Moodys

Moody's Analytics provides software, advisory services, and research tools for measuring and managing risk in a constantly evolving marketplace. With cumbersome manual processes slowing the sales pipeline, Moody's Analytics knew it was losing value on leads. The firm processed leads through a manual scorecard system and there was sluggish follow up with the sales team. They knew automating lead qualification and distribution would increase lead value and optimize opportunities for sales to convert business.

Path to Success: Moody's Analytics

With this goal in mind, Marianne Steckert, Moody's Analytic's Senior Director of Events and Outreach in the Americas, needed to identify the best methodology for measuring the value of each event within the events program in a way that would offer insights to support an overall events strategy. "The events and outreach team in the Americas is responsible for developing strategy that aligns Moody's events activities with market needs," says Marianne. "We play a vital role in helping the organization find, win, and retain business in new and established markets."

One avenue for measuring the value of these events was to measure the value and long-term sales conversions of the leads generated from them. It was a concept that the team had been chasing already, but with several manual processes that were slowing down the process and reducing the overall value of the lead over time.

"Understanding the value delivered from leads is one good strategy to get at ROI—and ROI is playing a big role in our go/no-go decisions for events."

Marianne Steckert, Sr. Director of Americas Events & Outreach

Providing a Historic View

The existing tech stack proved problematic for the Moody's team. "We had a stand-alone registration system that captured basic information about registrants and participants at Moody's events," said Marianne. "And we obtained registration and relevant lists from non-Moody's events that we shared in advance of the event with sales and marketing. After those events, we collected business cards and notes collected by our internal attendees."

All of this lead information was then manually processed against a scorecard that included qualitative and quantitative measures that helped Moody's sales and marketing teams track value. "And, lastly, we chased leads. And when I say chasing the lead, it truly was," said Marianne, citing Moody's lengthy average product sales cycle of 12 to 18 months. The dynamic nature of the sales team resulted in a shifting chain of responsibility that meant leads could be handed off to new point people at any given time.

Cvent Integrations Answer the Challenge

To that end, the ability to understand not only the initial value of the lead but the current status and the upstream history of the lead was of critical importance to Moody's. The answer was to integrate three different technology systems that could capture and score the initial value and continue to support that value as the lead flowed through the sales and marketing cycle. Without that support, the value of the lead could easily diminish—and ultimately diminish the value of the event as well.

"There were three systems in play: our event management system—Cvent— that the events and outreach team had implemented on our own, plus a marketing technology system and customer relationship management system, both of which we are users on," said Marianne. She adds, "We worked very closely with counterparts in the organization—including marketing and data teams—to ensure the integration was getting us the information we needed. Some of the information was complex, so we had a consultant or two help us develop the APIs we needed to get it."

The integration was not without complexities, she admits, noting that the system will always be a work in progress as they improve data capture and generate more databased insights. However, it is a vast improvement over the previous system and one which allows her team to continually grow in their process improvements. "We also learned about defining objectives ahead of time and that you have to be prepared to sell the value of the project to the organization to get buy-in to make it work," she adds. "Just because our team saw value in the effort, it didn't mean that our stakeholder saw it immediately as well."

A Holistic View of Success

In the end, however, Marianne's team have facilitated a seamless flow of information through three technology systems via a network of APIs. This integration has enabled events, sales, and marketing to work as a cohesive unit to support the sales lead lifecycle and convert more real business for Moody's on the leads that come out of the organization's event activities. "We can score leads and have them assigned to sales automatically and at any point, we can now see the value of the lead through our CRM system," she explains. "We also have some system generated ROI reports which allow us to look at event effectiveness."

Moody's is already using these reports to help evaluate individual events, but Marianne is realistic when it comes to evaluating event effectiveness from a data-based perspective only. "As much as we want to completely automate ROI, there are certain qualitative measures that won't be captured in automated systems and will always require manual interventions," she says. "But understanding the value delivered from leads is one good strategy to get at ROI—and ROI is playing a big role in our go/no-go decisions for events."