Cvent hosted its CONNECT Europe event last week, bringing together over 3500 events and marketing professionals to hear about the latest advances in the industry.
Cvent CONNECT Europe saw Invesco’s Head of Marketing Automation and Marketing Enablement, Shweta Bajaj, sharing insight into the asset manager’s efforts to integrate event tech into its broader martech stack.
“We’ve got every tech you can think of under the sky…sometimes that’s a problem,” Bajaj said, noting the complexity of managing and automating technologies across a global asset manager with over $2 trillion in AUM.
“My role is about driving value from all the customer data points that we have across these systems: integration is definitely the underlying narrative,” she said.
Bajaj said client centricity remains the driver of this integration. She noted that the biggest practical challenge has long been achieving a true 360-degree view of client behaviour across both digital and in-person interactions.
“Data silos have been a massive challenge,” Bajaj added.
To address that, Invesco has focused on integrations and on turning data into operational insight over the past few years. Historically, for example, feedback for Invesco’s flagship events was collected in a separate survey tool, exported into Excel, and passed to sales, which often led to inconsistent follow-ups.
However, two years ago Cvent feedback surveys were integrated into the Salesforce CRM. This saw not only the ingestion of the data being automated, but also scoring of it based on the responses. These scorings now enable dynamic activations for both marketing and sales such as relevant emails, Salesforce tasks and triggered follow-ups.
Bajaj also emphasised that success is as much about people and process as it is about systems. This meant defining and standardising which data points to collect, why they matter, and the forms and taxonomies teams should use, creating guardrails that make data usable and repeatable.
Account-based marketing plays a central role at Invesco, Bajaj said, because institutional relationships require depth of insight rather than top-line lead volume. “When you’re dealing with institutional clients… you need to know who you’re dealing with, what is your account penetration, how are they interacting across different channels,” she explained.
With the CRM as the hub, sales teams can see a comprehensive view of which clients attended which events, the questions they asked, and sentiment from responses, which helps to link marketing activity directly to account engagement.
“If two people from a client organisation attended an event last year and four attended this year, we can measure that growth in engagement,” she explained. That detail then informs targeted email and content strategies.
These approaches will be taken further through artificial intelligence, which Bajaj noted a rapid shift in attitudes towards. “12 months back, everybody was a fence sitter, but now everybody is deep into it. We don’t have a choice. We have to do it,” she said.
At the same time, she stressed the need to proceed cautiously within financial services’ regulatory boundaries.
“Being part of a financial organisation, we are heavily regulated. We can’t be as creative as some other peers can be,” she said. Bajaj pointed to tools such as Cvent IQ as an example of technology that can help democratise AI capabilities for teams “within the guardrails,” as she put it.
Rather than focusing on tools, however, Bajaj said Invesco’s strategy will come back to how technologies feed the CRM hub and fuel measurable engagement strategies across marketing and sales.
