In the study, executives were asked to rate the effectiveness of various marketing options at the four stages of product lifecycle. They ranked tradeshows equally effective as print advertising, and second only to direct selling, in the first three stages of the product lifecycle—introduction, growth and maturity. In the stage of decline, however, they rated both advertising and tradeshows as far less important than direct selling.

4. Business Event Planning Based on the Customer's Buying Process

Fortunately for marketers, most business buyers follow a fairly well-defined process as they evaluate options and make purchase decisions. In some companies, the process is so well defined that it is codified, and prospects will share with you the exact steps they must go through to buy. The more marketers understand the buying process of their prospects, the more efficient they can become with their selling processes. The secret is to map the selling activity to the prospect's buying process stage.

See Table 2 for a list of the typical steps a business buyer goes through. Of course, these steps will vary by industry and company size. In the right column of the table is a list of the seller's objectives at each stage. Notice how the seller's objectives vary as the prospect's needs and activities evolve.

Table 2: Marketing Objectives at Each Stage of the Buying Process

The successful marketer will analyze the buying stages for each account, or customer segment, and understand who is involved at each stage. The marketer will then craft strategies to help the prospect move to the next stage—preferably toward a purchase from the seller rather than from the competition.

The ideal approach is to develop a contact strategy for each prospect or customer appropriate to the buying stage. Table 3 suggests some of the tools that the marketer may appropriately use to influence the buyer's behavior.

Table 3: Marketing Tools to Influence Buyers at Each Stage of the Buying process

There are two lessons for business event marketers embedded in the notion of the business buying process:

1. Tradeshows and corporate events are not the optimal marketing tool for every stage, they but can be superb when applied at the right point in the buying process.
   
   
2. Every visitor to your booth at a tradeshow or to your corporate event will be at some stage of the buying process. The qualification process is designed to help determine that stage. Once you grasp that information, you can craft the best next step to offer the prospect.

5. Business Event Planning Tied to Sales Objectives

Perhaps the simplest strategy for business event planning is based on periodic sales requirements. The sales pipeline must be filled with enough prospective business to meet revenue goals. It is Marketing's job to keep the pipeline stocked with the right amount of quality leads to allow sales quotas to be met—at the company, region or territory level.

Business events can play an important role in generating the sales leads needed to fill the pipeline. If you understand how many qualified leads are needed in any given territory and during any given period, you can back your way into the appropriate marketing programs to support those objectives. Of course, you need to take into account the following challenges:

• Tradeshows are scheduled on their own calendars, not yours. So, a certain amount of inflexibility must be considered. The best approach is to plan on exhibiting at your most productive tradeshows to start, and building the rest of the plan to fill in the lead-generation gaps.
  
  
• Business events may not provide the geographic specificity you need for the pipeline supporting each sales territory. Other than regional shows, your tradeshow lead output is going to be fairly unpredictable in these terms. You will need to supplement the tradeshow leads with road shows, direct mail, outbound telemarketing, and other lead-generation activities that allow more geographic control.
  
  
• Business events can produce a glut of leads at one time, depending on their productivity. You can smooth the flow a bit with your post-event qualification and nurturing process. But there is a risk that an unusually high volume of leads will reduce the sales force's enthusiasm for working them all, resulting in a lower lead-to-sales conversion rate than usual.

Despite these potential pitfalls, planning your business events to support lead-flow requirements is a fairly straightforward procedure.

First, you examine the quota of each territory concerned, then subtract out the amount that will be self-generated through the natural course territory management. The remaining amount is what needs to be supported by lead-generation programs. You divide this amount by the average order size in your company or category to arrive at the number of closed leads required. Then divide again by the lead-to-sales conversion rate, to arrive at the number of qualified leads required per rep. An example is in Table 4.

Table 4: Lead-Requirements Worksheet

In this situation, each rep needs 80 qualified leads in the territory per year. Review your event calendar and estimate how many of these leads will be generated from the programs you have planned. Fill in the gaps with other marketing programs. And make sure you are buying the highest ROI leads first. You will need to adjust the integrated marketing program to optimize the results.

6. Business Event Planning by Target Audience

Another strategy for integrating business events into your marketing plan is based on target audience analysis. Select the key audiences you seek to acquire or retain, and apply the most effective marketing tools to those objectives. Events and tradeshows can play an active, and effective, role.

The chart in Table 5 analyzes the best event applications against marketing objectives targeted to various audience segments. Here, the segments are organized by buyer type. But you can also set this up by any relevant business segment, like industry, company size or geography.

Table 5: Best Event Applications, by Target Audience