Post-Event Follow-Up That Actually Works and Closes Deals

[00:00:00] Alura Roe: Now that AI is playing more of a role into everything that we do, I think face-to-face interactions are going to become more prominent.

And I think that another layer to that is making sure that as a marketer, an event marketer, that you're not just focusing on quantity but quality.

[00:00:15] Alyssa Peltier: Great events create great brands. But pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences, well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

[00:00:27] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:28] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:29] Alyssa Peltier: And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

[00:00:39] Matt Heinz: Well, welcome back. We are here live, Cvent CONNECT at the Convention Center, floor three, right next to the Stars at Night Ballroom, where the Innovation Pavilion is today. I'm very excited to have our team from 6sense. I feel like if you're in B2B marketing, you know 6sense, you've probably been to one of their events. And excited to talk today about not just events, but what happens after the event. What do we do when we move from the show floor to the sales funnel? And how do we leverage all the great momentum, all the great conversations and turn that into pipeline and revenue? I'd love to have you guys introduce yourself, Alura, starting with you.

[00:01:09] Alura Roe: Absolutely. Hi, I'm Alura Roe, based out of Atlanta. I help manage our ABX go-to-market team at 6sense. I'm more so focused on the one-to-few and one-to-one activations within 6sense. And then Ashley, you can introduce yourself.

[00:01:20] Ashley Biggie: Hi, I am Ashley Biggie, I'm a senior field marketer, so manage all of our trade shows, those fun meetings, work on all our events and the ancillary that happens around any of those tier one to tier three events.

[00:01:33] Matt Heinz: So I'm excited for this conversation. They're all great conversations, every one of them, watch every episode. But this one especially because of what you guys are doing in the field. Everything from Breakthrough to individual events, to CMO Breakthrough. You've got the Breakthrough event, you've got Empowered. It's just an amazing amount of stuff. And so my first question is what happens after the badge scan? But some of these events, there isn't even a badge scan. Talk about the strategy you have for events like objectives and the approach that leads to what you do today.

[00:02:04] Alura Roe: So our strategy is always to make sure that we're first off making sure that we're going after the right audience. Before we're going to any trade show, whether we have historical data or not, we're making sure that we're looking at the audience that's there and making sure they're relevant to us. So we're pulling not only the accounts in the ICP and making sure they're within there, but we're understanding where they're at in their buying stage. So if we're going to a trade show and everyone's an early buying stage account for us, then maybe we won't go as heavy, we'll do more educational pieces there. Educate people on what we do. Versus if there's a ton of customers who are late stage accounts that really need to get in front of a salesperson, maybe we'll invest more in a meeting space to really get our sales reps in front. So it really just depends and starts with the audience and making sure that we understand and wrap our heads around the people that'll be there.

[00:02:45] Matt Heinz: I think about the audience sometimes vertically and horizontally. I think about it vertically in terms of who's going to be in the room, is it going to be the CMO, is it going to be a director level driving programs? Is it going to be someone who's hands on keyboard with 6sense on a daily basis? And then horizontally think about where they are in their journey. That buying journey as well as the customer journey, both sides. How do you create a matrix around that and manage an event strategy that accommodates all of that?

[00:03:08] Ashley Biggie: We look at, like Alura said, the audience and we determine where they are in their buying journey. And also what, if they're customers and prospects, how big and how meaty do the conversations have to be. And then we pick the type of activation around that. So for some of our trade shows, they're extremely customer heavy. So we do our Club6 activation where we ensure that we're getting in front of our customers and allowing them to meet with our subject matter experts and having those conversations. While also doing dinners and experiential one-to-one activations. All of the trade show activations that you have as well for getting in front of new customers and prospects. But when we are super customer heavy, we like to bring in those wow surprise and delight moments.

[00:03:57] Matt Heinz: Yeah. I'm firsthand aware of just the quality and also the quantity of events that you guys produce on an annual basis. I think for a lot of companies it's easy to just white-knuckle it through each event and move on to the next event. And that's a recipe for not getting a lot of benefit out of all the investment that you made. Talk about what it takes to build a really event-centric strategy that capitalizes on the audience before and after the event itself.

