Most of my clients asked me this question before, “What differentiates a good event management platform from an average one?”. Then I told them about data management. If you have an one-off event and decide that you will never have another similar event in the future, then you need not read further. However, if you are keen on event marketing and want to leverage events for generating business, you must not miss this article. An event management platform with integrated CRM will be key to your success.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM software, therefore, helps you manage relationships and interactions with your current and future customers. In most cases, your event attendees are your potential customers. Hence, it’s vital to integrate a CRM with the event software so that the sales team can take control and take action in time.
Here are a few suggestions on how you can leverage an event CRM software to drive sales revenue.
#1 Engage with your attendees as a pre-sales activity
Pre-sales is very important as it’s about prospecting, qualifying and nurturing leads. Every time you spark a conversation, be it an email, a message, a Facebook comment, etc., you will want to record it and evaluate the sales-readiness of the attendee.
#2 Easy access to information for Sales
The marketing team’s effort in attendee nurturing shouldn’t be in conflict with the sales team’s lead nurturing. Your sales people need to know what events their clients or their leads have attended. Events could be about informing customers of a new product or keeping customers updated of the latest technological happening. Keeping a list of all the events that each of your client has attended will help Sales engage in an intelligent conversation with their client. That’s why there should be a data center that sales people and marketing people can access. With cloud-based CRM platforms, information is always available.
#3 Store data for future use
It doesn’t make sense to me if I use a separate platform for managing my event data. The data don’t only hold value to the event per se but also to customer analytics and remarketing. An integrated CRM allows you to look at a list of potential invitees and then select them as targets for event registration forms, so they are always aware of upcoming events and feel valued to be contacted. This may make them more likely to feel loyal to your brand and register. At the same time, your Sales team would have a better view of the customer and predict their behaviors.
#4 Everyone is on the same page
Not only marketing or sales need to nurture the relationships with customers. Customer success definitely needs to know what events their clients are attending. Human resources sometimes want to check if a candidate’s ever been to a company event. You want to make sure the people that need information to drive productivity and business get it easily.
In Conclusion…
You as an event marketing professional must look for an event management software with integrated CRM now. Keep in mind that it must be a single platform that allows both your sales and marketing teams work effectively together. Email campaign reports or attendance reports are not CRM. If you want to find out more about this, send your questions to us by clicking the “Ask us a question” button below!
Summary: This article is about a study done at Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne on the investment of PMS training and its relationship to a hotels performance. The study resulted in positive correlations between PMS training and revenues. Opinion: Training employees on the PMS seems like common sense but most hotels do not believe it is necessary. This study and its results make perfect sense but I am also a little surprised by the significant increase in revenues that is created from properly training employees on PMS.
This article is about a current study, in which about 150 mid-scale and up-scale hotels around the world answer the questionnaire. This study analyzes the relationship between PMS training and business performance, and the investment in training in PMS. Although every hotel manager knows the PMS is the key factor for hotels development, not only for getting customer data but also for decision making. The result shows that most of PMS system in hotel have not been made full used, there are many potential abilities can't be exploited. According to the study, most hotels don't have budget on PMS training. And also 32% of hotels don't provide training to all employees on the PMS. Plus, even they have training, it is very short and just in internal, no using the PMS providers. This study also shows us the hotels have a higher level of occupancy when they allocate more budgets on PMS training and have PMS suppliers training. There is also a relationship between PMS training budget and hotel revenues, the more budget on training bring a higher revenues. And the revenues are much higher than budgets. Hotels also need efficient management of PMS training, which means more revenues and full use of PMS.
The property management system is a tool not only is customer data but it can also help strategic and operational decision making. The study undertaken investigates the investments in training in PMS and the relationship between training and business performance. A big majority has no training or offer a very little training. There is a support that underutilization of the PMS is due to the lack of training. There is a higher occupancy level when hotels allocate higher budgets to PMS trainings. There is a significant positive correlation that shows a relationship between PMS budget and the gross operating revenues of hotels.
