According to a recent MarketingCharts study, 80% of marketing leaders believe events are crucial to their business’s success. But only 60% of marketers say they’re satisfied with their event ROI.
That gap shows that something just isn’t working. But the problem usually isn’t with the event itself. Instead, it’s a fatigue problem. Events can be exhausting to plan and execute. And then you have to do a lot of manual follow-up work—including handing leads off to sales.
This hand-off can be a lot harder than it sounds, because marketing teams and sales teams often use different tools. Sales usually relies on a central CRM like Salesforce to track and manage leads, but marketing teams use apps like Eventbrite to manage registrations. Getting information to move seamlessly between these separate apps can take work if you’re doing it manually and at a high volume.
But it doesn’t have to be so difficult. Here at Workato, I’ve worked with thousands of businesses that have successfully bridge the gap between marketing and sales using automation and integration. That’s great for your event ROI (return on investment), because it means that sales has everything they need to nurture opportunities right away.
Here are some of the ways my team automates the marketing-sales handoff after our own events.
Sync new Eventbrite attendees with Salesforce leads
Registering for an event is a key touchpoint on any customer’s journey. In order for Sales to reach out as soon as possible after a registration, we make sure that attendees become leads in Salesforce automatically.
But we don’t just want to add all attendees to Salesforce as brand-new leads. Sometimes, our event registrants are already leads (or even customers). To avoid messy data, we need to check to see whether there’s already an existing lead for that attendee. We also need to make sure the leads that are being added are done so in accordance with all our custom objects.
Our Workato Recipes move registrants from Eventbrite to Salesforce (but any CRM works) and de-dupes them automatically. It’s important to the marketing and events team that we can control how and when things happen without complicated code.
Now when Workato has an event:
- Registrants are added to Salesforce as soon as they sign up, so sales can start working on the opportunity right away
- If they are already in our system, event information is added to existing Salesforce leads when they sign up for a new event in Eventbrite
- There is a record of whether they attended or not in Salesforce when the event ends
To follow up, my team and I automate the marketing actions that need to happen after they are added to Salesforce. For example, you might want to automatically add registrants to Salesforce when they sign up, then add them to the correct campaign in MailChimp, ConstantContact, Marketo, or HubSpot so they can enter into a follow-up email series. You can set this up to happen automatically after the event, even if you’re enjoying a well-earned spa day!
Automatically create Salesforce campaigns for new events
Whenever marketing plans an event, our sales team wants to know right away so they can plan for the influx of leads. Usually, they want to create a dedicated campaign for the event in Salesforce, so they can:
- Track leads through the pipeline and attribute revenue correctly
- Send appropriate, relevant follow-up communications
- Assign any incoming leads to the right rep
While it’s not particularly difficult to manually create a campaign in Salesforce, there’s often a communication breakdown between sales and marketing. Sales might not know about a new event right away, or they might not know which new leads came from which event.
We have recipes that automatically create new Salesforce campaigns for every new event in Eventbrite. Though it sounds like a simple work hack, this integration empowers us to build upon the lead-syncing workflow we talked about earlier. By automatically creating campaigns, my team can then:
- Automatically assign leads to specific campaigns within Salesforce based on the event they registered for
- Automatically mark leads as VIPs if they register for an exclusive, invite-only event
- Kick off a tailored follow-up email sequence
- Receive Slack notifications as soon as they’ve been assigned to a campaign
These automations streamline the event follow-up process by making it simple to organize leads into lists, send tailored emails, and grow their relationship with our brand.
Eliminate the manual entry and follow up for business cards with machine learning
It doesn’t matter what kind of event it is — a conference, tradeshow, happy hour, or user group — we will always go home with many, many business cards.
Manually emailing these leads takes work, and it also means you’ll never record any of your interactions with them in apps like Salesforce or Marketo. This can lead to opportunities lost. If they don’t respond or it doesn’t work out, they’ll never be put in another campaign.
Here’s what my team does to solve this challenge with integration and automation using Google Vision Cloud:
- Take a picture of their business card or event badge and text it to a Twilio number
- Workato picks up the image from Twilio and sends it to Google Cloud Vision to pull their information off of the card
- Workato creates a new lead in Salesforce with the information from Google Vision Cloud
- Workato enriches the lead with Clearbit
- Workato sends a notification with all their information and a link to the Salesforce lead to Slack
This only takes minutes. Of course, you can choose to have the information from the business card go into the app of your choice (including legacy systems) and set the Slack message to include the data that you find most business critical.
Intelligent automation: The event planner’s best friend
Overall, we’ve found connecting our Salesforce instance with Eventbrite has cut out a lot of manual work out of the follow-up process, improved our event ROI, and helped cultivate a collaborative relationship between marketing and sales.
To learn more about how you can do the same, check out 5 Eventbrite Integrations Your Company Needs. Or, learn more ways to make your team more productive in The Event Professional’s Ultimate Guide to Productivity: 2019 Edition.
