You Ask, I Answer: Quantifying Hallway Conversations?

In today's episode, John asks, any thoughts on how to quantify online social media interactions at a conference versus those that happen in hallways and bars. I'm not sure that you could. Umline social media interactions are pretty straightforward, particularly those that are in public. Um your average marketing automation system that if it's any good at all can pull in social media data from public uh channels and store that in the marketing automation system or forward it onto the CRM so that you can see who you're interacting with and uh append that to existing records if you have those social handles. One of the challenges you'll run into is that the social handles of individuals may not necessarily be associated with you know companies or deals.

So you will have to do some cleanup there to be able to see what are the interactions that you're having on social media and how does that relate to um what you see in your CRM. The bigger challenge is the hallways and bars, the offline. I mean, there are there are ways that you could theoretically um log all that stuff. Uh you could uh you could have a a voice recorder, you know, and uh and a microphone just wear it, you know, and a big shirt that says I'm recording all the time. Otherwise you are violating wiretap laws.

Um so you could in theory have this on all the time and just record every single conversation you have, and then you have to take this uh and send it to a transcription service to transcribe it and annotate it. But realistically, realistically, probably the only way to do that at an event would be for sales professionals to to log their interactions to log their contacts and say, Hey, I was at this event and this is these are the people I met, and these in the interactions we had. Um and uh here's the things that were discussed. You know, we we've all been the that person who you get home from the event, you got a big pile of business cards, you know, stacked up on your desk. And if you were really clever, um you remembered to actually write something down on the cards that give you some semblance of what it was that you talked to this person about.

Um but for the most part, that's gonna be that's probably gonna be the easiest and best ways to uh to log those interactions. Now, here's the challenge, um quantifying them in terms of what the value they provide is. Again with the online ones, because it's all within you know the click stream and you can detect that activity and move it in you know, into deals and things in your CRM. You can start to estimate some of the interaction value, but even still your timeline is gonna be potentially all over the place depending on what your company sells and and how it sells it. You know, for my company, we were we were doing uh an analysis gosh, when was that?

A few months ago. And uh we were trying to do attribution on uh particular deal types, where like where did this this come from? And one of them was a contact uh that I had made with a person uh eight years ago. Eight years ago. Bef you know, this is trust insights is only three years old.

Uh so this predates uh this almost predates my work at the li at my previous company. And it just took that long for that person to be in a position to move up to a position in their company where they had the authority to you know to do some kind of a deal and they had a need. They had a clear need for the analytics services that we offered. And so how do you factor that into an ROI model? It's really difficult.

It's really, really difficult. At the at best, though, what you can do is log all the interactions and then look at the data over time and say, okay, what things tend to generate deals? Is it events broadly? Is it hallway conversations? Is it social media?

Is it you know stories in the newspaper? All of those things have the potential to generate business, but you don't know until you look at the data. The interactions people have at conferences, you know, I've I've seen some very skilled sales professionals uh you know have people signing deals and stuff at the bar. Um I don't know if those are legally binding if you the person was not of a clear state of mind uh while they were doing so. But I have seen people, you know, do business in the event itself.

Um certainly at trade show floors and and you know booths and things like that, you see plenty of that. But comparing the two would be even more difficult, I think, because they're different kinds of conversations, right? The interactions you have with somebody in public on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or uh Instagram are going to be different by default from you know just hanging out at the bar uh after a day at the conference. You're just gonna have very different kinds of conversations, very different kinds of interactions. I've seen some sales professionals uh behave less pro than professionally with people at conferences at the bar afterwards.

You definitely don't want that in your CRM. Um because of that, it's not a true apples to apples comparison. From the just from the data type alone, you know, online social media conversation of a person sitting in their basement or in their home office or wherever, you know, typing into a keyboard versus you know hanging out at the bar, you know, over beers. Very different kinds of interactions. So it would be somewhat foolish to try and uh create some kind of comparative method for valuation.

Like was the value of this versus that. There broadly that you could you could probably classify the interaction types and just see how they play a part, uh they play a role, but that would require fairly sophisticated modeling. Uh, that again, I don't think a lot of systems would be or I know no sales systems at all are configured to do that. You have to do that manually. Um self-reporting really is the only reasonable way to gather and analyze the hallway conversation data.

That really is it. And even then, with the online stuff, if your CRM or your marketing automation software doesn't connect to you know social inboxes, even that's going to be something of a mystery, right? If somebody you know sends you a private message on Twitter or in Facebook Messenger or whatever, um you may not necessarily get that information. Um organizations face an even greater challenge where you may have sales professionals doing stuff on their personal accounts that they probably don't want to connect to the system. I'm uh the the corporate systems, but yet the business is being done.

So again, self-reporting is going to be the way to go there. The challenge for businesses is going to be motivating sales professionals to do that self-reporting accurately and timely. Uh, this is something that I've never seen a single organization ever in my career that did not have a problem getting people to self-report. I have that problem myself, and I'm a co-owner of the company. You would think if there's anybody who had a motivation to do that, it would be the owners of the company.

But I still forget to put stuff in the system as well. And the only real leverage you have as a as an analytics person is to say, like, we're trying to prove the ROI of these things, and we need this information. If we don't have this information, then we can't justify spending money on sending you to Vegas or wherever for these events. So we need you to document stuff. That's typically the only leverage you have from an analytics perspective is to say like you can't do the things that you enjoy that are fun if you don't prove that they have some value.

So that can help with the data problem. But in the end of the day, you ha it comes down to what data you have and can you prove any kind of interactions that led to the closing of a deal. Sometimes you will. Sometimes it there's a very logical linear chain of events. Other times there won't be.

And those are the times when you have to either get creative or accept that a certain percentage of your your marketing and your sales activity is going to be vague. It's going to be not as clear as you want it to be. You could absolutely track, for example, when salespeople are at conferences. Physically they're out of the office at these things back in the days when we went to conferences. That would be a at least a time-based way to track some of those things to see that those activities were in the mix.

But it's a really good question. It's a tough question to answer. There's no good answers yet. Uh, and there probably won't be uh unless you really like intrusive surveillance. So if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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