Our event: drink our wine, eat our goodies then go home without buying from us.
You and me too dear reader.
I went to a wine tasting event run by a city lawyer recently. I had a great time but I’m not sure they got value for money from the event. Consider this little lot and see what you think: –
- I am never going to buy anything from this law firm and should never have been invited in the first place. Wasteful.
- Many of the lawyers spent the evening talking amongst themselves. Pointless.
- There didn’t appear to be enough senior lawyers there; they were mostly associates. Wrong level.
- There didn’t appear to be any kind of plan or BD purpose for the evening. Vague.
- Nobody followed up with me after the event. Fruitless.
So lets review the event then: a pointless waste of time attended by the wrong people at the wrong level resulting in a vague and fruitless outcome.
Now, I’d like to think that this was an isolated incident but I fear it isn’t. Too many corporate events are run either because they are on a timetable or because somebody thinks they need to do something and an event is the easy option.
So what is a body to do? Well you could try following the Flair 5 step approach to successful events.
- The client-facing people decide who comes to the event and invites them in person either face-to-face or by telephone.
- Before the event the BD team work with the client-facers to decide what the objective is with each of the attendees.
- The BD team attend the event with the client-facers and to support and facilitate the agreed objectives being met.
- After the event the BD and the client-facers will review the event by looking at what progress was made and what comes next.
- Each successful objective counts as a Progress Point – the total amount of Progress Points can be published as a quantitative measure of the success of the event. We call this the ROI Sheet.
If you measure events by the number of bums-on-seats this approach will horrify you. Of course if you want to get the most out of your events budget you can start by having less of them; invite less people; require more input from the client-facers but get much more sales momentum (and therefore sales) as a result.
Image courtesy of Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
