I read a new e-book on event planning recently, “Eleven and a Half” by Corwin Hielbert (www.redwagonmanagement.com), and was intrigued by his discussion of pricing for events.  It got me thinking about the different approaches to pricing that I have seen our clients use, and what I have observed about the impact that pricing seems to have on registrations and attendance.  

• If your event has no fee associated with it, the number of no-shows will be higher than if you are charging a fee. 
• Time-definite pricing, i.e. early-bird pricing, does generate registrations just before a deadline, but you have to plan to several communications to your invite list to remind them that the early-bird pricing is about to expire.
• Highly segmented pricing, where you have many different pricing groups that registrants can locate themselves in (members/non-members, certified/non-certified SMB, new/returning attendee, etc), is often confusing and you may see a higher percentage of people abandoning their registration than if you simplified the pricing structure.
• Offering promotional discount pricing to generate registrations as the event gets closer may alienate the attendees who registered early.  Instead, consider an incentive to encourage already-registered attendees to register a colleague or two to join them.

One of our clients has a new 1-on-1 coordinator scheduling meetings for an event happening at the end of the week. She called today to find out how to do the scheduling in MeetMax. Forty-five minutes later, she had all of her meetings scheduled: 61 attendees, 21 with meeting requests, 6 companies, 54 total meetings. Here’s how we did it:

• Schedule requested meetings for the tier 1 attendees first, using a batch scheduler to make this process quick and simple.
• Repeat for lower tiers of attendees, until it looks like there are no more fillable requests.
• Then go through the list of unscheduled attendees, and use the information provided by the attendee, when they registered, to determine who is willing to participate in small group meetings. Schedule these meetings by combining attendees who have indicated similar levels of knowledge of the company with whom they will be meeting.
• Continue this until you have scheduled all attendees and/or filled up the available timeslots for each company.
• Review the rooms grid to make sure that the number of meetings in each timeslot does not exceed the available number of rooms. Adjust the schedules as necessary.

The secret to efficiently scheduling meetings: Collect information about each request (priority, preferred meeting size, knowledge of the subject) when the attendee registers.

Most of our clients do some form of email marketing to promote their upcoming events.  Some create very sophisticated invitations in terms of graphics, fonts, colors and links, and some use very simple communications that look more like personalized letters.  Some email to the same list multiple times and others send just a single email.
So, which approach leads to higher registrations?

If you are like me, you get inundated with offers for free white papers that promise to tell you how to execute a successful email marketing campaign.  After reading a half dozen of these free white papers, here’s how I boil down the keys to email success:

• The quality of your list is the key determinant of success.  Your list should be email addresses for people who have requested that you send them invitations.  
• Content is the second most important element.  Write a strong subject line.  Make the content relevant to the reader.  Have a clear call to action.  Optimize the top 250×250 pixels with compelling information, so that the reader will scroll down “below the fold”. 
• For some people, you have to contact them multiple times to get a response.  Successful fundraisers know that for some donors, they need to send up to 4 reminder letters to secure the next year’s gift.  The same thing is true for event marketers.
• Measure the business result — how many people who received the invite then went on to register for the event.  Tracking just open and click-through rates doesn’t tell you how effective your email marketing is — it only tells you that someone read it.

What’s been your experience?  Have you got a winning formula for email marketing for your events? 

MeetMax and our sister company, Wall Street Webcasting, provide live and archived webcasts for 1000′s of conference sessions each year.  So, it is probably no accident that with the economy being what it is and event organizers working hard to maximize registrations,  I’ve heard from a number of people about how they would like to use webcasting to build attendance at events virtually.  Here are just two:

    * An international academic conference is planned for a week in a large city in Asia.  The organizers expect 2000 people to attend the 100 conference sessions in person, but they want to expand their reach by producing a shortened version for people to attend remotely.  Ten sessions will webcast live with viewers able to submit questions to the speakers via email.  The 10-session online version of the conference will then be available in an archived version for viewing later.  Different registration fees will apply for attending in-person, attending the live webcast version, or viewing the archived conference webcast.
    * A regional venture conference gives CEOs of start-ups an opportunity to get their story out to potential funders, partners and the media.  To expand their audience beyond local funders, they want to webcast the presentations.  To convey the sense of excitement in the room live, they will incorporate a Twitter feed into the webcast screen and display in the presentation room the Tweets from people attending both in person and remotely.

Here are three stories of how meeting planners in different industries are using 1-on-1 meetings to enhance the value of their events.

Annual Sales Meeting Connects Corporate Staff with Regional Management

A large resort chain with several brands and properties throughout Asia hosts an annual sales meeting for the general management of each property. In addition to the traditional presentation agenda and social events in the evening, corporate marketing schedules time for 1-on-1 meetings between corporate functions and each general management team. Each of the 60 management teams meets with 10-15 corporate functions throughout the course of the event. In order to ensure that the general management teams are able to balance time for handling calls and emails, the teams are allowed, when registering for the event, to specify times during the day when they will not be available to be scheduled.  Using an online registration and scheduling system makes the task of setting the schedules for these meetings much simpler and less time-consuming.  Using 1-on-1 meetings facilitates focused discussions on goals, directions and challenges.  At the conclusion of the sales meeting, attendees return home having had productive, high-quality discussions with the corporate groups they depend on for success.

Software Company User Group Attendees Meet with Developers

At their annual user group meeting, the marketing staff for a mid-sized application software company encourages attendees to request, when registering for the event, face-to-face meetings with the firm’s senior-level software engineers. These meetings give users an opportunity to explore in detail requirements they have for database upgrades or application changes, or to talk through technical issues they are experiencing with their installation. Some meetings are for the company’s usability experts to walk through an early version of a new release to get user feedback on the system’s interface. By formally facilitating these meetings, the marketing staff ensures that key clients are given access to the company’s technical leadership, and that all clients leave the event more invested in their use of the company’s products.

Tradeshow Planner Supports Distributor – Buyer Business Development

At a large international consumer products tradeshow in Las Vegas, the event organizer wanted to provide a more formal opportunity for top tier distributors to develop new business relationships with exhibitors at the show. Working with the event’s meeting planner, they put together a targeted 1-on-1 meeting program where this select group of distributors accessed online, in advance, a list of the show exhibitors and could request 30 minute meetings with any of these exhibitors. The meetings were scheduled by the meeting planner staff and allocated a small conference room. Before the distributors and exhibitors arrived on-site, they were emailed their schedule of meetings, and arrived knowing that their time at the tradeshow would be productive.

What to do if your Institutional Clients don’t pay you commensurate with the Corporate Access work you do for them?  This could be the biggest single question facing Sales Heads who we speak to all the time.

First – do you know which those Clients are?  Which means knowing precisely, for each of your Clients, what you have done for them.

Second – were the Clients aware of all that you had done for them?   The best assumption for this question is “no”.

Third – under-payers can then be classified as either a) we don’t value your services the way you think we do,  b) we do value your services and can pay more but you’ve never been the squeaky wheel, or c) we cannot or will not pay any more.

The last may mean dropping the Client – but a) and b) provide a clear path to the sales rep to talk to the Client about modifying the service mix and getting paid more.

Measuring event effectiveness requires an investment of time and resources. Is it worth it? MPI’s annual “EventView 2009 North America Report” concludes that companies that measure event performance are nearly 41% more likely to expect increases in their marketing budget than those that do not. For me, that makes a compelling case for measuring what matters in events.

Here are some of the approaches to measurement that I’ve heard about from our meeting planner clients at MeetMax and those that I’ve learned from my own experience producing events and conferences.

• You Get Partial Credit Just For Asking. Numbers of invitations sent, mentions in the press and in the blogosphere are all indicative of the impact on your company’s brand
• Everyone In. Make sure you are counting all of your attendees, even those that attend remotely.
• Beyond Counting Attendees: Establish metrics that are directly related to your business objectives for the event.
• Quantify the Cost: How much is a qualified sales prospect worth to your company? What does it cost you to generate one meaningful connection with a qualified prospect?
  • Count the number of qualified prospects, based on demographics, at the event
  • Determine the number of qualified prospects with whom your staff (or your sponsors or exhibitors) had a face-to-face dialog?
  • Calculate the cost of a single meaningful interaction, by dividing the total cost by the number of meaningful connections made.
  • Compare the cost of generating that sales prospect to the value of a sales prospect.
• Survey to Measure Perceptions and Satisfaction to Determine Whether Your Event Was Memorable and Met Expectations.
• Track The Long-Term Impact, Including Sales Conversions, Trends And Industry Averages.

Are you using an innovative approach to measuring event effectiveness? Post a comment and share your approach with us.

In today’s business environment, everyone is watching their travel and marketing budgets.  Sponsoring or exhibiting at an event is expensive, and even attending one is a commitment of time and travel expense.

But imagine, as a sponsor, if prior to an event you could see a list of attendees and other sponsors, choose which ones you’d like to have a private meeting with, and then arrive on the day with a full list of scheduled meetings, complete with attendee contact details and specified locations.

Imagine also, as an attendee, if you could see a list of all companies and people attending the event, request meetings with those you want to do business with, and come to the conference knowing for sure that you were going to meet them in peace for 30 minutes.

Private, pre-scheduled 1-on-1 business development meetings turn a conference into a business development trip for every participant.   No more chance encounters, no more waiting around hoping to swap cards – instead, scheduled quality time with key business prospects.    And you, the conference organizer, facilitate this relationship building by providing the service to connect and schedule these meetings and providing a room or table for the meeting to take place.

