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How Does Client Sense Support Your Event Management

This article explains how to set up an event in Client Sense, how to get the right people invited rather than the same people as last time, how to manage registrations, and how to view the ROI to tell whether the event was worth running.

In this article:

Short answer

Client Sense handles the parts of an event that depend on knowing who your firm knows. It helps you identify relevant invitees by industry, location and job title, lets partners suggest contacts they want invited, tracks everyone from suggested through to attended, and compares engagement before and after so you can see whether the event has impacted your client relationships.

Why it matters

Most firms invite the same people to their regular events event because assembling a fresh list means chasing busy partners for names, and that is often such a slow process that last year’s spreadsheet wins by default. The results are events that attended by the people already closest to the firm and missing out on new prospects.

The second problem is proof of success. Events consume a large share of a marketing budget and are judged, if at all, on whether the room looked full and whether people seemed to enjoy it. New matters rarely arrive straight afterwards, the person who buys legal services may not be the person who attended, and some events exist to build awareness rather than to generate work. All of which makes events easy to defend and difficult to improve.

Both problems come from the same gap. Nobody can see who the firm already knows, and nobody can see the engagement after the event.

What this looks like in practice

Your firm runs a construction sector breakfast every year. The invitation list is inherited from the last one, topped up with whoever partners remember. This time you set the event criteria in Client Sense as relevant to the construction industry and to job titles containing general counsel and head of legal. Partners see the event on the firm events page and suggest contacts, and the system prioritizes the people who match the criteria. You can see which contacts were suggested and by how many people, which makes the difficult decisions on a capacity-limited event straightforward: the person put forward by three partners goes on the list ahead of the person nobody named.

Ninety days afterwards, you compare engagement across the attendees against the ninety days before. Two things usually show up. A handful of attendees are now dealing with more of the firm than they were, and one or two who registered never came, which is worth knowing before you invite them again.

How to do it in Client Sense

Events are reached by clicking your name at the top right of the system and selecting Events (Beta). Full setup steps are in Getting Started with Events.

Setting up the event

Choose + Create Event and complete the details: name, start and end time, hosts, whether the location is physical, online or both, maximum attendees and the date you need final numbers. Then work through the settings, where three choices matter more than the rest.

  • Event visibility. Leaving this Private keeps the event inside the administration area. Setting it to All Users makes it visible for all users, which is what makes suggestions possible.
  • Allow attendees to be suggested. Set to yes, partners can put forward people they know. Set to no, they can see who is registered but nothing more.
  • Registered Contact Activity Mapping. Choose Create Activity for a lunch or dinner, where attendees will meet each other, because it records an association between them. Choose Create Separate Activities for a webinar or a large event, where they will not.

Important: Create Activity associates every attendee with every other attendee, which is useful for a table of ten and misleading for a webinar of three hundred. The choice cannot be undone by simply changing your mind later, so decide before you save.

Getting the right people invited

Two settings help you set criteria so that Client Sense can surface the most relevant invitees. The Industries feature prioritizes contacts in those industries when partners are suggesting attendees. You need to enable Company Insights for this feature to work. The Job Titles / Keywords feature does the same for job roles. Enter each keyword and press enter to add the next. Learn more about Company Insights.

Managing registrations

Contacts move through five statuses before the event, being Suggested, To Be Invited, Invited, Registered and Cancelled, and two afterwards, Attended and No showed. A contact holds one status at a time and they do not have to be used in sequence, so a webinar registrant can start at Registered.

Update them one at a time using the pencil icon in list view, in bulk by selecting several and choosing Actions then Update Statuses, or by pasting email addresses into + Add Contact and @ Bulk List with Update Statuses checked. Full detail is in Tracking and Managing Events.

Where an event is synced with HubSpot, Registered and Cancelled are controlled by HubSpot and reflected automatically. The earlier statuses stay under your control in Client Sense. See How Do Client Sense and HubSpot Marketing Events Work Together.

Assessing the event engagement 

When you set up the event you can identify the outcomes you hope this event will achieve. For example, you can set the number of days within which hosts should have followed up, and other outcomes such as increased fees, more communication, more meetings, more practice areas known or more connections, and set the timeframe in which you would expect to see these outcomes.

After the event you can click the Engagement icon. The default view compares ninety days before the event with ninety days after and can be changed. An engagement summary highlights the measures that moved most, and the chart exports as an image for a report or a partner meeting. Steps are in Assessing Event ROI.

Turning the output into action

  • Set the follow-up expectation before the event. Recording the number of days after an event within which hosts should make contact turns follow-up from a good intention into something visible.
  • Use suggestion counts to make the hard calls. On a capacity-limited event, the number of partners who put a name forward is a better guide than seniority.
  • Record no shows accurately. The difference between registered and attended is one of the few clean signals an event produces.
  • Wait before judging. Three to six months is the usual interval before engagement shifts, so a review at four weeks will tell you nothing.
  • Compare events against each other. One event with flat engagement proves little. A format that never moves engagement across three runs is worth reconsidering.

Common pitfalls

  • Using Create Activity for a large event. It records every attendee as connected to every other, which is accurate for a dinner and false for a webinar.
  • Setting industry targeting without Company Insights. The field depends on it. Without the service enabled, the prioritization has nothing to work from.
  • Judging the event on fees alone. Fees arrive late and often through someone other than the attendee. Communication, meetings and breadth move first.
  • Deleting rather than cancelling. Deleting removes the event and everything recorded against it, including registrations. Cancelling keeps the record.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Do we need HubSpot to use the events module?

No. HubSpot is currently the only connected system for registrations, and others are planned, but registrations can be imported and managed in bulk without any integration at all.

Does a person need to already exist in Client Sense to attend?

No. New registrants are added automatically when they register or when you add them, even where the firm has had no previous contact with them.

Can we assess events that happened before we started using the module?

Yes, provided your firm holds Client Sense data covering that period. Import the historical attendee list, add the event, and you can review the engagement that followed it.

What is the difference between Create Activity and Create Separate Activities?

Both record the event on each attendee’s contact card. Create Activity also associates the attendees with one another, on the basis that they met. Use it for small events and use Create Separate Activities for anything where attendees were unlikely to be introduced.

How long after an event should we expect to see a change?

Around three to six months. The buying cycle in professional services is long, and the eventual instruction may come from a colleague or a referrer rather than the attendee.

An event showed no change in engagement. Was it a failure?

Not necessarily. The event may have been intended to thank people rather than to generate work, the follow-up may have been weak, or the wrong people may have attended. Use the result to prioritize effort to make the event more successful.

Where do we find the events area?

Click your name at the top right of the system and select Events (Beta). It will move to the main menu when the module reaches general release. You will need version 4.3 or newer, which is shown at the foot of that same menu.