Telia is a major ICT company that had organized ”Telia Day One” event for its key corporate customers and prospects in 2019 to sell a variety of services and enhance the brand image.

The 2019 event was an immediate success and was meant to start a tradition, but unfortunately the 2020 event was cancelled due to the pandemic.

The second editions of Telia Day One was held in February 4th 2021 as a virtual event. It combined entertaining news studio inspired stage program with a unique networking platform. A meticulous meeting pre-booking process before the event day ensured unprecedented engagement.

The brief, in all its simplicity, was to match the success of the 2019 live event with a virtual one in 2021.

The main goals were derived from the key figures of the 2019 event: match the value of requests of proposals and attract at least 800 participants. As the brand image goal, before the event only 18% of target groups would recommend Telia as a full stack ICT partner – the figure needed to go up.

Three key insights guided the creative process:

1) The usual virtual event format does not support one-to-one interaction: group conversations usually turn into monologues, and chat tools feel too distant.

2) Executed properly, a virtual event can actually enable more effective networking than a live event, since there’s no room for idling about.

3) In a virtual event everything can be measured, which makes it easy to set goals for sales personnel.

Based on these findings, all the elements of the event supported one goal: maximizing the amount and quality of one-to-one meetings.

We concluded that the key to success is to maximize the time participants spend in one-to-one conversations with Telia people. By re-thinking the traditional format, a virtual event can actually be more effective in networking than a live one, since there is no idling about and everything can be measured.

The name of the event was Telia Day ONE – and the soul of it were one-to-one meetings. The more face time between a participant and Telia people, the more leads and understanding of customers’ motivations.

Obviously, the event needed to be more than a video call platform: the main stage program was all about subject matter and entertainment, yet its main role was to attract participants and keep them engaged, in order for them to eventually participate in one-to-ones. We completely skipped smaller groups and tracks.

Effective invitation process

· Save the dates, invitations and reminders via email and SMS contained program teasers

Pre-booking a one-to-one video call clinics with Telia specialists

· 200 Telia sales persons had a motivating and measurable target of 3 bookings

· The customers were asked to describe their business challenge for the specialists for them to be prepared

· Every booking was confirmed with a phone call

Execution exceeded TV production standard

· Hosted by top Finnish talents

· Keynotes from ethical hacker Rik Ferguson and Google Cloud Nordicin Managing Director Eva Fors

· News studio inspired format with 6 hours (!) of non-stop program to keep participants entertained

Customized event platform

· We modified the selected ProspectumLIVE virtual platform to support video meetings during the event

A new way to organize demonstrations

· In each demo room there were several Telia specialists available for direct ad hoc video call

The event exceeded expectations, especially in terms of the main goal, value of requests for proposal.

KPI: 800 participants

Result: 869 participants

KPI: Value of leads = value of leads in 2019 live event

Result: Goal was exceeded by 293%

KPI: Value of RFP’s (requests for proposal) = value of RFP’s in 2019 live event

Result: Goal was exceeded by 846%

As a conclusion for “hard targets”: the amount or participants increased just a little, but we managed to engage them better – there were no hang-arounds, just potential customers.

KPI: Before the event 18% of target groups would recommend Telias as a full stack ICT partner – that figure needed to go up.

Result: 80% would recommend Telias as a full stack ICT partner