This report measures:
This report will help you:
First things first: you can never measure the full success of a sponsored booth purely on leads. In fact, giving your account executives a lead quota is the easiest way to ensure you’ll get tons of unqualified badge scans (and waste a lot of time).
Instead of leads, you should measure short-term event success like you would any other in-market activity: based on pipeline and revenue.
But what about long-term effects? How can you measure the impact of booth contacts months or even years later?
Simple: by uploading booth contacts directly into HockeyStack with a CSV, through a form fill, or through your CRM, so we can connect those contacts with the rest of their journey automatically. If they already have trackable touchpoints, you can see the pre-booth journey leading up to the event. If they don’t, you can see the post-booth journey until they convert.
And that’s exactly what this report does for you.
Let’s break it down by section.
Like we mentioned, to measure the short-term influence of an event, measure it the same way you would measure any other short-term, in-market activity: by measuring pipeline or revenue, not MQLs.
When contacts make it into your CRM, this report will track their journey from contact to demo to qualified opportunity to pipeline to closed/won for you.
Now you can assign booth AEs a “demo booked” or “opportunity” quota instead of a lead quota, and motivate your reps to produce conversations not aimless badge scans.
What if someone met you at the event or saw you speak but never visited the booth or gave you their contact information? Instead, they scanned the QR codes floating around the event that brought them to your website.
In this example, you can measure QR code traffic all the way from landing page visit to closed/won.
While this won’t capture all the potential business that may come from non-booth contacts who saw you speak, it can help capture some of them.
What if everyone you met at the event was either already in your pipeline or already had significant marketing influence before engaging with you?
If you’re only engaging with existing prospects and not creating new prospects, it brings into question the value of the event.
Well, the “incremental” value.
The event is incremental if it creates new customers that wouldn’t have bought without the event; it’s not incremental if the customers would have bought anyways, regardless of the event.
It’s not that building trust with existing prospects isn’t a meaningful goal for every event; it’s that sponsoring an event booth is an expensive way to do it.
In the example below, you can see that nearly half of the event contacts were already engaging with an account executive, and over 3/4ths of those contacts had previous marketing touches before the event.
In other words, many of the event contacts were already on their path to purchase.
Does that mean the event was a waste of money? Not necessarily.
In-person interactions still would have helped accelerate buyers through your pipeline. But I can think of a dozen cheaper ways to meet prospects in-person, starting with attending the event vs. sponsoring a booth.
Finally, how do event contacts progress through their journey post event, months or even years later?
In HockeyStack, you can build an account-level journey segment made up of event contacts only.
Account-level journeys track historical marketing touchpoints (multi-touch attribution) of everyone who interacts with your marketing and organizes those individual journeys into accounts (companies).
Now you can see the pre and post event touchpoints from everyone in the buying committee, not just the person you met at the event.
Use journeys to inform your follow-up, gut check purchase intent, and measure the long-term impact of your event on revenue.
Learn more about how HockeyStack helps marketing, revenue, and sales teams surface and action insights like the ones in this template by exploring the interactive demo or booking a virtual demo.