Cvent Universal LeadCapture [Review]

Cvent Universal LeadCapture: What Is It?

Universal LeadCapture is a mobile app that enables exhibitors to gather leads through a single application at all the events they attend. Currently, many exhibitors rely on the event-provided tech, and it can be different at each event they attend, making organization (and collection) a challenge.

This application was developed to eliminate the need to manually collect and transcribe business cards or rent different (and potentially expensive) lead-scan devices at every event, which often results in an inconsistent qualification process, extreme learning curve–or worse, difficulty importing and exporting valuable data.

Universal LeadCapture provides exhibitors and sales staff a method for collecting and qualifying leads on the exhibition floor that is consistent from event-to-event. It does this with an app that allows them to scan badges and business cards, and then prompts them to ask qualifying questions. Once the lead data is collected onsite, it syncs with marketing automation tools and a leads portal in real time, and allows sales teams back at the office to prep for a speedy follow-up.

Their emphasis is on ease of use during qualifying conversations, streamlined data management via integrations with major CRMs and the rest of the Cvent ecosystem, and privacy / GDPR compliance.

Let’s take a closer look at the lead qualification process with Cvent’s Universal LeadCapture.

Main Feature Categories

Lead Qualification Question Designer

LeadCapture lets exhibitors build a questionnaire with a series of qualifying questions that sales staff can use to guide their live conversations. The questionnaire can be created ahead of the event or edited on the fly. You can apply dynamic form logic to adjust the questions you’re prompted to ask based on answers to prior questions.

Lead Capture

LeadCapture allows you to consolidate the data gathered from each person into a lead profile. The profile includes their contact information, lead score, important notes, and other customizable entries.

Lead profiles can be created through

Badge scanning

Business card snapshots

Manual entry

The system can use QR codes and barcodes as well as many other types of badges (including RFID badges). The scanning device can also be named (by location or other desired differentiator) so that exhibitors know exactly where the lead came from.

GDPR Compliance and Marketing Consent

One of the challenges with collecting attendee information at events is consent. Consent cannot necessarily be assumed just because someone stops by the booth and provides their email. In the current privacy climate, with privacy issues and potential fines at stake, exhibitors need a sense of security and to take measures to mitigate their liability.

LeadCapture provides more robust and explicit consent options. When the consent question appears on the device, you can hand it to the potential lead and allow them to agree to marketing consent by checking the box. It then takes a snapshot of the consent and the specific language they consented to. The device keeps a history of that interaction should anyone question it in the future.

Integrations with CRMs

Once leads are qualified and captured, they need to become part of the sales funnel and nurture programs. LeadCapture integrates with most of the major marketing automation and CRM platforms, including Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. As a result, the lead data you collect onsite is synched in real time with your sales database back at the office and across the devices of all other staff on the floor.

Users can customize how the data is used and presented. This leads to timelier and more productive conversations with customers and prospects immediately after the show.

Review

LeadCapture seeks to address two main challenges at trade shows and exhibitions: the difficulty of qualifying leads onsite, and the opportunity cost of an inefficient follow-up for qualified leads after the event.

Getting qualified leads helps to ensure that your follow-up efforts are fruitful. Exhibitors and onsite sales staff are likely looking for people who want to buy and have the authority and budget to do so. However, it can be difficult to uncover and accurately record these details on the floor, when you feel pressured to develop rapport while keeping conversations short.

Universal LeadCapture answers this difficulty with an interactive app that lets sales staff collect core contact information with a scan of a badge or business card, and move into a productive conversation guided by qualifying question prompts.

Currently, exhibitors use a variety of tools for onsite lead collection. There’s very little consistency in the process across events, and Universal LeadCapture promises to give exhibitors a standard process across events.

While Universal LeadCapture is a product aimed at exhibitors, sales staff, and trade show managers, event planners who host tradeshows offer LeadCapture to their entire trade show floor.

On-the-floor Lead Capture

LeadCapture offers cross-platform functionality and can be used with the booth staff’s own mobile devices on Android or iOS.

When an exhibitor has a potential lead, they can scan their badge, take a picture of their business card, or enter it in manually. LeadCapture works with third-party badge scanning software to populate the information into a lead profile. It works with a growing number of badge types.

If the lead doesn’t have a badge, or the badge doesn’t have a code to scan, they can scan a business card. However, to ensure 100% accuracy despite cards that are difficult for scanners to read, Cvent offers a unique service.

When you snap a picture of the card and hit upload, it is sent to a transcription team, and they manually verify the information and enter it into the database. This human touch ensures the information appears in the correct fields, no matter how it’s presented on the card.

