Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Sonia,

Are you still planning to attend the show you reference or are you looking to get away from the show entirely?

If you are leaving the show, your biggest problem will be getting everyone together. The nice thing about the show is all of your distributors will be there, whether to see you or take advantage of other opportunities the show offers.

Many companies break away from shows and put on their own mini-conferences for a day or two. These conferences include speakers who are actual customers of your products and they talk about how they use your products in specific situations. People like to hear from others in similar situations and it provides a great forum for you to learn more about your product, both the good and the bad.

In the computer industry, you find user groups who gather annually and learn new techniques, new features and are able to network with others in the industry. They also include pleasure activities such as golf contests, racing, a day at the track, casino nights, etc. It is good to mix both. You probably will do well with a 60-75% business and 40-25% pleasure mix.

Also helpful, provide them with speakers/sessions which help them grow their business through marketing or marketing partnerships with you. If you can put together an agenda in which they can see a nice return on their investment, they will attend. It may take a year or two to generate a crowd as large as what you might see at the show, but your distributors should end up with much more value in the end and word will spread.

Hi Sonia

You’ve already had some interesting ideas so I’ll only add the ones where I can offer a difference – also a warning about abandoning the existing event.

Firstly, let me dispel one myth – wealthy and powerful people can be impressed, either by a display of more wealth and power (more of the same!) but more likely by attention to details, details which show that you care about their presence at your event. Obsequious grovelling will be met by the disdain that it deserves. More of the same runs the risk of engendering jealousy or telling a self-made magnate that you make too much money out of them!

My major concern is that there is a risk, that by abandoning the show, they will attend it anyhow, without the ameliorating presence of your corporate hospitality, where you have a chance to discuss and defuse the competition they will inevitably come across. Leaving them to their own devices at such an event could be a disaster in the making. After all, how many of them bumped into your company representative at such a show 10 years ago!

If the event is mainly one for reassurance and to present your company in a good light there is still a need to engage these people in discussions and presentations which will justify their presence – in their minds at least. Look their primary motivations in attending an event that you host. In the past, one was the attendance of the show.

Now you will need to look carefully at the reasons why they will leave their business affairs to attend an event of yours. These might be:

• Your company is very important to them; therefore a chance to talk to your managers and senior executives on a one-to-one basis is not to be missed. This covers new products, the development of their business and a chance to get a real insight into your company’s strategic thinking.

• All distributors turn up to a hosted event with a genial hello, a discussion about the trip, the weather, a sincere greeting of solidarity and partnership from the team back on the ground who spend every working minute of every day developing your business in their country to the exclusion of all other principals, family life, health, life and limb.

Once that is over, they then launch into a list of 128 things that have gone wrong with your products since their last meeting and a similar list of “Must Haves” for your company to be able to succeed in their market. Intimate meetings at such gatherings are essential to clear the air of any negatives and to set in place your plans to overcome those of their problems which are actually capable of being addressed.

• The senior guy attending needs an excuse to get away from the office. Even if he does not have to justify his actions to a management or to shareholders, he needs to b comfortable in himself that he is using his time wisely. This is achieved by the product and business meetings mentioned above, but far more importantly, it is achieved by the availability of your chairman, MD and FD, to whom they will have ad-hoc and seemingly unfettered access – whether its in formal business meetings or more likely at dinner, in the bar or at a social event.

These are experienced people and your job may well be to provide a framework within which they can interact in their own way. You may put on an impressive array of sporting and entertainment events, coupled with opportunities to sample both high and low culture, but don’t be either surprised or disappointed if the President and a valued customer vanish at the end of Act I of Romeo and Juliet and don’t re-appear until the next morning’s formal meeting. (They’ll almost never miss those!)

I used to be the marketing manager of a sizeable electronics company and we combined a sales conference with a distributor conference but never in tandem with a show. Shows were always in addition to the conferences.

In the morning, the sales teams and the technical teams would give their presentations to the rest of the company and perhaps 40 to 60 distributors.

Over lunch, informal discussions would take place. In the afternoon, some entertainment would be arranged and many more meeting would erupt, arising from the previous activities.

In the evening, more formal entertainments and dinners would be held. The chairman was always the host. The UK sales team would usually try to wreck the hotel at 2.00am and quite a lot of the “Rich and Powerful” distributors would join in some high jinks.

This seemingly chaotic melange was actually very well choreographed and a lot of heads of agreement were signed, relationships were forged and reputations made. The odd guy would make a total prat of himself, but the overall event was inevitably a success. Anchoring the lot was the chairman, who everyone wanted to either gain access to or to impress him. He was the real pull.

I’m not suggesting that this will work for all companies – not all chairmen have the character or the stomach for this approach, but if yours does, go for it!

Good luck

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions