Case Study: Sales Targeting at all Levels

Key Challenges

•   Create an improved workflow for managing sales targets.

•   Create a web-based data application that sales managers and executives can access and modify.

•   Incorporate new functionality into the already-familiar Excel environment.

A Better Way to Track Sales Targets

Sales targets, perhaps more than any other business metric, reflect the intersection of the existing status of your business with what you hope to achieve. “How much of our product can we sell this quarter?” is a question that spans the entirety of previous, current, and planned efforts. Engineers design and build products, product managers improve products’ appeal and capabilities, and marketing activities attract new clients. The sales team is directly responsible for transforming all this labor into tangible gains. But at the center of all this, well, work, is the fact that running a successful business is about more than just producing a great product—it requires concerted effort and successful communication from individuals across multiple business divisions. Sales targets are a crucial final form of communication before a product is sold to a customer. Sales targets inform management and sales teams of performance expectations, allowing the management team to set clear goals and the sales team to meet those goals.

Our client needed a system that would allow their sales teams to upload sales targets for different products across varying geographies and segments. Their existing solution, a collection of Excel spreadsheets, was a major pain point. To broadcast sales targets across the company, sales managers and sellers recorded sales targets into spreadsheets. This process was repeated until all the sales targets were recorded, then the spreadsheets were collated and consolidated. Next, the spreadsheets were manually dumped into SQL sources without an approval workflow. This resulted in several challenges for our client. First and foremost, our client did not have the technical capability to directly push data to their data sources. More importantly, they could not manage their sales target workflow via data sources. Our client’s sales managers and sellers needed to be able to contribute to the workflow so that their sales targets could be authenticated and directly approved by the sales managers and upper management. As a result, our solution needed to convert the data from the Excel spreadsheets into a web-based application that sales managers and executives could access and use.

Our Process

Because our primary goal was to enable sales managers and sellers to upload and view sales targets across different geographies and segments, the usability of our solution was of the utmost importance. We needed to equip sales managers and sellers to individually authenticate their sales targets on a platform accessible to all. This, in turn, meant that whatever solution we proposed needed to immediately improve the everyday working conditions of the sales managers and sellers. Our solution needed to be intuitive, and adoption had to be instantaneous. We also knew our client’s sales managers and sellers already used Excel every day. As a result, we developed an MVC framework Excel Office app that utilized a SQL backend.

Challenges of Scale

Our initial implementation was tremendously successful. It was this success, in fact, that led to the most significant challenge that accompanied the project. We designed our solution explicitly for subsidiary-level sales managers, but following our implementation of the app, our client requested that we expand access to the app to include sales unit managers. When these managers attempted to examine multiple geographies and segmentations within the app, reports took far too long to load. To address this issue, we customized the amount of data that users needed to load depending on their job role. Now, sales managers were first presented with a report customized to their job role and geography, though they could still generate reports uniquely suited for their needs if a project took them beyond their typical responsibilities.

Empowered Sales Managers

Our Excel app helps 6,000 users upload their sales targets every day. The feedback we received on the project gives us a great deal of pride: “Your app empowered our sales managers and sellers to manage their targets effectively, and it immediately made their lives easier.” Because we are a consulting company, all our solutions require us to understand our clients’ problems as our own. The fact that our solution immediately made our client’s sales managers working lives better meant that we were well in tune with our client’s needs.

Case Study: Creating Custom Reports Has Never Been Easier

Key Challenges

•   Enable users to build reports using multiple business intelligence (BI) sources.

•   Create filters to set global parameters that are reflected in all reports.

•   Create structured report navigation.

Dealing with the Proliferation of BI Platforms

Organizations increasingly rely on BI reporting to analyze up-to-the-minute sales and marketing data. Most organizations address their analytics needs on a piecemeal basis. It’s not uncommon for companies to develop reports on HTML5, Power BI, Tableau, and other platforms simultaneously. The variety of platforms makes creating custom reports difficult. For example, if an account executive has a critical meeting and needs visuals from multiple reports, he typically must rely on programmers to pull the information he needs and generate a new custom report.

We created a tool that allows non-programmers to create custom reports, regardless of the source of the data. With our Power BI Global Filter, users can easily navigate between reports on various platforms, create custom reports, and filter the results to display only the data they need. Our Global Filter tool screens reports based on the job role selected, making relevant data easy to find. Our tool even allows users to share default views of reports so that the receiver immediately knows what information to focus on.

