Event data is the key to driving real revenue. But how do you know what kind of data to collect and what you should do with it?
That's literally the million dollar question.
In our newest episode of Run of Show Weekly, learn the GET methodology to driving real event ROI.
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Today, we'll walk through a data collection process that will enable you to capture the most important attendee information, empower your sales team in real time, and measure event roi.
It was 2015, it was May, and I was sitting at my desk. It was after hours at the office and I remember that I screamed. I was reading the attendee list from an event I had thrown the night before and there she was: Amanda from Adobe had walked into the door, had spent an hour at the event, and had just walked out and I didn't even say hi.
I didn't even know she was there! I couldn't believe it. We'd done everything right. We'd promoted and planned a great event, people seemed to have loved it, and we captured a ton of information from all the attendees. I felt like we were ready to go, but this person that I've been trying to get in touch with was such an important prospect for our business. She had just walked in and I had no idea. I remember thinking to myself, "How do I make sure this never happens again?"
I started thinking about data. We talk about data all the time. How do we collect more data? How do we use that data? Where do we store this data? But what I realized that day was that it doesn't matter. We can be as nostalgic as we want with our data, but if we don't have it when we need it, it doesn't matter.
I started thinking about building a framework and that's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna walk through a framework about how I think about collecting attendee information at every single stage of the event and more importantly, how do you make sure you put it in the hands of the people who can actually use it.
I use an easy mnemonic device called the GET Method. I call it GET because we're getting the data and we're getting the data in the hands of the people who can use it.
Let's take a quick step back and think about all the different types of information that you can collect about an attendee.
There's really three different buckets of data. There's (1) attendee data, there's (2) intent data, and there's (3) value data. You can bucket all three of these for every single person that RSVPs or attends your event.
Let's walk through each of these different types of data, but let's look at them at the stages at which we collect them.
If you break up an event planning process, there's essentially three different stages. Let's start with the pre-RSVP stage, we call that the gather phase. Now, you're definitely capturing and gathering people, but you're also gathering data during that stage.
During this stage, you're really understanding information about who that person is, something as simple as stuff that you could find on their LinkedIn profile, but you're also capturing information about their interests and their passions.
This could be anything from what their most important challenge is, to what their favorite song is, to what their last job was, or even what their relationship is with your business.
We call that attendee data and there's a lot of that in the gather phase that you can capture from RSVP questions or conversations that you might have or sessions that they attend or plan to attend at your event.
The next stage is the enhanced stage. This is where we really start to understand who at the event we really need to spend our most valuable time on, who we need to really start to cultivate relationships with before, during, and after the event.
During this enhanced stage, there's two types of data that help us make those types of decisions. The first one we call intent data.
Intent data is basically trying to understand how interested in your company, product, or event, this particular attendee is. You can infer this information by tracking their attendee journey. Things like clicks, conversions -- what do they engage with? Do they actually attend the event? If they attend, do they bring a plus one.
All these things help you really understand how interested this person is in your event. And the corollary to that is, how interested they are in your business.
Last but not least, during this enhanced stage, this is when we start to take in all of that CRM data. Stuff from Salesforce and other CRM systems to try to understand more about how valuable the opportunity with this attendee is.
Is this person likely to buy? If this person does buy our product, how much are they willing to spend.
Now, when you combine these two data types, intent and value, you start to understand who you should target, who you should spend your time on. But remember what I said in the beginning and remember that mistake that I made with Amanda. It doesn't matter if you've captured all this data and you stored it in some system somewhere, if you don't get it in people's hands in the time that they can use it, you might as well not have collected it at all.
That's when we move on to our third and possibly most important stage of this process. We call this the transfer phase.
During this transfer phase, we take all of this information that we've captured and we try to put it in the hands of our sales team, in the time, in the medium in which they can use it.
As you saw, we capture a lot of important information around every attendee, but when we think about how we help our sales team, we need to be thinking about, how do we help them make really good decisions. And the first decision that they need to make is how do they spend their time correctly. In so many words, how do they prioritize their time with the right people.
Sales people's time is pretty expensive. The way that you do that is, you cross-reference who is showing the most intent, which attendee actually is interested in buying, and you cross-reference that with who actually could potentially deliver the most value.
That will help your sales team decide who they should spend time with. And when they do spend time with that person, you really wanna make sure that they have an impactful, engaging, and a personal conversation. So, we try to help them personalize that interaction.
We do so by taking the information we captured during the gather phase. This is, who that person is, what they look like, and what they're interested in. When you combine those two things, we start to help our sales team prioritize the right people and personalize that experience.
That's the Get Method. As I've started to implement this process across all of my events, I've really started to focus on what the medium and the method is for delivering this information to the people who can use it in real time. Be it via email, Slack, text message. How do I make sure that people know who's gonna be in the room, and better yet, how can they engage with those people.
Make no mistake, we can collect all the data we need, but a data tree that falls in the forest... I don't know how to finish that. I'll see you guys next time.
