Companies spend about 20% of their marketing budget on events to find new leads. Engaging with potential customers and partners face-to-face yields critical information that can secure the next sale. Apps like Eventbrite let companies organize and manage events quickly. All good, right?
Not quite. If you plan an event, you quickly feel the “event hangover” afterward. You’re sitting on a ton of valuable lead/prospect information either in your app, on a business card, or a sign-in sheet. And that information needs to go somewhere.
Your sales and marketing teams work off CRM and marketing apps that your event management app may not be integrated with. For example, someone needs to go through a mountain of business cards and the data in your event management app to manually enter information into a CRM platform like Salesforce so that reps know who to follow-up with. Then, you need to send information to your marketing to so that they can push content to their distribution list using apps like Marketo and HubSpot. Manually handling lead information is untenable and results in a ton of missed opportunities. The energy from the event dissipates and the ROI suffers.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. By connecting apps, you can automate how attendee information from your event turns into well targeted and actionable work for you sales and marketing staff. This also allows you to prioritize which leads to follow-up on in a systematic, personalized way. What if contacts were created automatically in Salesforce when someone registers for your event? Even better, what if you can assign an account manager assignment based on an attendee’s title or the sessions they attended? You’ve become smarter and more efficient about engaging the prospect and making the sale.
Ask yourself these three questions next time you are planning a lead-generating event:
- What information do I need to turn an attendee into a lead?
- Which sales and marketing representative would take action with this information?
- What apps do these people use that you can auto-populate the attendee information with?
There is a big gap between potential and realized ROI for your events, when targeted follow-ups do not happen quickly and smartly after an event. So, next time you plan an event, avoid the hangover by integrating your event management app like Eventbrite with your sales and marketing apps. Recipes like the ones below enable you to be smart about converting the event attendees. Explore or build your own recipes for your event apps to increase the ROI of your lead-generating events by clicking here.
Connect Eventbrite to Salesforce
Create a Salesforce contact when someone registers for an Eventbrite event
Connect Eventbrite to WordPress, Facebook, and LinkedIn
Publish an Eventbrite event to social network followers
Connect Eventbrite to Gmail
Email attendees based on Eventbrite ticket quantity purchase
