Outbound Lead Generation & Marketing Team Collaboration: Events

This is the third post in a 5-part series on how managing inter-team collaboration can improve results for outbound lead generation teams.
In my last post I covered how companies and teams can benefit from creating a marketing feedback loop to give marketing real time insights from the market. This can be especially valuable at expansion-stage companies that are exploring new markets to sell into. In this post I will cover another way that marketing can collaborate with outbound lead generation teams: events.

Determining the True Value of Events: Cost per Lead (CPL)

Events such as trade shows and webinars can be a great opportunity for the outbound lead generation team to collaborate with marketing. From marketing’s perspective, the costs of trade shows and events are fixed costs. What isn’t fixed, however, is the cost per lead (CPL) generated by those trade shows and events. The more leads that marketing walks away from an event with, the lower the CPL for that event.
From that perspective, it makes sense for marketing to do as much as they can to get as many leads as possible out of every event. That said, many early and expansion-stage companies with limited sales and marketing resources allow events to coast by with very little pre-work, and/or follow up.
An outbound lead generation team can help maximize the impact of an event by driving prospects to register for an event, calling registrants to drive people to meetings at your booth, or setting appointments with target prospects following up after the event. This can add a tremendous amount of value to just about any marketing team.

Be Careful Not to Go Overboard with Your Helping Hand

While an outbound lead generation team can help in this way, outbound lead generation team leaders must exercise caution with this approach, and must be very clear on what the outbound lead generation team’s purpose is.
Your outbound lead generation team should be focused on a list of companies in a narrowly defined target market segment. By asking your outbound lead generation team to also lend a hand driving traffic to an event or following up with attendees, you risk distracting them from their target list of companies. This may not seem problematic, but here is an example of where it could be:

An Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company focused on the mid-sized healthcare and pharmaceuticals markets sponsors an event like VMworld (VMware’s annual cloud computing and virtualization conference). However, the attendees at VMWorld come from companies of a wide range of sizes and industries, and attendees from the healthcare and pharmaceuticals market segments only make up a small portion of the attendees. If this company’s outbound lead generation team is tasked with following up with all of the attendees, or even all of the booth visitors, they will be wasting their time with companies that aren’t on their target lists, and probably are a lot less likely to buy from them.

Best Uses of Marketing & Sales Team Collaboration Around Events

Outbound lead generation teams should be leveraging marketing events on calls with their prospects. Interesting industry events are great talking points for a call or to mention in an e-mail to keep the content relevant and fresh. However, by collaborating with marketing teams more closely both the marketing team and the outbound lead generation team will be able to achieve better results without creating a distraction for the outbound lead generation team from their targeted list efforts.
Here are three ways in which marketing and outbound lead generation teams can collaborate better on events:

1. Marketing should provide the outbound lead generation team with a mini asset package for each specific event including: messaging for the event, related talking points, one or two sample e-mails that can be sent to prospects, expected attendee profiles, and specific instructions for how to setup meetings at the booth/register attendees/etc.
2. Marketing should include the outbound lead generation team on promotional emails for the event that are being sent out to prospects so that they see what messaging and touch points are being made in parallel to their efforts.
3. The lead generation team should identify companies on their target accounts lists that would be interested in attending the event/webinar and personally invite them rather than just calling everyone on an event list.

In my next post I’ll discuss how list generation can be a key area for collaboration between marketing and the outbound lead generation team.