According to Gong's newest State of Revenue Growth Report, when asked if their CRM provides a comprehensive understanding of their customers, only 10% of respondents strongly agreed. This statistic is even more striking for media and events businesses, where revenue streams are uniquely interconnected and complex.
Media and events companies operate as sophisticated orchestrators, managing multiple interdependent customer segments. Consider a trade show organizer: exhibitors need attendees to justify their investment, while attendees rely on exhibitor quality and diversity to validate their participation. Similarly, B2B media platforms must balance subscriber value with advertiser reach, while ensuring content quality maintains audience engagement across digital, print, and in-person channels.
This interconnected ecosystem generates data across numerous touchpoints - from webinar participation rates to exhibition floor dwell time, content engagement metrics to advertising performance. While CRM systems excel at managing direct customer relationships, they weren't designed to capture these industry-specific interactions and dependencies that truly drive revenue performance.
To build an accurate revenue picture, media and events leaders need to integrate data from multiple specialized systems that capture the unique dynamics of their business model. The impact on top and bottom lines can include the ability to:
1. Detect and address customer churn effectively.
2. Spot and capitalize on upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
3. Scale top-performing sales strategies to help elevate B players into A players.
4. Refine and implement high-converting sales processes, pricing strategies, and packaging tailored to specific customer segments.
5. Identify and grow “outlier” revenue streams.
6. Enhance the accuracy and reliability of sales forecasts.
7. Minimize the time and resources spent on reforecasting.
8. Improve unit-level economics and profit margins, even down to individual customer insights.
9. Optimize pricing and packaging strategies to ensure maximum value delivery.
10. Uncover program performance issues and pivot
And more….
Here are the 10 essential non-CRM data sources that provide crucial insights for revenue leaders in media and events:
1. Event management platforms (attendance patterns, exhibitor ROI metrics, session engagement, buyer-seller matching data)
2. Digital content platforms (subscriber behavior, content consumption patterns, topic preferences, gated content conversions)
3. Advertising operations systems (campaign performance, yield metrics, advertiser engagement scores)
4. Marketing automation platforms (email engagement, lead scoring, nurture campaign effectiveness across audience segments)
5. Community/networking platforms (member interactions, discussion topics, peer-to-peer connections, expert engagement)
6. Virtual event platforms (attendance duration, interaction rates, networking effectiveness, sponsor visibility metrics)
7. Mobile event apps (attendee behavior, meeting scheduling, live polling results, exhibitor lead scanning)
8. Business intelligence tools (cross-platform audience overlap, segment profitability, lifetime value analysis)
9. Social media analytics (community engagement, influencer impact, content sharing patterns, sentiment analysis)
10. Customer data platforms (unified profiles, cross-channel journey mapping, segment propensity modeling)
The data universe for the media and events landscape is so much more complex than what tends to be reflected in traditional CRMs, and often the signals from beyond the digital walled garden and even offline sources are where the keys to robust customer understanding lie. For an industry that is truly at its best when it supports and represents the nuances of all its audiences’ behaviors, it deserves an equally nuanced and inclusive, while highly sophisticated, data strategy.
