Start the Party Right: Mastering Event Management

Posted on February 22nd, 2010 Adam Honig Comments 0

Are your events memorable? Illustration by Sabrina Campagna.

How can your marketing group be more effective? By mastering the art of event management.

Why Manage Events?

Event management is the art of generating demand by connecting with prospects and customers at events. Based on Innoveer’s extensive CRM experience, we’ve found that making your marketing program excel requires mastering five capabilities: marketing strategy, lead management, campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.

Practice excellent event management, and you will:

• Spend less time on low-value accounts
• Help salespeople close more deals
• Identify how to incrementally improve client relationships, leading to better account penetration

Best Practices: Event Management

To increase your event management proficiency, focus on these four best practices:

• Attendance Management: Using centralized coordination, target, invite and register guests at your event, ideally using multiple channels. The best practitioners use attendance management systems that monitor registration and automatically trigger follow-on campaigns to increase attendance for under-registered events.
• Speaker Management: Identify, schedule and manage subject matter experts to ensure they deliver targeted messaging at the event. Ideally, also integrate speaker development, including techniques for delivering messages, as well as feedback on presentations.
• Event Logistics: Plan and track event-related administrative details and accountabilities. The most successful event logistics practitioners track and study event outcomes—attendance volume, speaker ratings, attendees’ overall satisfaction—to learn how to improve future events.
• Lead Capture: The formal process for identifying prospective buyers at an event by recognizing and capitalizing on their buying interest. Ideally, you should qualify and score leads at the moment they are created.

File Under: Hot Prospects

Who excels at event management? Medical device manufacturers, for starters. These organizations sell multi-million dollar MRI machines and six-figure sterilization devices; their salespeople can’t just throw products in the trunk and demo them in a doctor’s office. Instead, medical device manufacturers run events to demonstrate their wares to physicians and hospital administrators. Over time, they’ve become expert at using these events to capture high-quality leads.

For example, one medical device manufacturer worked with Innoveer to adopt handheld devices for obtaining more information about people attending its events or its booth at trade shows. Now, whenever someone stops by a booth, a marketing person scans the attendee’s conference badge to “pull” their name and contact details. Then, using an application running on the handheld device, they record the attendee’s reactions to what they see and hear. As a result, the company can quickly score and qualify all of its leads to determine each person’s propensity to make a buying decision. Above all, this enables the company’s marketing managers to quickly identify and pursue the hottest prospects.

Lead Management: How Advanced Are You?

Innoveer benchmarks organizations’ marketing strategies to determine any given organization’s relative process maturity in that area—namely, whether it’s advanced, lagging, or somewhere in between. Here’s how that spectrum looks for lead capture:

• Initiating: Leads defined crudely—perhaps as simple as “attended” or “visited booth.”
• Competitive: Defining leads based on actual interest levels during or after the event. Includes a formal process to test attendee’s interest and capture their contact information.
• World class: Testing for interest during and after events by using activities, together with segmentation and channel-based strategies to continually identify, capture and target additional leads, using multiple channels.

Fix Problems First

By benchmarking their current capabilities, organizations will learn which parts of their marketing program to improve first. And while it might seem counter-intuitive, our advice is to focus first on making your weak capabilities stronger. This approach will give you the biggest improvement in your overall marketing strategy effectiveness, and thus the biggest return on investment.

Learn More

Too often, marketing’s use of CRM lags far behind that of sales and service. This can be a costly mistake. When marketing is allowed to take a more aggressive role within CRM, sales increase as a result of campaigns that are targeted to the right buyer at the right time. Read Innoveer’s perspective on how to advance CRM in the marketing department.