More than any other channel, live events offer the perfect opportunity to learn about clients and prospects. Event attendees send buying signals through the digital breadcrumbs they express at your event . By attending sessions, product solution areas, and scheduling meetings, attendees provide insights into their challenges, aspirations and buying preferences.
Despite the time and resources spent at a conference, the ability to capitalize on these buying signals is difficult. A recent survey of event professionals found that 75 percent do not leverage this data. Integrating event information with sales and marketing tools helps to develop more complete attendee profiles.
Tracking buying signals will make your event more successful. You can personalize attendee information, generate higher quality leads, and better track event performance and ROI.
Collect and Decode Buying Signals
There are multiple touch points across events to gather and interpret the buying signals of your event attendees. These touch points include check-in, sessions, and post-event surveys. Collecting this information and transforming it into value-added exchanges allows for prioritizing leads for prompt sales and marketing follow-up after an event.Check-In
First, savvy marketers realize that check-in is where the insights gathering begins. Once attendees complete a demographic profile, you can learn more about attendees by syncing check-in data with sales and marketing systems, and by asking a relevant question, such as what they hope to learn from the event. You can zero in on an attendee’s interests and needs further by asking them if they had time for just one session, what would it be. This helps inform marketers how attendees want to spend their time and enables more personalized follow-up.Session Tracking
Additionally, session attendance provides insight into content interests. Did an attendee go to all sessions on one specific solution? Or was their interest spread out across a variety of topics? You can also capture and mine the great questions and engaging conversations during session through a mobile event app. This information offers insights into the priorities and concerns of attendees, which can help fine tune your programming and the leads you generate.Create Focused Product/Solution Areas
Next, leveraging technology like Cvent LeadCapture can help you sync sales leads directly with prospect profiles in your sales and marketing systems. When attendees visit product or solution booths, sales reps can enter information about the conversation and even provide a lead score. It’s a smarter and more strategic option for sales targeting than simply gathering business cards in a bowl at the exhibitor booth.Finding High-Value Leads
Finally, a post-event survey is the best way to engage attendees, capture their sentiments and see if they’re amenable to a sales follow-up. You can directly ask attendees about purchase interest, timelines to buy, and what they would like to see at your event next year. This information immediately flags hot leads for your sales team.Prioritizing Follow-Up
Because you’ve captured attendee buying signals, you can ultimately segment and qualify your leads into three to help maximize ROI and manage demands on the sales team. Categories might include “sales-ready leads,” “hot leads” and “warm leads”, each with descriptions and desired actions. Leads that are not deemed ready for sales can be added to nurture campaigns in your marketing automation system. To learn more about how to harness buying signals and transform leads from net new to sales ready in short order, please register for Cvent’s webinar here.
