Once your event is over and your team has had the chance to meet with target accounts, it’s a matter of translating the outcome of that meeting into measurable next steps.
Document
Around any event, there are many activities that a prospect may take to indicate their readiness for sales engagement. These activities include, but are not limited to:
- Visiting the event website
- Registering for a hosted event
- Attending a meeting
By documenting these activities, both marketing and sales team can better determine how ready a target account is for focused sales engagement. Activities like event website visits or event registrations are activities that can be measured and reported on by the marketing team. Members of the sales team will be better able to speak on and document the outcome of a scheduled meeting. It’s up to your organization to determine what this documentation will look like, however a good practice is to compile this information within your CRM. Some tasks—like notes on a meeting at an event—can be entered manually. Others—event registrations—may require automated software integrations.
Keep score
Reporting for a specific account can be viewed across several events. Another way of determining how ready a target account is ready to change hands from marketing to sales engagement is account score. An account score is an often-automated process that gives points to accounts based on specific activities that records within that account make. Once the combined point value of these activities reaches a certain threshold—minimum engagement score—it may indicate that it’s time. A target account must perform Event Activities with a combined score of ten to merit focused sales engagement. Events do not exist in a vacuum. Other activities that a target account takes, such as visiting a specific page on your company website, requesting a demo or registering for a webinar may contribute to a target accounts overall account score.
Next Steps
Based on the alignment between your marketing and sales teams, you should have a solid understanding of how a target account should be engaged once it has reached its minimum engagement score. For instance, you may choose to send all records associated with a given account from you marketing automation platform/event success platform to your CRM and assign it an owner on the sales team. If the account is already assigned to an owner on the sales team, you could then send all of the records not in the CRM over and alert the owner that new records have been put in their name. The result should be a clear understanding of how an account is performing within the bounds of a specific event marketing campaign and clear steps for engaging them.
Conclusion
Making the jump to a dedicated event marketing strategy is full of benefits. You get to target customers who are likely to be a good fit for your company in the long run, you get to focus your event marketing efforts on accounts that matter and you you get to produce an event with the confidence that it will lead to positive ROI. Make no mistake, the benefits of an event marketing strategy will only come to fruition if your business is truly ready to embrace it. Adopting an event marketing strategy requires organization wide buy-in from stakeholders. It’s a huge investment in time, a dramatic pivot in strategy, and the key to bringing unparalled precision to your marketing strategy.