“I feel like I’m being held ransom…”
…by event organizers and their vendors.”
These are the exact words stated to me in a recent call I had with a Global Events Director from a Fortune 500 Enterprise.
We were discussing her event strategy, specifically around exhibiting at industry events and trade shows. The conversation naturally turned towards the topic of event leads.
This is the story I’ve heard on repeat for 5 years now since we started building Akkroo:
“We spend more on events than any other channel, often into the £$ millions per year and a significant percentage of that spend is on exhibiting at and sponsoring industry events and trade shows. Our number one reason for doing this is to generate new leads and at nearly all events, I’m left with no choice but to pay extra for renting lead retrieval scanners or accessing yet another mobile app provided for lead capture.
I’m completely at the mercy of the organizer and event reg vendor for the quality of the tools provided, the accuracy and relevancy of attendee data collected pre-event, and the time and format of when and how that data is delivered back to me post-event. I have no say or control in any of this. And don’t even get me started on trying to get my Sales Reps to use a different tool at each event.
Whether it’s one or the archaic badge scanners we’ve been using since the 1990s (“That’ll be $500 per scanner, please fax me your credit card details, thank you very much”) or even one of the modern mobile apps out there, the output is always an Excel spreadsheet that some poor person in my team then has to scrub, clean up, decipher, format, standardize and pray it includes even an inkling of the conversation that took place on the booth so we know what to actually do next.
Some of the event reg systems tell me they have integrations with Marketo / Eloqua / Salesforce et al. but there is simply no way we’re able to integrate each different system on a per-event basis. Barely any of the attendee data provided by the organizer maps correctly to my existing setup and even if it did, I have to wait 3 weeks just to get a new custom field created in Salesforce by my CRM colleagues, let alone plug in an entirely new system for every single event! Not happening.
So what does happen? Well invariably, after days (and sadly sometimes weeks) we end up doing one big upload into our Marketing Automation system and eventually start the follow up process. This is mostly a generic email because in amongst all the manual processes, any notion of what was discussed with the lead at the event itself has been lost. Apart from the leads that the sales reps grabbed business cards from and kept to themselves, which obviously I’ll never see again or be able to claim any marketing credit for.
And we have to do this for every. single. event. In 2019.
Finally, when I get asked the difficult questions by our CMO about justifying event budgets for next year, explaining to her “the best I can do is tell you we scanned 1,289 badges over 4 days at ExpoABC, and Jenny in Sales told Mark in my team that she had some great conversations at the Show in Vegas last week” is starting to wear a bit thin…”
OK so yes this isn’t a word-for-word transcript. However I’ve had 100s of variations of this conversation over the last few years.
It’s nearly 2020, so why is this still the case? With the explosion in Marketing Technology over the last decade, why have events been left behind?
Two main reasons:
1 — the Event Tech ecosystem is built to serve the organizer first, with the paying Exhibitor firmly in second place (sometimes even third behind ‘attendee experience’). Through decades of apathy, exhibitors have just accepted “well this is the way it’s always been done. Yes it’s #&^! but what else can we do?”
2 — too many Organizers and Event Registration vendors are not setting up exhibitors for success because they don’t take an ‘Exhibitor-first’ approach. The success of trade shows in particular from the organizer’s perspective is based on selling floor space, attendee numbers and rebooking rates, rather than actual genuine value delivered to the paying customer — the exhibitor.
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However, slowly but surely, there is a shift occurring.
B2B Marketers are starting to take back control. Driven by advancements in technology and fuelled by the absolute requirement for data compliance, exhibitors are demanding an increasingly higher standard from organizers and their chosen vendors alike when it comes to the event lead process.
What does this actually look like in reality?
Exhibitors bringing their own solutions for lead capture to events.
Solutions that:
- are used on the exhibitors’ own devices at every event, big or small, providing an easy, efficient and customized approach for Sales Reps
- integrate with both the existing Event Registration system on one side to enable the retrieval of attendee contact data and the exhibitors’ own Marketing Automation and CRM systems on the other, in real-time
- give the exhibitor complete control over the quality of contact data being collected and the ability to accurately record key qualifying information
- completely remove the manual, inefficient work required between events and thanks to integrations with existing Marketing Automation and CRM workflows, ensure that leads reach the right destination, with the right information, in real-time
- have SaaS business models, approved up-front by IT security for ongoing use, enabling the exhibitor to have complete peace of mind when it comes to compliance at all events
- not only lead to a higher conversion rate of show-floor conversations to actual sales opportunities and therefore revenue, but provide the B2B event marketers with visibility and reporting capabilities to finally measure the influence of event spend on bottom-of-funnel results
- result in exhibitors seeing a 10x increase in the number of Event Qualified Leads and have a transformative impact on event success.
For Event Organizers, not only enabling exhibitors to bring their own lead capture solutions but actively encouraging this creates a win:win situation.
Successful exhibitors = successful events = increased re-bookings and revenue. As an organizer, by ensuring that they partner with modern Event Registration vendors who offer API access as standard for exhibitors to plug their own lead capture solutions in to (meaning that exhibitors can still scan a badge and retrieve attendee data through their own mobile solution), they are actively setting up exhibitors for success, with absolutely no downside.
For Event Registration vendors, who have the incredibly difficult task of managing pre-event registration, on-site entry and badging, offering API access to exhibitors removes the hassle of onsite scanning hardware / app support, whilst keeping the ability to generate additional revenue per exhibitor by charging a sensible fee for that access. Through API calls retrieving attendee data, no visibility is lost on exhibitor or attendee activity. Again, it’s a win:win situation.
When we started the Akkroo journey several years ago, you could count on one hand the number of events offering exhibitors API access like this, and even then, it was hidden away, expensive and technically challenging.
Today, we integrate with over 40 of the world’s largest Event Registration vendors, who between them power 10,000s of events around the globe. There is still a way to go for universal acceptance and coverage (exhibitors won’t stop asking you, GES!) however as integrations continue to become easier from a technical perspective, driven by ever-increasing demand by B2B marketers, I predict this becoming the true industry norm in the not-too-distant future.
I’d welcome thoughts or questions, so feel free to leave comments below or get in touch with me directly.
