B2B marketers are employing a variety of top-of-funnel demand channels (e.g. social, digital ads, events, content syndication, etc.), but in an increasingly digital landscape, face-to-face interactions are becoming more and more valuable for advancing marketing teams’ goals and establishing relationships with prospects and customers.
Businesses spend billions on events every year with the goal of generating revenue, but over 50% of organizations have absolutely no idea how many of their event leads convert into deals, and thus, are unable to prove ROI. Antiquated event lead capture methods like badge scanners, paper forms, and business cards prevent sales teams’ from quickly following-up with event leads and prevent marketers from accurately measuring all touchpoints throughout the funnel.
To help B2B marketers manage and process event leads more efficiently and transform physical events into revenue, Integrate and Akkroo hosted a live webinar on Tuesday with practitioners from Avalara and Verizon titled, “End Event Lead Chaos: How Verizon and Avalara Control Lead Capture to Increase ROI.”
After the webinar, we sent all attendees a copy of our new eBook, “The Enterprise Playbook to Event Lead Management.” Download it here.
During the webinar, Pamela and Jason from Avalara, and Josh, from Verizon, provided valuable advice for B2B marketers eager to maximize event ROI. Here are some of the best takeaways.
What pain points did Avalara experience with event lead management?
Pamela: We had senior marketing managers scrubbing lists and trying to look in the CRM and find duplicates. It was not a great use of our time. That doesn't lead to growth and takes away from time that you could spend being strategic. Any source, whether it be from events or from content syndication, as they [leads] come in and age, their ability to convert is much lower because your prospects recollection of that interaction decreases.
Pamela: We also found that even with our professionals looking over these lists, we were still making plenty of errors. There was lots of duplication and that equals wasted money.
What was on your checklist when looking for an events solution?
Jason: An app-based solution that enables us to leverage our sales teams’ own hardware and mobile phones, collect online and offline data (Wi-Fi at these events isn’t always exactly stable), is easy-to-use for sales team members and is also GDPR compliant.
What has changed since bringing on Integrate and Akkroo?
Pamela: We're seeing much better conversion rates from the leads that come in and it all equals thousands of hours of saved time for SDRs. Because they're seeing higher quality leads, our SDRs in our inside sales crew have a lot more confidence in our campaigns. It allows me to pull different levers and make adjustments on the fly from my campaigns that I really wasn't able to do in the past without a heck of a lot of manual effort.
What’s more important: Cleaning lead lists before putting them into our database or uploading everything to get leads to sales faster?
Pamela: They're equally important. You've got to be accurate and you've got to be fast if you want to grow. It's allowed us to scale are our programs and not have that kind of manual effort and scrubbing.
How do you determine where to route leads for follow up when you don’t know who scanned them or what was discussed?
Jason: Within the [Akkroo] form itself, I use hidden fill forms and I'm using those to give instructions to our CRM solution to bucket leads and allow the right person to follow-up. You can also add additional information about a prospect to further enrich the data.
What is the benefit of getting leads over to SDR quickly when attendees are still on site for the show?
Jeremy: What we’ve seen at Integrate is a prospect can leave the booth and be engaged almost immediately by a SDR and send a personalized follow up in a matter of minutes. We've seen that translate into follow-up calls with our strategic account directors, sometimes the day after the show.
How does Verizon build a sustainable event process?
Josh: You can only do so much at scale and really that was one of the biggest limitations. We would love to be more places to ultimately push more customers through the funnel to capture more leads and drive more revenue. But we can only be so many places and so many people at one time. So we had to have a consistent evaluation process and then we have to make some pretty interesting decisions about how we market and when we market.
Your organization doesn’t have to leave revenue behind on the show floor
Invest in an event capture solution that increases lead velocity, adds context around conversations for personalized messaging, and collect prospects’ data in real time for faster sales follow-up.
If you missed the webinar, you can access it on-demand here.
