Start the Party Right

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 numerous marketing engagements, we’ve found that event management is one of the five capabilities—including marketing strategy, lead management, campaign management and marketing measurement—that organizations must master to maximize the effectiveness of their marketing programs.

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

Medical device manufacturers typically excel not only at event management, but also managing key opinion leaders. Our Cultivating Key Opinion Leaders white paper details the best techniques and also explores the relationship between key opinion leader and event management.

At events, many organizations would like to qualify and score leads the moment they’re created. For guidance about how to put this into practice, look to the pharmaceutical industry, which often provides its salespeople with mobile-device-based CRM software to quickly rate physicians’ levels of product awareness and contact preferences during meetings. Using this information, marketing managers can segment physicians based on their interests, plan sales activities, and design more relevant campaigns and increase their sales effectiveness. For more information, see our white paper on Taking a Customer-Centric Approach.

Master Plans: Not Just for Evil Geniuses

Whatever your strategy, put it in lights. Photograph by L. Marie.

What’s your marketing strategy? For direct marketing to be effective, you must define your strategy in advance. Many organizations, however, neglect this crucial step.

For example, one of our biotechnology clients excelled at marketing and selling to the third-party distributors that sold its products. The company ran top-notch campaigns to generate leads and managed those leads extremely well. But then its market shifted, and instead of selling through suppliers, the company wanted to sell directly to customers. As the firm shifted its approach, however, it didn’t pause to define its new marketing strategy. Instead, the company assumed that all of its indirect marketing knowledge and expertise would work just as well for direct marketing and sales. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. As a result, the company experienced a painful transition as it was forced to rethink its entire marketing strategy mid-campaign and on the fly.

Strategy Essential for Direct Marketing

Based on Innoveer’s extensive CRM experience, we’ve found that making your marketing program excel requires mastering these five capabilities: marketing strategy, as well as lead management, campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.

To create a more effective marketing program, almost everyone will agree about the need to consider each of the above disciplines. Except for marketing strategy. “We already have one of those,” we always hear. Perhaps. But unless you define it, are you sure that it’s the right one?

Best Practices: Marketing Strategy

Having the right marketing strategy and articulating it is step one. Step two is ensuring that you can successfully execute your strategy. To do that, we’ve identified these four best practices:

• Profiling and targeting: Identify the key characteristics that differentiate your prospective buyers, to best match appropriate offers with customers.
• Cross-functional alignment: Define the integration between marketing and other customer-facing functions (sharing leads with sales, feedback with developers, etc.) to maximize the effectiveness of demand-generation programs.
• Multi-channel management: Define your strategy and schedule for executing demand-generation programs, using the appropriate marketing channel for each designated customer segment.
• Program design: Develop the objectives and plan for a campaign or collection of campaigns for each targeted audience, using selected messaging and a call to action.

Example: Multi-Channel Management

As an example of how these best practices work in real life, take multi-channel management. Done correctly, multi-channel management—reaching each customer through the optimum channel—becomes much more than the sum of its parts, as organizations can increase their efficiency at identifying and pursuing customers using a variety of channels.

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 multi-channel management:

• Initiating: Just getting started with having multiple customer touchpoints.
• Competitive: Interfacing with some—but not all—channels, perhaps using some outsourcing. Also defining some, but probably not all, customer segments.
• World class: Seamlessly interfacing—across all customer-facing functions and third-party agents—with each customer via the most appropriate and comfortable channel. For example, teens on Facebook, older clients in retail stores, people with office jobs via email, direct mail to homes.

Fix Problems First

By benchmarking their current capabilities, organizations know 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

As you plan for upcoming marketing program enhancements, know the requirements for creating more effective marketing programs.

Closed-Loop Marketing Success: All About Leads

Having trouble closing deals? Start by mastering lead management. Photograph by Neubie.

Excelling at closed-loop marketing requires using CRM to:

• manage multi-channel campaigns
• track responses rates and results
• dynamically adjust campaigns based on results and responses
• nurture contacts with more targeted and relevant messages
• score prospects
• promote high-scoring prospects to sales leads as likely buyers
• gain feedback from sales through a lead pipeline program
• measure and adjust lead scoring/promotion based on real results (to understand opportunities and revenue)

Marketing departments must do the above, then rinse and repeat. Of course, that’s a lot to master.

Required Marketing Capabilities

Based on our extensive marketing experience, we’ve found that to excel at the above, your marketing program must master the following five capabilities:

• marketing measurement
• lead management
• event management
• campaign management
• marketing strategy

Five Steps to Better Leads

This is a big topic. So let’s break it down, starting with lead management—the practice of how you qualify and route a prospective buyer to the correct sales team. To do this effectively, you must master the five aspects of lead management:

• Intake & augmentation: Get people to opt into your marketing, and know which specific organizations to target. Along the way, maximize lead quality by ensuring profile content is complete—using self-disclosure and third-party data sources.
• Marketing qualification & nurturing: Pre-sales, determine (by scoring leads) whether or not you have the right target, based on whether they have the required ability or service. If they don’t meet the threshold for becoming a bona fide sales lead, nurture that relationship or lead. Often, this process is quite automated (for example, emailing a quarterly newsletter to everyone in your lead database).
• Pre-sales qualification & nurturing: As with marketing qualification and nurturing, once a lead exceeds a certain score threshold, nurture the lead using more manual—and thus costly—efforts (for example, telephoning high-value prospects).
• Lead distribution: Using defined business rules, route leads to the appropriate sales channel and representative.
• Measurement and quality: Measure the effectiveness of all of the above, to ensure that it’s as effective as possible.

To improve your lead management program, analyze how well your organization handles each of the above five requirements, and ensure that each is working at maximum effectiveness as well as connecting properly with each other.

Tackling List Quality

As an example of what counts as effective and well connected, take intake & augmentation. Let’s say, like many of the organizations Innoveer works with, you sell to other businesses. And like many companies operating in B2B markets, one way you acquire leads is by purchasing lists. (In fact, there’s a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to selling leads.) Unfortunately, however, roughly 60 percent of the data in those lists is junk. As a result, many list buyers waste a lot of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

The most advanced lead management practitioners, however, take both a manual and an automated approach to lead intake and augmentation, to decrease qualification efforts while increasing lead quality. They still procure information from public sources, or purchase data directly from information brokers such as Dun and Bradstreet. But before qualifying, nuturing or distributing those leads, first they focus on data quality, using a mix of automatic and manual techniques:

• Automatic validation: Software such as QAS can automatically validate the address of an individual or company—perhaps the company frequently relocates, so part of the address information is incorrect, or perhaps someone mistyped the nine-digit zip code.
• Manual validation: Many Innoveer clients (as well as Innoveer) transfer data to a relatively inexpensive location, such as India, for validation, using automatic tools backed manual processes, such as picking up the phone to query leads directly.
• Crowd-sourcing: Interestingly, new Web 2.0-era approaches also help organizations acquire and validate leads. For example, a new company called Jigsaw helps organizations crowd-source their contacts, based on an equity system: upload valid information, then you can download valid information.

No matter how you procure leads, and regardless of your lead validation techniques, the ultimate requirement is to only load high-quality lead data into your system before proceeding to lead nurturing and distribution. The underlying rationale is simple: the higher the lead quality, the greater the likelihood that sales teams, partners and channel suppliers will not only snap up the lead, but run with it and capture the maximum possible wallet share at each customer.

And that’s the real point of an effective lead management program: to sell more.

Learn More

Succeeding with lead management starts by ensuring that sales and marketing teams working together on lead management—and not just having marketing throw its leads over the transom to sales. Read our 10 best practices for lead management.