Using Our Power BI Global Filter

Users begin by selecting their job role (Figure 1). Global Filter then refines the results, displaying only reports that are relevant to the selected role.

Figure 1: Role selection prompt

Users can select specific reports using the navigation menu on the left side of the app (Figure 2). This customizable menu allows users to quickly navigate report hierarchies. Once the user selects a report, it is displayed in the right-hand frame.

Figure 2: Navigation screen

Users can also create collections of reports that are tailored to specific roles or work areas (Figure 3). For example, let’s say a user selects a filter to only display sales data for the Pacific Northwest. Once applied, only sales data from the Pacific Northwest will be shown on all reports in that collection. Pacific Northwest sales data is then shown, regardless of which reporting platform the data originates from.

Figure 3: Navigation customization

Finally, users can create custom reports (Figure 4). This feature allows users to select visuals from any report, regardless of BI platform, and compile it into a single source. For example, a user could select one chart from a Power BI report and another from a Tableau report and combine them in the same custom Global Filter report. Users can also add unique metadata to reports detailing the data source, user concerns, or other pertinent information.

Figure 4: Custom report creation

Create Reports Without Compromises

With our Global Filter, you can reduce the time it takes to find reports, apply global filters to edit reports more easily than ever, and even create custom reports to suit your specific business needs. You’re no longer restricted by visuals that are located on disparate reporting platforms. Global Filter lets you gather the exact information you need without complex coding, saving you time and giving you complete control over your analytics visualization.

Case Study: Connecting Databases Across Business Divisions

Key Challenges

•   Merge customer identities that are siloed in various databases.

•   Create “golden records” that allow division-level databases to identify specific customers.

•   Allow administrator access to override data conflicts.

Abundant Data Means Complexity and Redundancy

In ever-changing business environments, systems and databases must evolve to meet increased demands. Business growth inevitably leads to increasing database complexity and often necessitates infrastructure improvements. This new infrastructure requires data to be transitioned and reentered, leaving room for clerical mistakes. As a result, records struggle with inconsistency and redundancy between the various departmental databases. Ultimately, this means that organizations are not able to provide the highest level of service to their customers. Master data management (MDM) is a process that creates a master-level dataset of information, allowing interdivisional communication without the need for costly integration of division-level datasets.

Our client, a large retailer, needed a way to merge customer identities that were siloed within databases in different divisions. The company’s numerous business divisions sold a variety of products. But because they could not track customer identities across business divisions, sales and marketing teams couldn’t coordinate activities. Customers who had just purchased a product still received promotional emails for the very same product. Product sales information was not utilized for future sales and marketing efforts. In some cases, customer records were even duplicated within the same department. The systems hosting the departmental datasets were tailored to the specific needs of each business division, so unifying these systems directly would have been prohibitively expensive.

Our Process

Our client hired us to improve their database accuracy and efficiency. We started by creating reporting copies of each dataset. The next step was to create “golden records”—master customer identities that enabled division-level databases to identify unique customers, despite a multitude of duplicate stored identities.

To create the golden records from the various customer identities siloed within the different divisional databases, we extracted each of the ten divisional databases onto the reporting platform, then cleaned and profiled them. Next, we matched the various records using customized rules, fuzzy lookups, and machine learning procedures. We then deleted duplicate records and standardized and consolidated customer identity values. Machine learning algorithms then identified similar records and linked them, allowing one record to be identified as the master record amongst a group of similar records. We then attributed the master record to the customer identities within the siloed divisional databases. Once mastered, the data was made available for use with the existing systems.

This entire process is now automated and occurs on a recurring basis. Golden records are added and refined to keep pace with changes in the transactional data. While the solution takes advantage of data about customers across various systems to improve understanding of the customer, data security and privacy requirements have been observed. The solution is entirely compliant with the regulations established by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Although the process is now automated, we built administrative modules that allow users to address cases where data cannot be properly processed through machine intelligence. Matching rules, thresholds, and other system parameters can also be managed within the administrative module.

Unified Customer Identities Across Divisional Databases

Mastering data from siloed databases allowed our client to clean the raw data, apply business rules to validate the data, and better track customer experiences across business divisions without integrating division-level datasets. The improved data management led to improved customer service. Using our master data management system, marketing and sales can now better address customer needs. Now, customer’s purchases are accurately tracked, and relevant information is sent to them regarding promotions or offers.

