Event Metrics That Matter: From Sales Alignment to Attribution

Rachel Andrews (00:00):

It's okay if the point of your event is for people to have a good time. We don't want it to be so transactional that it's only leads, only leads, only leads. Obviously that's a huge important piece of it, but you also want the attending experience to be freaking awesome, right? You want it to be great. So hopefully you have the marriage of both. That's the dream.

Alyssa Peltier (00:19):

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences? Well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews (00:31):

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu (00:32):

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier (00:33):

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

John Hunter (00:44):

Live from Cvent CONNECT 2025 in San Antonio, it's the Great Events podcast. I am your guest host today, John Hunter. That's right: guest host. Because the lady to the right, Rachel Andrews, is usually in the host seat, but now she's in the hot seat.

Rachel Andrews (01:03):

Oh!

John Hunter (01:03):

Oh yeah, it's coming.

Rachel Andrews (01:04):

Pressure!

John Hunter (01:06):

We're coming for you today.

Rachel Andrews (01:07):

I'm excited to be a guest today. I don't have to do anything. You just answer things.

John Hunter (01:11):

You got to do a lot of answering. I'm going to throw you a few curveballs, so just be ready. And next to her is marketing powerhouse and Cvent family favorite, Robin Clark.

Robin Clark (01:21):

Thanks, John.

John Hunter (01:22):

Welcome to the podcast, all right?

Robin Clark (01:24):

I'm here!

John Hunter (01:24):

We got a really cool subject matter, and marketers are going to love: how to measure event impact with data that really matters, really means something. Not the fluffy stuff, not the fluffy metrics, not the wishful thinking, the vagaries. Digging right into the real stuff that you guys know will help prove impact of events, right?

Robin Clark (01:50):

Yeah.

John Hunter (01:51):

Okay, we're going to just dive right in.

Robin Clark (01:53):

Let's go.

John Hunter (01:54):

How do you define impact when it comes to events?

Robin Clark (01:57):

This came up in one of our sessions here on site yesterday in fact. But defining real impact is going to come down to ROI in a big sort of way, and in addition to that, what our attendees are experiencing at this event.

We invest a lot in this event to make sure that we bring the impact to our industry, that we are bringing the impact to our bottom line and that we're bringing a really great experience to our attendees.

Now for us, for Rachel, myself, when we are working on that impact, we want to see the right people. We want to know that we have business influencers, we have deep Cvent users, that we have those that are invested in learning and sharing in their experiences here at this conference, and as long as we've got them, then we see that the impact from this event comes back tenfold. Now we're in this knowledge-sharing scenario where they're more interested in Cvent products than they were when they got here.

Then we have this opportunity, as events experts, we like to think of ourselves, that we're presenting them with an experience that's worth their time. That they have come here, that they're leaving satisfied, that they're leaving inspired, that they've enjoyed themselves, they've had fun. This is what we live and breathe. We want to share that experience with them. And once they're here, they have that experience, we see that when we've been able to inspire and delight that it actually comes back in a monetary sense to us. We've been able to bring to mind ideas and perspectives for them to leverage Cvent products in a way that they didn't realize before the event.

So getting them on site, making sure that we've got the right people here, they know enough about the product to start to really get their hands dirty, we leave an impact on them and then that turns out to be tenfold for us on the impact coming back to Cvent. What do you think?

Rachel Andrews (03:49):

A lot of pressure, asking me this while we're running Cvent.

John Hunter (03:52):

That's the plan.

Rachel Andrews (03:54):

Thanks so much.

Well, I'd echo everything Robin said. I think from a 50,000-foot lens, obviously we're running Cvent CONNECT on site right now, which is great. We are moving and grooving and getting all the data, we have RFID tracking. But from a larger lens are hundreds of events that we're doing each year. One of the things that Robin and team, we have a 40-person team, and we've been digging into this year is prioritization of what events are actually working: what's converting, what are the actual goals of the event, and things like that.

