3 Keys to Ensure Your Events Strategy Aligns With Your Go to Market
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In B2B, most of us do events to move the business forward. Whether our events are small sales dinners or large trade shows, event marketing plays an important role in B2B sales and customer service.
But to ensure that your events strategy aligns with your overall go to market is critical and all too often there is a disconnect between the two. Events are a means to an end and also a budget habit. Last year we did XYZ trade show, so that we should automatically re-up our sponsorship this year and execute. But sometimes that is a mis-step as our go to market needs change. In particular, as a company / brand matures, repositions or works with customers in new ways. As does your GTM change, so must your Event strategy. With that in mind here are 3 keys to ensure their is alignment strategically and tactically between your events and overall go to market efforts.
Key #1: Event and Event Deliverable Selection
Selecting the right events is an internal and external discussion. Each year sales and marketing leaders (usually as part of the budgeting process), should collaborate to identify the right events to service their go to market motions for the upcoming year. This exercise will help leadership on both sides identify the tentpoles of key industry activities that can requirement material investment.
For example at MSFT for our automotive go to market, we identified 3 car shows to build tent poles around. But the key is we worked directly with sales, event marketing, pr, sales development, account management and industry category development to identify which shows were important to move the business forward. We looked at a buyers / customer index of past attendees over our ICPs. We explored the logistical impact to marketing, events and sales teams. And lastly, we discussed budget impacts of each choice. The net was a collaborative negotiation that allowed us to align on those 3 shows and the things we’d get done to support each.
The second side of event selection which few discuss is event deliverables. That is what sponsorship components are important to us relative to our go to market. The key here is to map what is being brought to market and aligning that with your events deliverables selection. While this may sound tactical, it helps ensure both activations improve each other’s success. Also, teaching the team to think this way (1+1=3) encouraged collaboration, team building and improved overall outcomes for our collective go to market efforts. This is orchestration excellence in practice.
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Key #2: Measure Event Outcomes Using Marketing Performance Measurement Excellence
Many event teams measure the success of an event - especially with booth elements - with the number of leads generated. But this is a red herring. The true measure of successful events are two-fold. On the revenue side, use pipeline and deal close acceleration (pre and post event) to uncover the incremental benefit the event created. And second on the brand value side, use NPS & cSAT metrics for your brand generally or featured product pre and post. Let’s unpack that a bit.
On the revenue side, what sales and account management (for existing customers) leaders want to see is acceleration of deal closes and pipeline around the event. What you’ll find using this approach, is some of your larger trade shows, aren’t as value in terms of revenue to your business as a smaller happy hour or private dinner especially with larger ticket products. This metric will lag 30 - 45 days past an event as well, but build a decay curve that lowers the contribution of events to that deal close over time towards 0 value at 45 days.
The brand value - and there is brand value - for being at industry trade show, especially for well established brands. It’s also a coming of age for smaller brands that are “ready to play with the bigger companies”. For the influence of an event on your NPS, you need two things. A standing monthly NPS survey, which you should be doing regularly for customers, prospects and other key stakeholders. And that data bumped with a list of event attendees. So you can see the incremental lift or drop for that segment of respondents.
Key #3: Content & Messaging Alignment to Event Audience
Telling your story at events is ever so important. But as many good marketers know we need to tell our story in the language of the audience to cut through the clutter. With this in mind too few firms spend the diligence to package their content for a particular event, systematically. That is, every piece of content, signage, swag, etc. should be customized for the events’ audience first then your brand’s story. You need to wrap your story for the audience that you seek to engage.
But to do this systematically, for every event, for every touch point is an operational challenge. This is where messaging frameworks by ICP, by audience industry, by customer vs. prospect, are super important. Think of it as branding guidelines for your story. And building enablement systems to execute is critical. At MSFT, we built a system to the point a rep in the field could order a presentation, a piece of swag, etc. for a particular activity and it would be delivered to them or their hotel. This allowed the events team not to have to focus on swag creation but to focus on event excellence. This is orchestration excellence.
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