Case Study: Achieving Long-Term Goals Means Making Incremental Changes

Key Challenges

•   Integrate two SharePoint portals that are used daily by thousands of team members.

•   Incorporate existing third-party applications into the integrated portal without increasing costs or resource usage.

•   Implement incremental changes to minimize downtime.

Balancing Capabilities, Costs, and Cohesion

If you are not part of an IT company, odds are your content management system (CMS) relies at least partially on third-party applications. Third-party applications are not necessarily a bad thing—they provide many beneficial CMS services. As the number of third-party applications increases, however, integration costs rise and systems become fragmented. Companies must strike a careful balance between increasing capabilities (and costs) and maintaining a well-integrated system. Development often must take place incrementally. We help our clients navigate the tradeoffs associated with incorporating new CMS functionality to increase performance one step at a time.

One of our clients, a large retailer, approached us in 2015 to make incremental changes to their SharePoint-based employee portal. Their portal allows employees to read the latest company updates and access required third-party applications. The client independently owns several thousand stores. Employees at these stores accessed the portal with no issues. But the client also needed to share company updates and application access with their licensee stores.

Maintaining consistent customer service and brand image, regardless of whether a customer visits a partner store or a licensee store, is crucial to our client's success. To ensure consistency, the client was responsible for training and educating the employees at the partner stores and the licensee stores. But because our client did not employ the workers at the licensee stores, the client did include them in the existing employee portal. Instead, the licensee store employees received company information through hard copies and emails. Our client needed to be able to onboard new employees at their licensee stores and provide them with company updates while maintaining a separate SharePoint portal for their full-time employees.

Our Process

In order to centralize licensee store resources, our client asked us to build a licensee employee portal. Ideally, the client wanted to be able to push updates and information simultaneously to the main employee portal and the licensee employee portal. We began by cloning the full-time employee portal onto a separate system. This ensured that our client was able to house all the information needed for the employees of the licensee stores, and at the time, this was all our client wanted. But this solution introduced a logistical problem. Both portals naturally underwent incremental change as a result of their slightly different roles, but our client still needed the portals to perform the same functions. Because our client was using two entirely different portals, updates meant the same code had to be written twice. To increase the efficiency of the implementation, we generalized the logic that ran both portals. Now, changes made to both portals were pushed to both concurrently.

Challenges Along the Way

Working in a production environment that extensively relied on third-party applications presented many unique challenges. Due to the size of our client’s SharePoint farms, for example, we could not load the entire production environment in lower testing environments. Even though we used proxies to reproduce errors, we could not be certain that bug fixes would be successful until they were implemented in the production environment. This challenge was then exacerbated by the size of our client. Our client is responsible for over 10,000 stores. This means that any proposed changes to the SharePoint farms must go through a lengthy vetting process of at least three weeks.

We knew that for a project of this scale, mistakes or bugs were unacceptable. Any mistake that resulted in downtime could interrupt the workflow of thousands of company and licensee employees. Over our years-long relationship with our client, we worked hard to develop trust and demonstrate our competence through reliable results. Reflecting on the scale and duration of the project, the project lead emphasized the importance of patience. “We cannot be impatient, and we must be very thorough in our work. If we say, ‘this is the hotfix,’ we have to be absolutely certain in our work so that it doesn’t backfire.” Our diligence and attention to detail paid off. “We had to prove that we were the best,” our project lead noted, “but as long as you are technically capable and thorough in your work, I think the work speaks for itself.”

Case Study: Boosting Black Friday Sales

Key Challenges

•   Create automated emails and a dashboard allowing leadership to analyze real-time sales and promotion data.

•   Combine multiple database platforms into a single information portal.

•   Implement secure access allowing only authorized personnel to view the sales data.

Black Friday Sales Created Unprecedented Data Volume

Our client is a business strategist in charge of his company’s brick-and-mortar and online stores. His company wanted to coordinate promotional campaigns with near real-time sales performance during the busy Thanksgiving shopping season. We’d worked with our client for many years, and this latest project offered our client and ourselves a real chance to excel. In 2016, we had helped him automate retail reporting, which allowed reports to be delivered every fifteen minutes. Now, our client was tasked with automating the reporting of all sales data—a collection of data that was 100 times larger than the reports we had automated the previous year. With just two months until Black Friday, we hurriedly set to work.