It's been pushing a boulder up a hill, but we're getting there with some of the data, and we're looking at things like brand awareness, lead generation, the attribution from the events. Is it a relationship show that we're going to or is it a relationship event? And then how we're defining the success of those, because it's very easy to do the lead generation and the converting. Those are pretty... well, I shouldn't say easy, it's pretty hard, but those metrics are more tangible than a brand awareness or a relationship show and talking to executives of why it matters to go to those things.

Defining success I think starts at the beginning of that, of just looking at your whole events program and saying, okay, these are the events that we want to do, and then questioning, why are we doing them? What is the goal? Obviously everybody wants to go to a sick party, but what are we getting out of that, right? Are we getting anything in return or is it just relationship-based or are we trying to do a huge launch and have our brand out there and is the brand awareness working? And we're looking at social media impact and things like that.

So prioritization, I think, is a big piece of that. Starting at the beginning, and then... I'm not going to echo what Robin said, because we have the same brain at this point when it comes to the stuff that we're looking at for CONNECT. But one of the things that we said in our session yesterday was looking at who's in the room. Did we get the right people there? Are there open opportunities there? And then after the event, did we go after them? Did the attendee journey mirror what they've raised their hands for? Did the attendee journey afterwards mirror what we should be following up with them on?

So I don't know if I defined success John, but that's a tall-order view.

John Hunter (06:03):

No, I think you hit on what the problem is for a lot of people. It's selling an executive that this is a brand awareness event. We're not going to get 10,000 leads out of it. There are different metrics for success.

Robin Clark (06:16):

Yeah, totally.

John Hunter (06:17):

But I think that is perfect way to lead into the next question. Where do you think most teams get stuck when they're trying to define success? Do they get stuck in the lead thing or... What do you think?

Robin Clark (06:28):

If I had to venture to guess, I want to hear your thought on this, but I think it's probably less data, getting stuck more on anecdotal impact or success.

I would love to see more teams rely on data to help them define their impact, to help them define whether or not an event was successful because we tapped into it. Everybody loves a good time, a good party, and sometimes an event can have that feel: that was fun, that was energetic, that was ... But what came from it? Is there anything measurable coming out of that? Unless of course the point of the event, the entire purpose of the event, was simply to have fun.

Honestly, I would think more relying on the data, going more toward the data, which I don't know that our industry is quite there yet. Getting our industry to spend more time in the event data will serve us all really, really well. Kind of my take.

Rachel Andrews (07:25):

I also don't want to be so lame that I'm only, only ROI now.

Robin Clark (07:30):

I'll be lame.

Rachel Andrews (07:32):

I'm not talking about you. I'm just saying there's certain times where it's okay if the point of your event is for people to have a good time. We don't want it to be so transactional that it's only leads, only leads, only leads. Obviously that's a huge important piece of it. But you also want the attendee experience to be freaking awesome. You want it to be great. So hopefully you have the marriage of both. That's the dream. And I think that's where people maybe get lost in the mix a little bit and they focus maybe too much on the fun and not enough on the leads.

Hopefully you strike the right balance between the two and that's where you can define it better. But when you're starting, I just can't say it enough: sitting down and saying, okay, what would be successful for you? Because different execs, different folks, different strokes, man. Some of them are like, I'd be happy with 20 people, but these 20 people have to be of this caliber. Robin and I have this talk all the time. It's like, we can do quantity, baby, we can blast it out to everybody if we really want to pack the room with people. But why don't we focus on packing the room with the right people? So I think that's just part of defining success and then sprinkling in the fun moments because no attendee wants a lame party or lame event.

Robin Clark (08:41):

No, absolutely. Taking my Cvent hat off for a second, honestly, my daughter's school, they put on a gala every year. Attended this gala for the first time this year, and at no point, and I'm a little bit tapped now into the committee that's putting this on, that at no point have they done any kind of analysis on what is working at this event every single year, and what's not working. And I think that that's representative of what happens too often. Because in large part they want it to be a really great time because a great time brings in big fat checks, quite frankly. They need to be putting on a great chat, but they're not doing any kind of research or survey or anything like that to figure out were the attendees delighted? Did they have a nice... And the answer is largely no, so Johnny, you need to go to the daughters' gala.

