42 Data
DATA MATTERS
Some 80 % of sales leads are never followed up . Shea Bennett , head of strategy , Identity , digs deep into the world of data to find out why
here ’ s a statistic that ’ s been touted around the events industry for as long as I can remember , which goes a little something like : After an event , 80 % of sales leads are never followed up . 80 %!
If you ’ ve ever worked in sales or marketing , that stat probably feels like it has some validity . Some weight . If you haven ’ t , I know what you ’ re thinking : sales people are lazy . Which is often true . But it ’ s not always as simple as just picking up the phone or firing off an email . More often than your common-or-garden person would perhaps care to believe , it ’ s the quality of the lead that ’ s the roadblock .
In 2020 and well ahead of the peak of the pandemic outbreak , Identity pivoted to offering virtual event solutions for our clients , with great success . One of the primary USPs that made virtual event delivery so attractive was the end-to-end abundance of rich , quality data . In days of yore , data acquisition at in-person events was , at best , problematic .
Shea Bennett
Here ’ s the rub : data is only of value if it ’ s both accurate and impartial . Throw human error into the mix and things get messy . Studies show that manual data entry with no verification layer steps has an error rate as high as 4 %. That means the error rate for data entered once , without any further verification , is 400 per 10,000 entries .
But this is just stage one . What happens when you have to re-enter all of that data into another system ? Another study found that when manually entering data into simple spreadsheets , the probability of a human error was between 18 % and 40 %. Compounded , these are hugely significant numbers that massively impact even small datasets .
Virtual events , by design , both greatly nullified the human error issue and opened the doorway to a veritable smorgasbord of data . For the first time in the history of our industry , data touchpoints all the way from pre-event marketing and comms through to live delivery and post-event reporting , could be tracked , quantified and analysed .
Our clients loved it . Suddenly , they were awash with data . Data that showed them what was and ( importantly ) what virtual events , by design , both greatly nullified the human error issue and opened the doorway to a veritable smorgasbord of data . For the first time in the history of our industry , data touchpoints all the way from pre-event marketing and comms through to live delivery and post-event reporting , could be tracked , quantified and analysed .
Happy days . Except , now , after almost two years , face-to-face events are back . Which is of course glorious news , but it presents us with something of a problem . Clients have been spoiled with data and now have a deep awareness of the value that it brings . The best of anything is almost always data-driven , but that ’ s an impossibility without a data graph that runs across an entire campaign . The conundrum isn ’ t just limited to lead generation , either ; what about behaviour at events ? How people www . conference-news . co . uk