Why Every Event Manager Needs a CRM Platform

A Customer Relations Management (CRM) platform serves one primary purpose – it helps an organization to manage its dealings with both current and future clients. In so doing, it automates a great deal of customer relations – sales and marketing, technical support, and general customer service generally fall under the purview of such a system.

I suspect most of you already have some idea of why a CRM platform is valuable from an event management perspective. After all, running events is only part of what you do; a great deal of your job involves managing people, as well. If you don’t know your customers and clients, then you won’t be able to personalize your events for them.

And if you aren’t able to personalize your events, well…they’ll find someone who can.

Let’s face it – managing your attendees can be something of a logistical nightmare. You’re faced with a metric ton of information that you’re expected to sift through in order to determine the best structure for your event. Without some sort of system to manage all this data, you might as well preemptively reach for the aspirin.

By using a CRM system, you can quickly and efficiently track, store, and retrieve virtually every scrap of information you would possibly need to know about your attendees. Everything from their contact information to their demographic details to their personal preferences can be stored in your database for easy retrieval and analysis, while the built-in scheduling software makes coordinating your volunteers relatively painless.

Coincidentally, all this information ends up making promotion something of a breeze. Since you’ve got your potential guests’ details right at your fingertips, you can work out an effective marketing campaign for your conference with relative ease. What’s more, the success (or failure) of this campaign can be tracked through the platform, as well.

Data on your guests can be collected during the event in order to improve service at future conferences– everything from the cost of your event to the average level of satisfaction among your guests.

The majority of event management applications (at least, those that are actually worth using) are, at their core, CRM systems. They’re designed to help you manage your clients, team, and attendees; they’re designed to help you run better events based on the information you’ve got available.

Basically, they’re designed so that they’re indispensible to the event planning profession. 

As an event management professional, you’re dealing with people as often as you’re dealing with events – if not more so. For this reason, you need to make certain that the event planning software you’re using includes CRM functionality. While it’s certainly possible to run your events without such software, why would you want to?