Our Process

From the outset, we knew this project presented unique challenges. Each retail division had a different reporting system. The brick-and-mortar stores relied on custom on-premise databases. But due to the sheer volume of the data we needed to collect, we knew that we could not process and report data at this scale using the on-premise solutions. We would need to use a suite of Azure technologies. These technologies, however, came with their own set of problems. At the time, Azure Analytic Services was not yet out of preview. Many of the features we needed lacked documentation. With these unknowns in mind, we conducted a series of proof of concepts over a period of three weeks. We then vetted our assumptions, communicated the results with our client, and determined our final architecture design. At the time, no one had hosted a project of this scale within Azure services before. We were working in uncharted territory, but our client had complete confidence that we would deliver.

We began implementation immediately after conducting our proof of concepts. We initially had some challenges getting data at the rate we needed. We had access to real-time sales reports from retailers and online stores but did not have access to these reports from two specialized business divisions. “A lot of my time was spent reaching out to folks who managed that data,” our project lead observed. “Once their teams saw the initial version of the build, they were willing to give us access to the transactional data because they understood how successful they could be with our implementation.” Once again, our Agile methodology proved crucial throughout this entire process. Because we submitted deliverables immediately upon completion and finished the implementation ahead of schedule, we were able to win the trust of both specialized business divisions in the span of a few short weeks, despite having never worked with them before.

We finished development and basic testing two weeks before Thanksgiving. We continued running end-to-end tests improving our implementation until the Wednesday before the holiday. Our teams were absolutely committed to the successful closure of the project: “The weekend before Thanksgiving, the entire team and I worked very hard. I don’t know how much sleep I got those five days, but I can tell you this: I was awake most nights,” our project lead said with a laugh. That week, our teams busily worked, simulating the data reporting load of the Thanksgiving shopping season. Finally, it was time to put our implementation to the test.

The first three days of the holiday weekend passed without a hitch. But on the fourth day, a minor setback arose. Because we were pulling the data in near real time, we were creating a lot of files. We were creating roughly fifty files every thirty seconds, and the data reporting job started running slower and slower. Initially, this was not a problem, but when the job started taking over twenty-five minutes, our engineering team stepped in. If the data reporting job took over thirty minutes, it would eat into the timeframe allotted for the next data reporting cycle. This would have then disrupted all the reports.

Our team first implemented a quick fix that compiled the files as they came in. This fixed the setback for a day. By the next day, the team reached a permanent solution; files were defragged and only then compiled.

Improved Sales Reporting Without a Hitch

Our work resulted in a tremendous triumph for our client. Despite the technical challenges we faced during the Thanksgiving festivities, there was no impact on end users. Each of the 125 email reports was sent to promotional staff on time. Our client made five promotional decisions based on the reporting that we did, and each decision resulted in improved revenue results. Our reports were widely used; the dashboard that collated the sales reporting data ranked 100 out of 75,000 dashboards used by the organization.

Modern Marketing Breathes New Life into Time-Honored Business Ideas

Figure 1: MAQ Software solutions connect technology to business leadership needs

At MAQ Software, we’ve spent 18 years developing marketing technology (MarTech) solutions to address our clients’ business needs. Today, more than ever, businesses rely on data-driven technology to inform marketing and business decisions and, ultimately, develop better connections with their customers. Savvy decision makers know that customer focus is the key to modern marketing success.

The four P's of traditional marketing, product, place, promotion, and price, have now become the four E's. Customers expect a comprehensive experience across all touchpoints with modern companies. Customers require the ability to purchase your product everywhere, and they urgently flock to the evangelists who best promote their products and services. Once customers have been evangelized, they earnestly exchange the benefits of your product or service online. To market successfully, modern businesses must anticipate and cater to customer needs instead of hoping to simply push products on them. 

Management teams must dedicate significant resources to developing tools that utilize data to better understand customer needs. The better businesses understand their customers’ needs, the better prepared they are to create products or services that satisfy them.

Even with the advantage of modern marketing tools, understanding the needs of individual customers is not an easy task. Top management will always be accountable to shareholders for generating a return on their marketing expenditures. But evaluating the effectiveness of the huge number of potential marketing approaches is often difficult. Marketing executives must optimize their spending to generate the highest level of customer engagement while accounting for ever-changing competitive environments. Fortunately, modern MarTech offers many solutions that help executives measure the performance of their marketing campaigns. Executives can use this information to adjust course as campaign or budget demands inevitably shift.

