Today’s marketing strategy is predominantly digital. Tools like multivariate testing and out-of-the box analytics have empowered marketers to make data-driven decisions and quickly adapt to changing market and customer dynamics. Still, 35% of the average B2B marketing budget is allocated to events, which are inherently offline and, thus, hard to digitize. Fortunately, there are now tools available that allow marketers to apply the same principles to event success that are commonplace for digital channels.

As with any investment, the path to optimization starts with measurement. To that end, there’s been a shift in how businesses think about event success. This shift is driven predominantly by the realization that face-to-face interaction accelerates sales opportunities.

Measuring Pipeline and Revenue From Events

Fast-tracking event interactions to closed-won opportunities calls for a new mindset. It means that we need to shift how we measure events to focus on pipeline acceleration and revenue generation. Simply counting new “leads” is not going to give you an real indication of how your events are impacting the business.

There are five different metrics you should be looking at when evaluating event success in terms of pipeline and revenue:

• Revenue potential – the potential reach of your event based on the opportunity value of all event registrants
• Revenue in the room – the opportunity value of all attendees that have checked into your event
• Influenced opportunities – the value of all opportunities that were influenced by your event
• Sourced opportunities – the value of all opportunities that were created by your event
• Event ROI – the amount of return on your event investment relative to the cost

Tracking these metrics will give you a much better idea of how your marketing events are impacting sales.

Measurement is only half the battle

Knowing what to measure to track your event’s influence on revenue is hugely important because it gives you a baseline from which to optimize. When you first start tracking these revenue-focused metrics, you may not be happy with the results. So what can you do to improve your event results?

The biggest lever to optimize event outcomes is better sales engagement and follow-up. To do that you need a process for sales engagement at events. Beyond targeting the right audience for your event, these are truly the only real measures we have available to optimize event outcomes.

• Engagement Mapping – pre-event plan to give your sales team assignments on who they’re responsible for engaging with at each event
• On-site Engagement – making sure that all attendees engage with the right members of your team and that those interactions get tracked and conversation notes get recorded
• Follow-up – because event interactions are tracked and synced with your CRM and Marketing Automation, it’s easy for sales to follow-up quickly with a relevant message.

How to measure and optimize your events

Knowing what you should measure and what your sales team needs to do is great, but how can you put this strategy into action? In the past, all of this work would have been manual. Measurement of revenue-focused event KPIs would require your ops team spend hours in Salesforce and Excel. Sales engagement at events was planned and tracked via sales reps’ memory and handwritten notes.

At Attend, we recognized these major event marketing challenges and developed a solution. To solve for proper event measurement, we created our Revenue Attribution Dashboard, which calculates all five of the core revenue-focused metrics for you. To help you optimize your event results via sales engagement, Attend Playbook allows you to map and track engagement, which enables effective sales follow-up.

Want to see how our Revenue Attribution Dashboard and sales Playbook work? See a full overview here: Measure & Optimize Event ROI.

 
Article written by Eric Bisceglia. Eric is the VP of Product and Marketing at Attend.