[00:04:23] Alura Roe: So before we go to any event, I've lived in a world before, I got sophisticated within my career, where you see how many badge scans you can get at a trade show and then you throw them all to the sales team and it's like, "Everyone follow up." That is not a world we live in any longer. We really strive to make sure that we have our pipeline even flowing in before we even go to a trade show. So we're looking at, like I said earlier, historical data, we're looking at speaker lists, we're looking at who's local to a city. We're not siloing ourselves just to people that are going to necessarily a trade show. We're really trying to figure out, while we're there, who can we get in front of.

So it's multi-touch approach in terms of, like she said, if we're going to be in person in a trade show, we're going to be doing a connect space outside of there, and really how are we going to engage them. The events are expensive and you want to make sure that you're getting the right people in the right seats that can be doing a lot of pipeline for you.

[00:05:11] Ashley Biggie: During the event I like to have touch points with all of the people that are on site and ensuring that we're getting voice notes, we're getting notes on handoff, any of the meetings that they've had, any meaningful conversations. Any events that are needing to get booked, book them now, even if it's just a meeting to figure out a time to book a larger broad meeting.

And then when we do take those leads and give them to our sales team after, we have a post-event meeting where we scrub the tiering and ensure hand-off actually happens because sometimes things get stuck in Salesforce. And then we are making sure that they're consistently being followed up with. And then they are put into 6sense and tiered into their buying journey where they're at. Are they a 6QA? And then that will determine whether or not it is one of our AI emails, one of a real person, the account owner, how does that get filtered out? And making sure that those conversations are happening. And doing check-ins, like you said earlier, in your event, right after the event, couple of weeks after. What was that post-mortem? And then continuing to check on the ROI journey. And making sure that we do manual scrubs to make sure that attribution is happening to all of our events because they're expensive.

[00:06:32] Alura Roe: I think a lot of people also, early in their event journey, it's super critical that you make sure that everything flows in dynamically and is automated. Because whenever you're on a showroom floor, if you're tracking things in a spreadsheet or a form, whatever it might be, people are getting on flights, they're getting home, you have to get it to your MOps team and then you get it to your CRM, it's just delay, delay, delay. And the touch point immediately after an event needs to be instantaneous. While also being personalized. No one wants a generic follow-up. You want to make sure it's either a product that is relevant to them or a pain point that's relevant to them that you're speaking to. And so all of that being automated is super critical and timely.

[00:07:07] Matt Heinz: Well, and you guys are great about drinking your own champagne, using 6sense to actually triage and prioritize those different leads. But you mentioned leads getting stuck in CRM. And I imagine that's not a problem that happens to anyone else other than just us sitting up here. Those next parts of the process, even manually having to scrub list, it's the reality of a lot of programs right now. But what is the role of technology that you see now and moving forward to really help accelerate and automate pieces of that? Everything, badge scanning, tracking activity, triaging that and bridging the gap between the potential that those events have and the reality of actually having to execute them in sometimes a very manual way?

[00:07:43] Alura Roe: Yeah, I think there are a ton of tools, like for our meetings specifically, I've talked about this a lot here, we use Jifflenow. If we're meeting with people before we get to a show, while we're at a show or after, we're using that tool. Everything flows in with our CRM and everything can be dynamically flowing into, maybe someone's not on site and they can see if someone checked in, they can see the notes on that activity. And then there are other tools out there that can capture leads as well that you can use. I know there's a handful of them in the market. But that as well is more timely than necessarily one that's not integrating with your CRM at the moment. I know they have lead capture capabilities. But then trade shows that you can purchase, but one that isn't already plugged in and has the appropriate filters that you're already using-

[00:08:22] Matt Heinz: That's right.

[00:08:23] Alura Roe: ... just gets you there in even more timely manner.

[00:08:25] Matt Heinz: Yeah. Let's start talking a little bit about handoff. So you run an event, you've got some data. You've got some engagement. Now there needs to be a follow-up. Who does that follow-up? Is it a marketing follow-up? Is it a sales follow-up? How do you prioritize that follow-up? How aggressive is that follow-up? When you think about speed to follow-up as well as quality of follow-up, how do you build the playbook appropriately that not only respects the prospects and the customers, but also helps you drive and accelerate business value?