Figure 1 is a chart we’ve created to show a holistic view of how our MarTech services benefit business needs. The chart divides customer touchpoints into four categories:

•   Advertising and promotions

•   Content and experiences

•   Social and relationships

•   Commerce and sales

Advertising and Promotions

Our work in advertising and promotions falls broadly into three categories: search and social advertising, programmatic advertising, and native advertising. Technology plays a key role in enabling and enhancing these customer touchpoints.

Social media advertising includes digital advertising and influencer marketing. With modern social platforms, businesses can tailor ads to reach specific demographics. Promotions can appear in the form of traditional ads showcasing a product or service or as promoted posts or tweets.

Influencer marketing efforts include identifying influencers, determining the impact influencers have on marketing outcomes, and integrating influencer content or tweets as part of social media advertising.

Technology is rapidly replacing human intervention in buying digital advertising space. Technology even determines the amount to pay for digital advertising spaces. Neural networks enable programmatic ad purchases. Semantic analysis is used to integrate native advertising on digital platforms.

Advertorials, or native advertising, blur the line between advertising and tutorials. These promotional tools blend the ad experience with the form and function of the user experience.

For an example of some of our work in advertising and promotion, check out this case study.

Content and Experiences

We also help our clients create unique content and experiences through content marketing, campaign and lead management, and CMS and web experience management.

Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Ultimately, the goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action. Web analytics are used to optimize content marketing to identify popular content and drive content marketing efforts. Planning and analytics tools are used for campaign and lead management.

Marketing campaign management involves planning, executing, tracking, and analyzing direct marketing campaigns. These tasks span entire marketing campaigns.

Lead management is designed to generate potential clients. Lead management is generally operated through a variety of marketing campaigns or programs.

Content Management Systems are used to build, launch, manage, and host websites. Web Experience Management is the process of managing the all-round experience of web users across various touchpoints in the journey through an organization’s web presence.

Finally, clickstream analytics is used to analyze and optimize content management and web experience management.

For an example of some of our work in content and experiences, check out this case study.

Social and Relationships

Building lasting relationships with customers is a huge component of modern marketing. To build relationships, we focus on community channels and reviews, customer advocacy and loyalty, and feedback and chat.

Marketers engage with customers through community channels and forums where customers leave reviews or opinions about the offerings.

Customer advocacy is a form of customer service in which customer desires are put before other more traditional business needs. Customer advocacy represents a dramatic shift in the modern business environment, which is supported by customer-focused customer service and marketing techniques through methodologies such as Voice of the Customer (VOC). Customer advocacy rewards businesses with loyal customers who advocate for their favorite products and brands.

Marketers must maintain open channels of communication, so customers or potential customers can reach out to them through feedback options and chat channels. Technology-enabled sentiment analysis is used to analyze large swaths of community forums and reviews to identify and decipher customer sentiment on product and service offerings.

Referral and reward tools are used to drive customer advocacy and nurture customer loyalty through loyalty and reward programs.

Chatbots are primarily used to support 24/7 customer chat channels and to provide an interactive experience for customers.

For an example of some of our work in social and relationships, check out this case study.

Commerce and Sales

To facilitate commerce and sales, we help businesses with affiliate marketing, proximity marketing, and partner and channel marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which a business rewards affiliates for attracting customers. Affiliate reporting is used to track and manage affiliates' marketing efforts. Funnel management tools are used to manage engagement with partners and facilitate lead nurturing and sales conversion.

Proximity marketing advertises content based on its geographic location. Content is only received by individuals who wish to receive it, and they must have the right equipment.

Because of advances in technology, proximity marketing can now even more easily target specific groups within a given location. For example, content in tourist hot spots can be managed so that it is only sent to foreign devices. Communications can also be customized based on time and location; content at a conference venue can be customized depending on the event in progress.

A partner collaborates with a manufacturer to market and sell a manufacturer's products, services, or technologies. This is typically achieved with a co-branding relationship. Channel partners can be distributors, vendors, retailers, consultants, systems integrators, or any other such organization.

For an example of some of our work in commerce and sales, check out this case study.

Pulling it All Together

These technology-enabled marketing activities and tools generate data in isolated silos. Successful marketing organizations leverage data generated by these disparate systems to report on the entire gamut of marketing activities. These reports provide organizations with a holistic view of their entire marketing effort.

