You’ve just come back from a major trade show. Perhaps you were at Dreamforce last week, and now you’re back in your office with all of these awesome new leads. Now what?
The typical B2B marketer will enter all their leads into Salesforce, assign them to the sales team, then tell ‘em to go fish. This results in a classic case of frustration: marketing had a great event and promoted the heck out of your brand, but overall generated little to no revenue.
So much for ROI.
Then when your marketing team goes to plan its next event, someone from the executive team will ask the inevitable question: what return did we get out of the last event? Oh boy…
[Tweet “It’s never good when a #B2B marketer can’t demonstrate ROI from an event. #FlipMyFunnel”]
As marketers, it’s our mission to enable sales through every step of the buying process. For events, our jobs extend beyond what happens after the trade show floor closes. We can’t just pass the leads to sales and expect the revenue to start raining down.
Let’s look at two different post-event marketing scenarios.
Marketer A’s Strategy to Turn Event Leads into Revenue
- Send all leads from the show to sales.
- Drop all the leads into a generic email nurture campaign.
- Run reports to see if any of those leads turn into opportunities.
Marketer B’s Strategy to Turn Event Leads into Revenue
- Send only the best-fit leads to sales, then turn on an account-based marketing campaign for the next 30 days to target accounts. This creates the halo effect and keeps Marketer B’s brand top-of-mind, nurturing both their leads and other decision-makers at that account with relevant content.
- Drop the colder leads from the event into email, direct mail, and targeted advertising and/or nurture campaigns. Turn on lead scoring within their marketing automation platform to automatically send those qualified accounts to sales when they’re ready.
- Roll those leads up into accounts to see account-wide activity in real-time, then enable account scoring to see which accounts are proactively engaging with their message. Finally, send them to sales.
Which sounds better? The majority of marketers are following Marketer A’s strategy, which only requires a marketing automation platform that’s integrated with a CRM solution.
[Tweet “#B2BMarketing #ProTip: Turn your event leads into accounts before passing to sales. #FlipMyFunnel”]
If you’re interested in being more like Marketer B — the most badass marketer of them all — you need an account-based marketing solution, not to mention a good old fashioned bank account to collect all the revenue from your event. This all factors into the new account-based marketing model we’re advocating for here at Terminus.
The first stage of the funnel is to identify. (Click here for a list of account-based marketing tools to help you identify more leads.) Then you’ve got to expand, engage, advocate, and measure. You’ve already gotten through this first step by identifying hot leads you met on trade show floor. Now expand your audience by finding key decision-makers within those accounts. Using an account-based marketing tool like Terminus, you can reach decision-makers on their own terms. After all, we know that in sales, we don’t close leads; we close accounts.
[Tweet “Wanna be a badass #B2B marketer? Stop thinking about leads & focus on accounts. #ABM”]
Find the Best Account-Based Marketing Technology for Your Company
The account-based marketing space may be new, but there’s already tons of ABM technology out there. How do you know which martech tools are best for your marketing event needs? I recommend using the ABM Stack Grader to explore your technology options and build your dream marketing tech stack. Check it out below — and then let me know what kind of tools your marketing team uses to turn event leads into revenue!