John Hunter (09:29):

I know. I think so too. I was just going to say, is that a gala problem? It seems like that might be a gala issue. Like the Met Gala, how do they... That's all donations, but...

Robin Clark (09:38):

We should let them know that.

John Hunter (09:40):

Yeah!

Robin Clark (09:41):

Listen, Met.

John Hunter (09:42):

Yeah, well let them know that and then maybe they'll invite us if we just poke the bear a little bit.

Robin Clark (09:46):

Totally.

John Hunter (09:46):

Yeah. So saying all that, is there like a KPI metric that you think should just be thrown out that marketers are using right now that just doesn't mean anything to anybody?

Robin Clark (09:59):

That's tricky. Probably every metric has its place. I'm going to dance around the question a little bit and say that at Cvent we get a lot of questions about what can we attribute in performance to an event. But the way that you go about that attribution can can be packaged a lot of different ways. And that inconsistency... Can I, in my opinion, be very problematic? I wish that there was just, this is our is how, period, full stop, we are calculating the attribution for this event.

It can't be looked at in another way. It can't be that way from event to event, year over year. You're able to set these benchmarks, you're able to pick up on the patterns and make decisions based on that. The inconsistency... And to Cvent's credit, we're getting really, really great at it. But the inconsistency to the point of being tricky, right? It's the weighting of the engagement at the event. What is weighted more heavy than the other things? Is going to a product booth or a one-on-one more important? What is that weight? What's the engagement journey throughout the event? And what does that mean for the actual event?

I feel like we're still figuring that out. We're the experts figuring it out and we will be for another decade. It'll be fine. AI is going to help with that I think, a little bit, with some of that metric stuff, but I...

John Hunter (11:26):

Yeah.

Rachel Andrews (11:26):

KPIs are so hard because I was trying to think of something like the duration of someone's in the event or something, but I was like, but that's important because then you need that if the session didn't work and you don't want to do that session again, but then you could argue that you would just look at the number of attendees or maybe the number of attendees doesn't matter, but maybe it's the duration that matters more.

Robin Clark (11:46):

Yeah. The second you think a metric doesn't matter is the second somebody's asking for it.

Rachel Andrews (11:50):

Yep, 100 percent.

John Hunter (11:51):

Okay. It makes perfect sense.

Rachel Andrews (11:53):

Yeah, that's the best, when you pull a very comprehensive report and you're like, I got everything in here.

Robin Clark (11:57):

That's right.

Rachel Andrews (11:57):

You're like, well what about this? Oh my god, you pulled the one thing out of 450 things.

John Hunter (12:02):

I know. That's crazy.

Rachel Andrews (12:02):

That's fantastic.

John Hunter (12:03):

That's right. Now, this is the big elephant in the room. Our partners in sales, right? Hey, they're our partners in sales and events. There's a problem with these people sometimes. They don't like to...

Robin Clark (12:19):

You heard it here first.

John Hunter (12:20):

They don't follow up post-event. Is this something these guys have experienced in your lifetime? Do you have any advice on how to fix this problem?

Robin Clark (12:31):

Yes. And I will say...

Rachel Andrews (12:33):

I'll say, hire yourself a Robin Clark.

John Hunter (12:36):

Yeah, there you go.

Robin Clark (12:36):

Thank you. I will say...

John Hunter (12:37):

Oh yeah, I've been on the meetings. Trust me.

Robin Clark (12:40):

To sales' credit, they have a lot thrown at them a lot of the time. It's tough. It's a tricky position to be in, because they have us, they have demand gen, they have their sales leaders, they have their own quotas. All of these varying competing priorities hitting them. It's tough for them to cut through the noise. So I say, I cannot do your job. You are good at your job. You have your job for a reason. You are great at it. I need you to do it. And that is all very true.

But I'll just take a low-hanging fruit here. Sales, their hygiene, what we in Cvent and probably elsewhere call sales force hygiene, and really properly and efficiently tracking what their follow-up actually is. Because there is a discrepancy in what sales is following up on and what we are able to track, what we are seeing. That's a problem in and of itself.