[00:08:51] Alura Roe: It just depends on us in terms of where someone is in their journey. So like I said, go to a show and have 3000 badge scans. We aren't going to say, "Have fun BDRs, have fun sales reps." We are going to first put them in, make sure they're in our ICP, make sure that they are emailing appropriately. Our team does a backend build on what our ICP looks like. And making sure that things are emailing appropriately. But that's when our buying stage comes in next, we want only our BDRs and sales reps to really focus on ones that we call 6QA accounts, which are accounts that are in the right buying stage. They're showing enough intent data for them to want to have a conversation with a sales rep. No one wants to necessarily go on a first date with someone right off the bat unless you get to know them a little bit or know a little bit about them. So it just depends on where they're at in their buying stage. And if someone is early adopter, maybe we'll throw them into a nurture. Maybe like Ashley said, we'll put them into our AI agent emails and start to educate them more on what we do. So it just depends on where they're at on their journey.

[00:09:47] Matt Heinz: Yeah, I think this is a place where you guys really excel at an advanced level of what we've been talking about today which is event-led growth programs. Where you've got integrated teams working together on this. You've got an event team nailing getting the event done and having a great experience. You've got an ops team that's managing the back end, the technology and the lists. Then you've got to figure out the sales enablement play. It's not just like, here's a bunch of leads to follow up, please don't follow up with these others. What does the sales enablement playbook look like? How explicit do you get in terms of what to say, what to send and how to engage with those prospects after an event?

[00:10:19] Ashley Biggie: Pretty explicit.

[00:10:20] Alura Roe: I'm not doing a very good job of this. I mean, I think everyone's unique in this. But we make sure that we have sales templates that we use that are relevant to personas for follow-up. We make sure that we have dashboards built that will outline which reps have and haven't done follow-up. So we can track it down to a calling people out level if you will. We also make sure that we have content that's relevant to them. And that we have everything built out within our dashboards so they could just take a look at where check-ins happen, where no-shows happen, where attendance happens.

[00:10:50] Ashley Biggie: I think something that feels pretty basic to us, but I know is not, is we have an ABX deck that has pre-event, like all of the information that you need on a slide for that event. After the event, that slide flips to post-event. And here are all the resources for it. And that slide is linked in the notes that are uploaded into every single lead that comes out in Salesforce. And then also any of the notes from those meaningful conversations that we have on site. Again, we'll tier the lead based off of like was it a meaningful conversation? Were they just there? And that will help Salesforce and 6sense filter them into the appropriate type of response that can be automated. And I think we're pretty hands-on, ensuring that they get all this stuff.

[00:11:40] Matt Heinz: That's great.

[00:11:40] Alura Roe: We also make sure that every single event or campaign that we do has a unique Salesforce campaign created. Which is very oftentimes the basics, but we have really done a good job at making sure our sales team knows where to tag opportunities appropriately. So within those Salesforce campaigns, we also have all of the details that you could possibly want on that campaign. So what was it, what was the event, here are all the assets to it, linking to that ABX deck so we can make sure that people are tagging opportunities appropriately as well.

[00:12:09] Matt Heinz: Got it. 

Let's move on and talk a little bit about ROI and measurement, which can be a sticky wicket depending on some of the organization you're in and the expectations of what happens out of events. Talk a little bit about how you manage reporting and expectations at the event level and all the way up to the C-suite.

[00:12:24] Alura Roe: So we measure a number of things. We first off measure, like I mentioned, tagging those opportunities for source pipeline, which is critical. We also want to take a look at influence pipeline, if we're touching customers that have renewals or deal accelerations, we also want to track that. We also like to look at our ABX win rate when ABX is involved. And I think you talked about this stat earlier. When events are involved, you're more likely to see pipeline progress or deals open. We like to track our win rate there. We're always striving for a 10x ROI for any event that we do.

But to your point, how do you measure that up to a C-suite, especially if you've never done something before. How are you going to justify that? I think oftentimes you're often looking for the audience, back to the segmentation, of who you're going to get in front of and making sure that the potential pipeline is there. But those are our key metrics that we're usually looking at.

[00:13:11] Ashley Biggie: I'll add onto that. When we're doing these events, it's not just leads, it's not booth scans. We're calling out to our C-suite, what is that source pipeline, what is closed one, and then what is influenced and any of the meatier activation. So how many meetings, how many meaningful conversations happened, how many dinner attendees did we have, things where there was that quality interaction versus 'thank you for the sticker'.

