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Resources › Run a BTL or medical event

BTL activations and medical congresses: from invitation to follow-up

How to fill the room, prove who came, and turn an event into contacts and follow-ups instead of a photo album.

A tasting in a market, a product demonstration at a wholesaler's, a distributor forum, a symposium for cardiologists: field events cost money, time and goodwill. Yet many of them end the same way. A few photos on a phone, a paper sign-in sheet that nobody types up, and a vague feeling that "it went well". A month later, nobody can say who attended, what they thought, or what happened next.

An event is only worth its cost if it produces three things: a room filled with the right people, proof of who came, and follow-ups that actually take place. This guide covers each of them, for BTL activations and for medical events alike.

Know which kind of event you are running

A BTL activation and a medical congress share logistics, not rules. A BTL event — a tasting, a forum, a demonstration, a workshop — moves quickly: it is prepared, scheduled, started, finished. A medical event — a congress, a symposium, a training, a webinar — carries an obligation of review. Its programme, its sessions and its content must be checked before the event is published, and that check must leave a record: who approved it, when, and with what note.

In FunnelRover's ACTIVATE module, the two follow different paths. A BTL event goes from in preparation to scheduled, then started and finished. A medical event goes from draft to submitted for compliance, compliance approved and published before it can start. Master Data or an Admin reviews the event, its sessions and its content, and decides: approved, rejected, or revision requested.

Filling the room

There are two ways people arrive at an event, and you need both.

  • The people you already know. From the event record, your team registers contacts to a BTL activation or invites them to a medical event. The list distinguishes the contacts in your portfolio from the leads.
  • The people you do not know yet. Each event has a public registration link, to copy, to share on WhatsApp, or to print as a QR poster for the venue. The person gives their name, their mobile and, if they wish, their email — and enters your contacts as a lead, with the event recorded as their origin.

Capacity is respected: once it is reached, no more registrations or invitations are accepted, and a cancelled registration or a declined invitation frees its place. The public link only accepts registrations while the event is open and until its end date.

Consent is asked separately, with a box that is never pre-ticked. Ticked, it records WhatsApp consent — and email consent if an address was given. It is the difference between a list you may contact and a list you may not.

Proving who came

A paper sign-in sheet proves very little. A QR check-in at the door proves attendance at the moment it happens. From the event record, ACTIVATE generates an access campaign whose quota is the event's capacity; for a medical event, each invitation then receives its own QR ticket. On the day, the host scans or types the guest's code at the entrance: a valid code records the arrival and marks the guest as present. A code from another event is refused.

For a medical event, the dashboard shows the essentials side by side: invited, confirmed, present, and QR codes validated. That is the figure you need when someone asks what the congress actually delivered.

During and after

For medical events, the programme lives in the same place as the guest list: sessions with speaker, room and times, and content before, during and after the event, each with its compliance status.

Feedback is collected per attendee. For a BTL participant: satisfaction, recommendation, a comment and the next action. For a medical event: satisfaction, quality of content and organisation, recommendation and key take-aways. Feedback is read on the event record, not lost in a survey tool nobody opens.

Then comes the part that decides whether the event was worth it: the follow-up. A call, an email, a visit, a sample, a piece of content sent — dated, and for a medical event assigned to a colleague. A single page lists all follow-ups, so the ones still open are visible.

What to do in the week before

  1. Create the event with its real capacity, not an optimistic one.
  2. Invite the known contacts first; share the public link second.
  3. Print the QR poster for the venue, for walk-ins.
  4. For a medical event, submit the programme and content for review early — approval takes the time it takes.
  5. Generate the QR access campaign and test one code at the door before guests arrive.

What to do in the week after

  1. Read the feedback while the event is still fresh in everyone's mind.
  2. Assign a follow-up to every attendee who asked for something.
  3. Check the follow-ups page at the end of the week: what is still open?
  4. Look at the leads the event brought in — they are now contacts your field team can visit.

Run this way, an event stops being a line in the marketing budget and becomes what it should have been from the start: a structured moment of contact, whose results you can show.