Everyone loves Eventbrite. We’ve all used it to register for beer festivals, conferences, and concerts. But we can all agree it’s not an ideal solution for B2B events. 

B2B events are about engaging with customers and prospects to drive revenue. Businesses need to own this experience and these events don’t belong on a public events community.

The most effective B2B events are targeted at a very specific audience with the goal of cultivating believers that become customers and stay customers. Below is a list of nine reasons to choose something other than a free solution like Eventbrite for your next event.

1. B2B events are for your customers and prospects

Eventbrite is a great way to promote events that are open to the general public. For businesses that are looking to provide a personalized, VIP event experience for a targeted list of prospects and customers, Eventbrite isn’t the answer.

This personalized experience should start with the invite and extend through the registration experience all the way to the post-event follow-up. With Eventbrite, when someone registers for one of your events, they need to become an Eventbrite user.

Eventbrite directly promotes themselves and other people’s events to your attendees, which can diminish the power of your perfectly executed event. Own the entire event experience and choose a solution that doesn’t require your attendees to create an account.

2. Events are a strategy, not a one-off

Eventbrite was designed to support individual events. It doesn’t allow you to look at all of your event programming and attendees in one view to compare success across multiple events. This makes measurement of event success very difficult. 

If you are serious about your events, you need a solution that allows you to report on event performance holistically. Eventbrite’s reporting makes it nearly impossible to demonstrate how your event strategy is impacting your business, which means it’s even more difficult to measure ROI.

3. Make Sales and Marketing Ops happy

Eventbrite doesn’t make it easy to connect your event data with your marketing automation platform or CRM. That makes events a huge headache for your Sales and Marketing Ops teams.

Implementing and maintaining Eventbrite plug-ins can be a pain for your ops team simply because it wasn’t built to serve B2B marketing. Eventbrite’s integrations achieve the bare bones of what your team needs to capture registration info but that’s about it. A quick look at their 36 page implementation guide for Salesforce shows that using the integration is far from easy.

Ops loves set-it-and-forget-it systems which require lightweight set-up and are simple enough for marketing and sales to manage going forward. Otherwise your ops team will dread your events.

4. Follow your ideal workflows

It’s tough to follow your ideal event workflows when your event technology doesn’t seamlessly integrate with your marketing automation system. Eventbrite lacks these integrations and also doesn’t allow you to capture the event data you need most, like conversation notes.  

You need an event solution that makes it easy to sync your event data with your key systems. These integrations take the headache out of your event set-up and data management. They also allow you to accurately measure the impact of your events and sales can follow-up in a timely manner with a relevant message. 

5. Track Event progress

Eventbrite doesn’t make it easy to stay up-to-date on the progress of your event. 

Are you on track to meet your registration goal to fill the room? Do you have the right mix of customers and prospects registered? Does your Sales team know who’s registered and who they’re responsible for engaging with? Are they engaging? 

Eventbrite provides no tools to help you track and measure this progress. 

6. Empower Sales at events

Eventbrite doesn’t provide any tools that empower your sales team at events. Ultimately, B2B events are for the benefit of sales. You need a solution that allows your sales reps to know when their prospects or customers arrive. 

Reps also need to know who they’re responsible for and have tools to track their engagement with attendees. A mobile solution that integrates with Salesforce allows reps to follow their normal follow-up processes. The days of a pocket full of business cards with scribbles are gone!

7. Hold Sales accountable

Marketing does all of this great work to host the right event, get the right people there, and craft a great experience but it’s all for naught if your Sales team doesn’t capitalize on the opportunity.

Sales follow-up is hard to enforce when there is a long delay in getting event data like attendees and conversation notes back into Salesforce. You need a solution that enables fast, meaningful sales follow-up. 

Think about your last event. Do you know if all of your guests connected with the right people from your team? Did your sales reps follow-up in a timely and personalized manner with all of the people they had great conversations with? Were the right introductions made to help accelerate the few deals that were stuck in the funnel?

All of this needs to be tracked and measured for any B2B event, but Eventbrite provides no way to do it.

8. Measure your event ROI

Events are the biggest spend in B2B marketing budgetsbecause they are effective. If you can’t answer the question of how your events are impacting your business, you can’t measure return on your investment. Eventbrite provides no tools to help you answer the age old question of what your event ROI looks like. You need a solution that allows you to prove your ROI.

Eventbrite doesn’t provide any way to attribute business to your events. There are no integrations available to allow you to take advantage of the attribution tools you have in your existing systems, like Marketo. Eventbrite has no native attribution capabilities either. 

Do you know how much pipeline was created from your last event? Or how many opportunities that were influenced by the event closed? How about how much pipeline and revenue were in the room at your event? These are all important insights that Eventbrite can’t help you answer.

9. Keep your budget…and your job

Marketing is evolving from an art to a science. It’s all about measurability these days. If you can’t demonstrate how the dollars you’re spending are impacting the bottom line, you’re going to lose those dollars, if not your job as well. 

Events aren’t about the top of funnel for B2B anymore. There are much cheaper and efficient ways to build a list of companies and people that you want to target than to host a huge event focused on attendance numbers alone. And the “it’s about brand and awareness” excuse isn’t going to cut it. 

If you have a huge marketing budget and a culture that’s bought into that mindset, go for it. If you work at a place that values smart, measurable investments, you need to be more targeted with your event strategy. Eventbrite just isn’t built to support targeted B2B events. 

Attend is purpose-built for B2B events. Download our free eBook to learn how to drive more revenue from your event strategy: The Complete Guide To Revenue Event Marketing.