Conversations
Conversations: Marius Milcher on Powerful New Salesforce Integration — A “Window Into RainFocus”
11 Apr 2024 | Jessica F. Lillian | 4 minutes
From the start, RainFocus’ comprehensive event data has helped both sales and marketing teams build effective programs and outreach — and enabled organizations ultimately close more deals. Seamless integrations are the key to making all this vital information flow organization-wide. The latest game-changing feature set is a particular boon for sales teams. Thanks to a new Salesforce integration, reps can view event engagement data and take relevant direct actions with their valued clients and prospects right within their familiar Salesforce environment.
We sat down with Marius Milcher, group product manager, strategic integrations at RainFocus, to get all the exciting details.
How did the idea first come about? What were the initial goals and priorities?
A core value prop for RainFocus is bridging events, sales, and marketing. Events are a key part of an organization’s sales and marketing processes.
Being able to report on the effectiveness of events is critical, and the RainFocus platform is already the source of truth for events — information on attendees, exhibitors, etc. But for many organizations, sales data lives in Salesforce. How do we bridge these two worlds?
This integration is a window into RainFocus for the sales team. Reps can see event engagement to guide customer interactions based on products that the people within their accounts are interested in.
Expanding further into Salesforce drives engagement at events. For example, we included functionality for reps to directly submit nominations into RainFocus. They can also create and send personalized agendas, including sessions, meetings, and extra activities, to their customers and prospects.
Overall, the integration serves two important purposes: event engagement insights to guide sales conversations and functionality to drive engagement within events. It also allows for more effective, comprehensive reporting on event ROI.
What are some specific ways that having sales working more directly with RainFocus through this integration can enhance that alignment between marketing and sales?
Transparency and accountability are key. Both teams need clarity on event engagement. Having information readily available reduces the amount of back-and-forth needed. For example, when an event starts, the sales rep doesn’t need to constantly message the marketing team or the event director asking whether their customer arrived yet, who attended various sessions, and so on.
Having all that information available at their fingertips means less “noise” for events and marketing. They can just focus on putting on a great event.
Activation metrics also help with getting sales’ help in driving engagement before, during, and after the event. They’re closest to prospects and customers, so their participation can really drive success. Increasing attendance isn’t just a pure marketing play — the team can recruit sales with the help of the integrated data.
Post-event, all the available data — both for the individual event at the session level and in aggregate over time — provides valuable information that informs sales motions.
How much can organizations customize the reports and metrics they want to use?
The Salesforce integration includes eight out-of-the-box reports that cover common questions you might ask of your event data. For example, teams often want to know about accounts that have not yet registered for the event. They also want to know about unattributed attendees — the folks who have registered but don’t match any contact or lead yet.
The sample dashboards and templates can be customized to fit every organization’s needs and exactly how they want to structure that data. They serve in-person, virtual, and hybrid events. All the info is within Salesforce, and data can be analyzed by event type.
Finally, what has client and user feedback been so far?
When we made the official launch announcement at INSIGHT, we received very positive feedback at the event and afterward. Since then, we’ve conducted a lot of demos, and many clients are now in the requirements-gathering and setup phase.
The events business is very seasonal, so companies usually wait until after a major event cycle concludes to fully implement a new technology. With any enterprise software project, approvals and permissions can take time. By starting now, they’ll be ready for their registration launches for their fall conference season.
One of the most exciting things about this integration is the broad support it provides. The app itself focuses on sales personas with its utilities and features such as targeted agendas that are meant for sales to drive engagement.
But it helps marketing as well. These teams can create campaigns and attribute event attendance within those campaigns in Salesforce. In this way, the teams can meet in the app, again enhancing alignment.
Clients appreciate the hub-and-spoke model. The RainFocus platform is at the core of it all as the source of truth and system of record, and now they can get an even better ROI on that platform investment.