event-data

In one of our recent blogs posts, we talked about the term ‘Smarketing’ – the alignment of sales and marketing in an effort to better nurture leads and close sales. Smarketing owes its efficacy to the fact that the more information your sales and marketing teams have to work with, the more effective they are at converting and closing a lead. This well-oiled marketing and sales machine runs on the power of data, and one of the often overlooked sources of this information is – you guessed it – your event data.

Despite the fact that corporate events are veritable oil wells of information, the majority of businesses don’t tap into this invaluable treasure trove of data.

Consider the following (hypothetical) event data about three of your guests:

Guest X: Has attended two of your events, and after your most recent expo, followed your brand on social media and then visited your website and downloaded a product brochure. Guest Y: Has attended three of your events, has had no further interaction with your brand. Guest Z: Has attended five events, and went on to buy one of your products after the third event she attended. She regularly reposts your content on her own social media accounts and recently referred an acquaintance to your sales desk.

Three guests, each with their own unique history and relationship with your brand.

Now consider the following scenario, involving a sales team who has no data on hand about any of the guests mentioned above:

The marketing team sends an email to Guest X, asking if she’d like to be added to your newsletter. She ignores the email, as she’s already signed up when she visited your website. She’s slightly put out by the fact that, despite being the one to initiate further interactions with your brand after attending your events, the sales team has no knowledge of her doing so. As a result, she loses trust in your brand and writes you off as another business who doesn’t pay attention to their prospective customers.

Guest Y receives yet another invitation to one of your events – a bespoke golf day – and accepts, without any intention of purchasing any of your products. She looks forward to a day off from work, playing a round of golf and swilling bubbly at your expense.

Finally, Guest Z – a loyal brand advocate and customer – is sent an SMS in the middle of the night (a topic deserving a blog post of its own). She’s woken up by your ill-timed text message, and struggles to fall back to sleep. As well as being irritated with this impersonal and inconsiderate correspondence, the next time she comes across your brand, she’ll reconsider her loyalty due to this gaffe.

Had your sales team used your event data, they would have known that each of these guests needed to be treated differently.

Guest X needs more information, and is still a couple of steps away from being sales-qualified; Guest Z is not worth the time or money and should be removed from future guest lists; Guest Z has the making of a brand ambassador and possesses the possibility for upselling opportunities, which means that only personal, relevant content will do.

As you can imagine, the outcomes of the scenario above would have been vastly different to the dismal results of an unprepared sales team intent on painting by numbers. Your brand would have been able to nurture Guest X towards a sale, save money by crossing Guest Y off all future guest lists, and capitalise on the brand awareness that Guest Z was all too happy to spread.

The moral of the story? Your sales and marketing teams can’t afford to go in blind.

They need to know who’s ready to buy, who’s not, and just as importantly, who’s a proverbial dead end. By collecting event data and making it available to them, you’ll ensure that they’re adequately prepared to nurture and close leads – wherever they are in the sales funnel.

Our RSVP software is an end-to-end ERM™ (Event Relationship Management) platform that collects and collates every single piece of information about your guests. Find out more about what our software can do for you, by downloading our brochure or giving us a call.