As enterprises look for ways to make up for the shortfall invaluable face-to-face customer meetings due to canceled in-person events, they are turning to virtual events, webinars, and digital campaigns. To make these marketing investments more effective, sales and marketing teams are scheduling thousands of virtual customer meetings to build their sales pipelines.

Many of these enterprises are using Jifflenow, innovator of the world’s #1 Meeting Automation Platform (MAP), which has seen a dramatic increase in the use of these highly effective meetings since the launch of its Virtual Meetings capability, earlier this year.

“In just a few months, close to 100 enterprises, including NetApp, Okta, and Veeva, have added virtual customer meetings to their virtual events and digital marketing programs to generate better ROI,” said Hari Shetty, CEO of Jifflenow. “Over 90% of enterprises are now planning multiple virtual events and online programs, so increasing attendee engagement is their number one concern. To this end, B2B marketers have made the marketing-qualified meeting a vital element of their plans to grow their business, manage sales disruption, and expand their sales pipelines.”

Since face-to-face meetings are impossible, virtual customer meetings have become a key performance indicator for marketing and sales teams. Consequently, a new marketing KPI has risen to the top of all marketing metrics: the marketing-qualified meeting (MQM). This highly desired metric complements the traditional metric MQL (marketing-qualified leads) by converting MQLs into more valuable sales opportunities.

Marketing Technology News: Zendesk Debuts Sophisticated Real-Time Analytics Solution

Trend reflects increased buyer proactivity

With in-person trade shows and conferences for evaluating enterprise products and services on hold, B2B buyers have become more proactive in determining how to engage with an organization to learn more about a new product or service offering. In B2B sales situations, a buy decision almost always requires a number of customer engagements, such as demos and Meet the Expert or Meet the Executive meetings.

To accelerate the sales process, B2B marketing teams are integrating MQMs into more of their virtual events and other online marketing channels. One easy way to do this is by enhancing landing pages with special inbound meeting request pages that allow a lead generated by any digital marketing program to book an informational meeting with the appropriate internal expert resources. MQMs that result from this action are more valuable than MQLs because they scale better, shorten the sales cycle, and drive a higher ROI from marketing and sales campaigns.

Marketing Technology News: Demandbase Automates High-Impact Campaign Experiences with Tray.io to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

Examples of creative uses of MQMs by enterprise marketers include:

• NetApp includes inbound meeting request pages to schedule customer meetings for a variety of campaigns across both industry and corporate virtual events.
• Okta began using Jifflenow platform to generate B2B meetings during a virtual user conference, and then extended usage for several weeks after the conference to allow attendees to meet with experts at a more convenient time.
• Veeva Systems used the Jifflenow platform in the virtual booth of its virtual user conference with a Zoom integration to instantly book meetings between experts and interested attendees.

“CMOs can no longer be satisfied with generating MQLs as a KPI, they want marketing-qualified meetings from the marketing investments that contribute more to top-line growth,” said Ravi Chalaka, CMO and VP of product management at Jifflenow. “At the same time, prospects and customers don’t wait for sales to call them—they are in the driver’s seat and want more control of their journey. Marketers must therefore adapt or risk losing customers to those that cater to their expectations. MQMs are now seen as a business imperative to drive attendee engagements from virtual events, webinars and demand gen programs.”

To facilitate the creation of MQMs within any marketing workflow, Jifflenow integrates with industry-leading marketing, sales enablement, and event software platform to give users an unparalleled experience that simplifies workflows, reduces manual effort, and improves the quantity and quality of meetings across events and trade shows. Integrations include:

• Video-conferencing software to easily enable virtual meetings including Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and BlueJeans
• Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar to sync available times into the Jifflenow master calendar
• Adobe Marketo Engage and Oracle Eloqua to enable meeting data to sync back to marketing automation tools
• Virtual- or live-event management platforms like Aventri, Rainfocus, Cvent, and more.

Marketing Technology News: Vestorly Adds Joel Goobich, Veteran Business Executive, as Head of Marketing