There are no limits to how many you can submit this way, and the information is added to the lead profile within a few hours (but can take up to a day).

Lead Qualification

Once the potential lead’s information is entered, the exhibitor can begin to qualify them using lead-identifying questions. LeadCapture walks the exhibitor through the process.

With the “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) question designer, you can easily create required or optional questions to help direct the lead identification conversations salespeople are having on the floor.

The customizable questionnaire may include:

Lead score assignment using a 1-5 star score

Multiple choice questions

Yes/No questions

The app uses smart logic and dynamic question/conditional capabilities to adapt the questions as the conversation is happening. If a question does not apply based on an earlier answer, it will not appear on the screen, or it may prompt a different follow-up question.

For instance, if the first question is when they will be in the market for the product, the timing they select will influence the next question. If they answer “sooner than six months,” a different subset of questions may appear than if they had responded with “over a year.”

The sales or trade show manager can also designate questions within LeadCapture as required, so they cannot be skipped or ignored as may happen in conversation without the form.

Once the lead has been assessed, you can automate follow-up activities and accelerate the sales pipeline with LeadCapture’s integrations to all of the major marketing automation and CRM platforms, like Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics.

The data is shared with sales teams at the office in real time, so they don’t have to wait for someone at the event to phone it in or return from the trade show. This leads to timelier and more productive conversations with customers and prospects immediately after the show.

Central Dashboard

LeadCapture also provides insights into all leads coming in from multiple events. The dashboard provides an intuitive overview into how many leads were collected at each event, which is designed to offer greater insights into the value of a given event.

Online/Offline Usage

The application works offline but with some limitations. When you don’t have an internet connection, you’ll get a warning, but the platform will still collect leads and allow you to go through the leads questionnaire. They will sync when you reconnect.

Privacy and Consent

One of the standout features in this product is consent assurance. Not only does it provide a place for the potential lead to give consent to be marketed to in the future, but it also captures the details behind what version of the consent they signed off on and when. This keeps trade show exhibitors from the guesswork behind consent challenges.

It’s easy for people to forget what they’ve consented to, but LeadCaptures makes sure they can quickly be reminded.

Cvent Platform

While LeadCapture can be sold as a stand-alone product, it’s included in Cvent’s broader technology platform, which aims to provide end-to-end solutions for lead retrieval, appointment scheduling, registration, room block management, badge printing and more.

This connection to the Cvent ecosystem allows users to, for instance, take the lead collection data and plug it into the registration feature to host mini events, conduct meeting scheduling with the appointments tool, create custom reports, and collect data across other Cvent features.

Cvent supports LeadCapture with about 1300 staff who are dedicated to helping users achieve success and ensure proper use of the products.

Main Differentiators in This Application

• This app creates a streamlined process for filtering and collecting lead data that can be the same for every event you attend.
• It features an intuitive system that benefits from a thoroughly tested UX.
• Extensive data integrations mean you can use the system in accordance with your other platforms, even if they’re not part of the Cvent ecosystem.
• Business card info is manually entered for greater accuracy.

Who Is It For?

Cvent’s Universal LeadCapture is for B2B and B2C trade show managers, exhibitors, and sales staff who find existing processes for lead gathering, identifying, and follow-up to be onerous or challenging.

Because so much of the benefit hinges on qualifying capabilities, companies with broadly applicable products and services or wide / nonspecific target markets may not see as much value as companies with more specific audiences and qualifying criteria.

Pricing

Each pricing instance is slightly different with Universal LeadCapture, as it may be used as a stand-alone product or as an add-on or module for other Cvent applications and software. Contact Cvent directly for customized pricing information based on your scenario.

IN CONCLUSION

Live events account for 20-40% of a total marketing budget, and trade shows represent a large portion of that for most B2B and B2C companies. Universal LeadCapture is a robust lead capture solution that follows a trend towards automation without sacrificing its respect for privacy and consent. It’s designed to give trade show managers, sponsors, and salespeople quick on-the-spot insights to help them better qualify leads.

LeadCapture can be set up without any particular technical knowledge, and can integrate with your existing marketing and sales tools. This allows it to send qualified opportunities to your marketing and sales teams in real time for a speedier follow-up.

Its dashboard facilitates custom reporting to provide metrics for the ROI of each trade show.

If you’d like to learn more about Cvent’s LeadCapture application, contact them for a demo.

Disclaimer: Reviews are paid for placements. While Event Manager Blog receives a fee to extensively look at the tool and review it in detail, the content of the review is independent and by no means influenced by the company. If you have any questions please use the contact us section.