[00:13:41] Alura Roe: To add a 6sense plug in there, because it is truly what we do. Whenever we're pulling those segments to see who's going to be there before, we can see what buying stage they're in. But then afterwards, you can also pull what's called a segment performance report, and see how you've progressed those accounts and how you've engaged with them and how the event has affected it. So that's another metric that you could take a look at and start to show the progression on.

[00:14:00] Matt Heinz: Yeah, I've heard Saima, your SVP of marketing, publicly talk about this goal of getting 10x pipeline out of an event investment. And two things I like about that. One is that it's a very explicit number. It's a nice big number. It's not just focused on what happened at the event, but it really is focused on what happens after the event as well. And it assumes a body of work investment in that event. It's not just, we talked about this in our session earlier, it's not what you spend, it's what you're buying. And it helps you rationalize everything from the great work you guys would do at Club6, the activations outside of the show, which become not just a place to hang out, a destination, a coveted destination that really helps promote the brand and also get more people to come and more people to engage. Attribution gets a little hard in that conversation, because you can say, okay, we did this amazing thing at Forrester, and you've got a presence here at Cvent CONNECT and you've got the Club6. But almost everybody that was at that event was also influenced by something before that and is likely to be influenced by something after that. What are the attribution conversations sound like internally when you're understanding the impact and maybe the acceleration that events are having?

[00:15:02] Alura Roe: Yeah, I think that attribution is, especially when it comes to branding which is harder to necessarily get attribution tied to. I think that it all stems back to that audience you're getting in front of and making sure that you have the right people you're targeting. When it comes to deciding how big our brand is, if we're going to rent out a whole restaurant, do a Club6, it all just depends again on the audience that we're getting in front of and making sure that there's the potential there. So yeah.

[00:15:28] Ashley Biggie: I think it depends on the type of event. For Club6 where it is largely customers we're looking at influence. How much of this was influenced on the renewal? How much was influenced on that? If we're doing more direct mail campaigns for the event, that is more sourced. Did that direct mail help source? So the attribution can be like anything else, but it all depends on how you tell your story.

[00:15:51] Matt Heinz: Yeah, yeah, I mean, no one's solved this problem. Attribution is hard. And I would argue that the better you're doing an integrated motion, like you guys are, the harder it is to answer that question. But if you give me the choice of having better reporting or better results, I'll take better results all day long.

[00:16:05] Ashley Biggie: Thousand percent.

[00:16:06] Matt Heinz: All right. We're wrapping up here with the A-team from 6sense. I think it's this last question I think for each of you is, for people that are watching this that are running events, whether they're event producers or event marketers, for the next step in their journey what do you want them to know about how events are going to impact their business and should be impacting their business moving forward?

[00:16:21] Alura Roe: I think that now that, we talked about this at this conference a little bit, now that AI is playing more of a role into everything that we do, I think face-to-face interactions are going to become more prominent. And I think that another layer to that is making sure that as a marketer, an event marketer, that you're not just focusing on quantity but quality. Which is where that segmentation I mentioned is important. Making sure you're going after the right audience and making sure that the follow-up is done in a timely manner as well. So I think leaning into the more face-to-face interactions I think we're going to come into and the audience building as well.

[00:16:51] Matt Heinz: I agree. Ashley, bring us home.

[00:16:54] Ashley Biggie: As we move more into agentic AI, I think that human interaction is just going to be so relevant. People are going to crave actual humans. Do I know the difference between an actual human and an agentic AI? 

[00:17:08] Alura Roe: That day might come.

[00:17:09] Matt Heinz: Yeah, that's been a huge theme for me just over the last couple of days. Just really until the robot becomes the persona, it's about the humans. And the more we can ignite that human spark, the more we can create that human moment, the more it's going to accelerate the relationships and the business results we want.

So Ashley and Alura, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:17:26] Ashley Biggie: Thank you, Matt.

[00:17:27] Alura Roe: Thanks for having us.

[00:17:27] Ashley Biggie: Always good to see you.

[00:17:28] Matt Heinz: Good to see you too.

[00:17:28] Alura Roe: A-team.

[00:17:33] Alyssa Peltier: Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

[00:17:43] Rachel Andrews: And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.

[00:17:52] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content, updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:18:00] Rachel Andrews: Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

[00:18:10] Felicia Asiedu: Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

[00:18:20] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.