The most successful companies go one step further. Successful companies feed the data from the disparate silos into the rest of their marketing systems and tools, allowing them to fully leverage their data in all their operations.

We are continually motivated by the ever-changing MarTech landscape. Our expertise in emerging technologies enables us to create solutions that are perfectly tailored to our customers’ marketing needs. The result is that our clients have the peace of mind that their marketing budgets are being used as effectively as possible to better reach, analyze, and address their customers’ needs.

References

The 4Ps Are Out, the 4Es Are In

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2018)

Case Study: Covering Events from Start to Finish

Key Challenges

•   Create a platform that allows conference hosts to facilitate and track conference events from start to finish.

•   Enable multiple business divisions to collaborate on budgets and marketing campaigns.

•   Create a comprehensive view of session attendance, attendee feedback, sentiment, and attendee demographics.

Hosting Conferences Is Not Easy

Conference hosting is a complex operation. A successful conference requires careful budgeting, executing multiple marketing campaigns, planning sessions, monitoring session attendance, tracking attendee feedback, and ensuring that the conference meets business objectives. If you have ever hosted a conference, you’ve likely spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours diligently marketing your event to ensure a good turnout. At some point, you probably wondered what people thought of your event, whether they liked it, and whether their professional aspirations were aided by attending. You also likely wondered whether there was a better way to market and manage your event.

Our client, an internationally recognized software company, asked us to create an end-to-end event platform to manage a conference of 30,000 attendees. The client wanted to track all the marketing activities related to the conference. The platform would allow marketers to track budgets, drive weekly campaigns, analyze marketing channel performance, measure attendee demographics, compile and compare attendee sentiment from before, during, and after the conference, and evaluate the return on investment. In short, the platform would enable our client to run the event from start to finish.

Complete Event Management on a Single Platform

Running a conference with 30,000 attendees requires significant preparation. One of the draws of our client’s conference is the diverse audience it attracts. The audience spans countless industries. Individual sessions and workshops were planned for a variety of job titles ranging from IT technician to CEO. Our events platform allowed the client's leadership and operations teams to execute multiple marketing campaigns, each targeting an audience segment. Unifying the budgetary information for marketing campaigns enabled an enhanced level of coordination that ultimately made the conference a success.

Our client’s marketing teams spent six months generating demand for the event. The events platform allowed marketers to forecast how many weekly registrants were needed to meet the conference’s attendance goals. The marketing teams conducted weekly campaigns. When conference attendees registered for the event, their registration information was made instantly available to the teams. This real-time data access allowed the teams to perform detailed analyses of marketing channel performance. The result was that campaigns improved each week, as the teams knew exactly which channels and demographics to target.

Registration information, pre-conference and post-conference surveys, and session surveys allowed our client to better understand attendee experience. A week before the conference began, attendees were asked to fill out a pre-conference survey. Attendees were asked questions like, “What are your professional objectives, and can this conference help you reach them?” and “Is [our client’s] brand a brand you love?” The attendees then answered to what extent they agreed or disagreed. The events platform allowed our client to analyze the survey results in detail to learn how to better serve the attendees’ needs.

Finally, after all the preparation, it was time for the conference itself. The client issued each attendee a conference badge. The badge was scanned before entering each session or workshop. The session attendance information provided our client even more insights into the attendee experience. Our client used this information to evaluate session demand in real time. Because the client knew which sessions were filled, they could schedule additional makeup sessions during the later days of the conference.

Successful Results

A week after the conference, attendees were sent a final survey. The survey featured the same questions from an earlier pre-conference survey, allowing the client to measure sentiment shift. The client was now able to evaluate how attendees felt about their brand before the event, how attendees’ perception of the company shifted during the event, and how attendees felt about their brand after the event. The information allowed trends to be tracked across countless metrics. Using the data gathered from the event, our client determined whether certain industries liked the conference more than others and whether the enjoyment of the conference varied by job title.

Most importantly, our client observed positive ROI in all their metrics. These metrics included satisfaction, sales lead generation, viewership, support cost reduction, and demand generation channels. Using our comprehensive events platform, our client compiled the data from their conference in just one week—a process that used to take six months. The ability to use one platform to host an event from start to finish resulted in significant benefits at every stage in the process.