The Client
People prefer to do business with those they know and trust. This business truism serves as the foundation of our client’s marketing plan. Despite being a SaaS provider that serves large enterprise accounts, the company is heavily focused on hosting field events that build relationships with prospects and customers through peer knowledge sharing and networking. Hosting small, exclusive events allows them to establish these valuable one-to-one connections.
While the company engages in digital marketing, partner marketing, and other demand-generation tactics, the primary focus of its go-to-market strategy is field marketing and events. This reflects the fact that the marketing team is small and the department leader came with a field marketing background and a mandate to implement that strategy.
The client’s marketing operations person was about to leave, and the director of field events was relatively new. The company was facing a potentially debilitating gap in campaign creation and execution, data flow management, and related attribution analytics. Fortunately, one of the team members knew just who to call: a former colleague who is now a ClearPivot strategist.
Initially, ClearPivot worked to improve the marketing organization and create a streamlined events outreach process. That quickly grew into full revenue operations responsibilities as the client’s head of revenue asked for help in improving sales and revenue operations.
The Challenge
The client hosts events in key cities around the US and Canada where there are concentrations of large enterprises that fit their ideal customer profile – technology companies with more than 1,000 employees. There are just 10 to 20 guests at each event, plus one or two from the company. As everyone enjoys dinner, they can network, share ideas and experiences, and learn how the client’s software might help them uplevel themselves and their roles.
The marketing challenge was obvious: with a small team and a goal of hosting multiple events every week, how could they be successful? Clearly, they needed a sharper outreach process that could be replicated and managed to ensure the right data is captured and that the right people are being invited. These are highly desirable events, so the team needed to target directors and top titles, such as production leaders and user research leaders, at ICP target firms.
The Solution
First, we created a pre-event process that established an invitation timeline and logistics. We used the data platform Clay to filter for cities, then for desired titles to generate the invitation list. Having already hosted many events, the company had accumulated considerable data on invitee engagement, how many converted into opportunities, the number of customers generated, and city-specific performance. Hosting additional events adds to the data trove, making it increasingly easy to make data-driven decisions regarding target cities.
Once we had the lists in Clay, we synced them using an outreach tool called La Growth Machine (LGM). LGM allows us to combine email and LinkedIn to get in front of people across different channels. In some cases, we used the CEO’s LinkedIn profile to underscore the importance and potential value of the invitation.
Invitees reply to register, thus triggering a “yes” response in LGM. Then, Zapier, a tool that automates and integrates with different tools, adds registrants to Notion. This is a tool the company uses to collate event contact data for marketing. Zapier also sends registrant data to HubSpot, creating a contact for future email reminders and adding the registrant to the calendar invite.
Following each event, the host tags each registrant in Notion as either an attendee or a no-show. Attendees then become Salesforce campaign members, with a conversion goal of agreeing to a sales meeting.
This pre- and post-event workflow now serves as a template for all future events. Though small, the marketing team can handle the entire process on its own.
At first, ClearPivot continued to monitor some post-event issues to ensure data was flowing properly. And we continue to help the client refine their process. The most recent iteration, for example, allows the host to add notes in Notion about conversations with individual attendees. “We talked about basketball.” Or, “We talked about how their company had layoffs in the last two months and he lost half his team.” An AI tool then uses these sales notes to generate personalized follow-up emails to attendees.
The Results
In the past, the client typically hosted brunch or dinner events about once a week. Now, with an easily repeatable and scalable process, leadership was enthusiastic about expanding their outreach. The new plan calls for the GTM team to implement as many as three events per week, every week.
Even though the director of field marketing has now left, the remaining team can tackle the increased work with confidence. They have the resources they need, pulled together in an event engine built by ClearPivot that helps them maintain the flow of field marketing events, capture the right data, and invite exactly the right prospects and customers to each event.
Whereas the company was previously unable to clearly identify which cities and events were performing best, they can now pinpoint performance and correlate it with pipeline and sales data. And they can use the dashboards we created to get an overview of progress at any time.
Our goal at ClearPivot is to make our clients champions by helping them succeed. In this case, we used the tools the company already had to sharpen its procedures and enhance results at every step.
The client is very thankful. In the words of one of their marketing managers, “Berk [our ClearPivot Solutions Analyst] is at the top of his game. None of our reporting, our programs, or our automations would stand if Berk hadn’t helped us. He is my sensei when it comes to automations. I have learned so much from him.”