You have turned your conference into an exciting, must-attend event.  You have created a whole new sponsorship category because sponsors have priority status for these meetings.   And you have elevated your own organization into a key driver of business development.

Private 1-on-1 meetings have been a vital part of financial conferences for many years – and MeetMax is the registration system of choice for these events.   Increasingly, other industry conferences are realizing their importance.  Those events that get there first will see the biggest benefit, as they become a magnet for all kinds of business development spending.   And those events that do it best, will use MeetMax for their online registration because of its comprehensive, easy-to-use functionality for managing private meetings.

Click  here to schedule a demo, and use that time to ask us about how private meetings work in practice — we have worked on hundreds of events involving private meetings, some of which have had over 1000 pre-scheduled 1-on-1 meetings.

We realize that Corporate Access is a soft-dollar activity for the most part.  (Leaving out the considerable success of Gerson Lehrman, of course).   So invoices will never be sent out looking like this.

That does not mean that banks should forget about Invoicing.  

Institutional  clients are becoming ever more rigorous in  the voting processes they follow – driven by many factors.   A compliance need to justify how they direct commissions.   More sophisticated tools for managing their voting.  A desire perhaps, in these challenging times, to more accurately and generously reward their smaller sellside providers as the bulge bracket banks see their dominance eroded.

So while Institutional Clients develop what amount to sophisticated Purchasing and Accounts Payable departments, not all sellside firms have yet responded by developing equally sophisticated Accounts Receivable procedures.  And yet for any business, improving Accounts Receivable is often the easiest and quickest path to improving the cash flow.

Specifically, banks should be generating and delivering detailed reports for each and every Client that receives any kind of Corporate Access benefit – including Conference meetings, non-deal Roadshows, Company Visits, Conference Calls, Analyst lunches, Analyst Roadshows, Field Trips.   These reports need to be complete, accurate, detailed and timely.   They should be considered as if they were an invoice.  Sample.

Complete – every type of “billable” activity needs to be included.   Imagine if a wireless company didn’t invoice for calls made in Texas, or for those made on Tuesdays.  Activity not counted and reported is revenue left on the table.

Accurate – obvious errors are simply an invitation to a Client to discard the entire report.  The more that is done by hand, by busy salespeople, for example, or by copying and pasting data between systems – the greater the room for error.

Detailed – many Clients need full details on each meeting.  Who was there, was it a 1×1 or a group, where it was, what type of meeting it was, when did it start.   They need this to let the PM attribute the correct number of votes.  Without it, they will give the minimum number, or none at all.   Reports also need to be formatted in a way as to make Client processing as easy as possible.  

Timely – if the reports are not delivered on time, they may not be counted, or votes may be applied with minimal consideration.

These times demand that valuable services that are provided to Clients are fully compensated.  One component of that it to invoice for Corporate Access services – to show how serious you are about getting paid for it.

One brighter spot for smaller sellside firms this year, is that there is a lot of institutional market share up for grabs.   Bear and Lehman and Merrill/BofA have opened up a sizeable chunk of share, and many hedge funds are reassessing their allocations to those  remaining bulge firms.

But smaller sellside firms will need to get organized qujickly if they want to take advantage of this opportunity.

A helpful starting point is to  think like an attorney.   Not litigiously (please) but in tracking billable hours.  That attorney phone call to discuss the project.  Is it free?  That lunch to review progress?    That piece of research?  No, no and no.   Attorneys are ruthless at keeping track of every possible billable minute.  If an associate doesn’t bill 50 hours a week, they are in trouble, and if they don’t track it, it isn’t billable.

Brokerage firms don’t bill for hours but they assuredly bill for activities.  Billable Activities – any and  all activities that a Client might give you a vote for.   These include Corporate access meetings, 1x1s, field trips, client visits, analyst visits, substantive analyst calls, lunches with industry experts, conference calls or video conferences.  What is not billable?  Sales calls, voicemails, emails.   

Which is why CRMs (customer relationship management) systems make such incredibly poor billing systems.   They mix billable and non-billable activities together, and they are also very poor at reporting.  Law firms don’t use their CRMs for billing, and attorneys generally don’t prepare the bills.  They discuss them with clients.  CRMs are one thing, billing systems another.

Likewise, brokerage firms need to track Billable Activities.  Ruthlessly.   And these billable activities need to find their way into a central “billing” system that tracks everything.  And report  it accurately Client by Client.   So that the salespeople can start negotiating their way to a bigger share of commissions – based on hard substantiated facts, and leaving nothing out.   

Many brokerage firms keep different activities in different systems.    Analysts use one tool to monitor phone calls with Clients. Roadshows are kept in another system.  Conferences another.   This is  not an obstacle – it can even be a good thing – and is not an excuse for inaction.   Because these different systems can be ported to a single billing and reporting system – without causing any change at all in how people work.