When it comes to exhibitors collecting and actually measuring good-fit leads, this is where I personally think the events industry is still way behind other areas of MarTech. The methods used are still scan as many badges as possible with rented devices and no context of the conversation (often with old, generic, patchy contact data back), business cards and hand written notes. Most of these aren’t actually ‘leads’ – they’re just basic TOFU contacts that are then sent a generic follow up 2 weeks later once some unlucky marketing exec has manually waded through several spreadsheets.

As you say, events are an incredibly powerful investment when done correctly, and I think we’re starting to see a shift in focus by exhibitors using their own solutions which result in Event Qualified Leads going straight into their Marketing Automation & CRM systems, ready for fast, appropriate follow up. Here in Europe, GDPR is also changing the landscape as simply scanning badges with rented devices and relying on a third party for implied consent is a big area of concern for many businesses.

What I would caution against is using traditional lead metrics as the quota (Number or revenue). The first reason is that the number of top-of-funnel leads is largely a factor of spend. A VPM could divert money from much needed strategic initiatives to apply it to lead gen for the short-sighted goal of “making quota”. That is, one can throw money, even if not efficiently, at activities that will generate leads, and to a large extent, without much concern for quality.

Revenue quota’s partially solve the problem but is often outside of the control of the VPM. For example, especially for an early stage company, it is often imperative to do a logo “land grab” even if it means discounting.

I prefer to use two metrics:

1. Marketing has a quota that N% of closed deals at the end of the year can be directly attributed to marketing, and
2. Instead of focusing on an arbitrary lead quota (again, that’s a factor of spend), instead, make the goal along the lines of improving the conversion % of web visitors to trial to subscriber. If you can improve that percentage by N then the ramification is felt through the entire funnel.

Of course, there’s no one size fits all. Just relaying what I see as more effective.

Thanks for a good article and discussion,

Senior managers and executives also need to understand that as companies mature, A’s look for opportunity within a company, and if they don’t find it, they’ll leave for something greater. And that leaves a company with only B’s and C’s remaining, they often get promoted purely out of peer attrition and resource availability. Then B’s are hiring C’s because that’s what they do.

The goal here is to maintain awareness of how this cycle perpetuates itself and to ensure that you don’t fall into this downward spiral.

In your opinion, is the first three months revenue in contracts that have an average lifetime of 3-4 years too much for sales reps? Circa 10-15k contract value.