––people who are productive in in-person settings––creating relevant connections and maintaining depth of engagement is critical. And that task is challenging when offline channels aren’t available.

Max Altschuler, VP of Marketing at Outreach, posed the problem like this: “You build trust when you meet people face-to-face. How do you then move that over in an online experience? What are the things that you do when you're doing a virtual event and you want people to speak to a sales rep?”

Part of Outreach’s answer was to be highly strategic with how they got introductions to contacts at target accounts––which we’ll cover in a future post. But introductions were just the beginning. Outreach created an original event format that was valuable and wholly different from typical webinars others may have been putting on. They delivered a valuable, entertaining experience for prospects, while also seeding relationships for eventual follow-ups from their reps.

For example, Outreach hosted a virtual dinner party with a celebrity chef where they sent participants the ingredients for the evening’s meal so they could cook along with the chef at home. “It was around 7pm eastern, so people could also do it with their families,” Max said.

“The celebrity chef was able to engage with each person individually, and they had a great time. Plus we had our reps in the event as well to engage with folks.”

And that was just one of several such events where Outreach got creative with how they created intimacy. They saw clearly that there were plenty of webinars, and that by doing something different than the crowd––namely, adding human interest and entertainment value, they could also drive business value.

And the results have been great. Max says, “Next year––or whenever things go back to normal––we’ll still want a virtual element to our conferences and events. It has worked really well, and people want it.”

For the full story of how Outreach reinvented its events in response to Covid, you can download our guide.

Click here for part 1 of this series.