Beyond that, sales, they don't always grasp the brevity of an event like CONNECT or attending a trade show. And a huge enablement piece for us, that it does sit with us, is to educate sales on the importance, on the impact that an event can have with them closing a deal. I mean, sales is in sales for a very good reason. They're good at what they do and it's a selfishly motivated commission-based position they're in. They want to close the highest deals, they want to make the most money, and that makes perfect sense. We need to be better about educating sales on how they can get that done for their own selfish interests because that is going to serve our interests. If they know the importance of the event and following up effectively, if they understand what that's going to do, I mean, that's just going to respond in turn for us.

John Hunter (14:31):

Yeah, that's good.

Rachel Andrews (14:31):

What she said.

John Hunter (14:32):

Yeah. I think that's a good strategy. I mean, help me help you.

Robin Clark (14:35):

Help me help you.

John Hunter (14:36):

Yep.

Robin Clark (14:37):

Yep, that's right.

John Hunter (14:38):

All right, so I think we're going to wrap up things now. Getting pretty deep into the weeds here. Good information. A final thought for you guys. If you could give your fellow marketers one rule to follow when it comes to proving ROI, what would it be? You touched on it already, but just a definitive statement.

Rachel Andrews (15:00):

I mean, I kind of said it already. The defining of the goal -

John Hunter (15:04):

So it's goals.

Rachel Andrews (15:04):

... is you set that up -

John Hunter (15:05):

Defining those goals.

Rachel Andrews (15:05):

Stop moving the goalposts. I feel like that's my biggest beef is sometimes we have these events, we set the goals and then we move the goalposts. Or you know what I would do? I would remove the sentence, well, we've always done it like that.

Robin Clark (15:21):

Oh, yeah.

John Hunter (15:21):

Oh, yeah.

Rachel Andrews (15:22):

I can't stand it. I don't care that we've always done it that way. Why don't we try something new? Why don't we pivot? Why don't we do something that's going to better suit what we need now and be agile with it?

And I think sometimes marketing organizations, especially big ones, get a little... it's what's like the 500-pound gorilla. They have so many people but they can't execute fast stuff. And so, I don't know, just going back to being agile I think is key. But then also being able to scale a process. So find a process that works and then scaling a lot of it. That was like eight rules to follow, but...

John Hunter (16:02):

I like, we've always done it that way.

Robin Clark (16:04):

God gave us 10 commandments. We can have eight freakin' rules. We're fine. It's good.

John Hunter (16:08):

We've always done it that way. See if you think about it, we wouldn't even have cars today if we kept that way of thinking. We'd just be riding horses everywhere still, right?

Rachel Andrews (16:16):

It's true that.

John Hunter (16:16):

That's a San Antonio joke.

Rachel Andrews (16:18):

All right.

John Hunter (16:21):

All right. I think that's it. Thank you very much for joining us and I want to remind people that you can subscribe to Great Events and get all the great episodes that have already been recorded.

Rachel Andrews (16:33):

It's on all major podcasts.

John Hunter (16:34):

Yeah, all major platforms. Great. See, I didn't know that.

Rachel Andrews (16:37):

Yeah, well, that's real.

John Hunter (16:38):

That's what guest hosts do, they throw a wrench in the machine. But thanks a lot, ladies. Great information and I hope everybody comes and maybe I'll get to guest host again sometime.

Robin Clark (16:50):

Yeah, absolutely.

Rachel Andrews (16:51):

Sure.

John Hunter (16:51):

Yeah. Or I can be in the hot seat.

Robin Clark (16:52):

Yeah, that's also fine.

Rachel Andrews (16:55):

Yeah, that's great.

John Hunter (16:55):

All right.

Robin Clark (16:55):

Thanks, John.

John Hunter (16:55):

Thanks, everyone.

Robin Clark (16:56):

Thank you.

Rachel Andrews (16:56):

Thank you everyone.

Alyssa Peltier (17:00):

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that Subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews (17:10):

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu (17:20):

Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews (17:27):

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Felicia Asiedu (17:37):

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier (17:46):

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.