Last year any company could organize successfully an event or conference by inviting speakers, partners, customers and potential customers: resulting in a rather large venue as people seemed to come without any specific reason.

Partners would only come if they could exhibit for free: paying for a small booth was only feasible for events of well known brand names. The partners would prefer to attend the conference and sell to your customers by just mingling and socializing with them during your event.

Customers and potential customers would come in large numbers as any event was a good reason to get out of the office for business purposes.

Conferences in recession during recession

Currently during this recession, partners are eager to pay for a spot on your conference in order to be able to address as many potential customers as possible.

However the number of customers and potential customers that register for your event has become significantly less compared to last year. As always even less (30%) people show up than registered.

The problem is that employees aren’t allowed to go and visit events and conferences like they used to do. Managers and CxO level people need to focus on their business first.

Thus less customers and potential customers on your events.
More paying partners hoping to generate leads.

Conferences as gatherings of vendors is bad
Seems the conferences have become the gatherings of vendors all hoping to score a lead.
This is exactly what needs to be avoided: the number of vendors and your employees should be less than 35% of the total population in order not to scare away those who have managed to come to your conference. Too many vendors will make the potential customers very uncomfortable and give them a feeling of wasting their time.

Organizing conferences during this recession have become the recession of conferences: no people show up except vendors, thus not successful.

How to draw in more people?

- Get industry renowned or famous people to present. Preferably 2 people for an additional panel discussion.
- Get customers to present instead of your Product Marketing managers.
- Offer free drinks.
- Offer free food.
- Give a few industry awards: at least the nominees will attend.
- Create and launch a conference website: present partly sneak previews.
- Make it exclusive to get invited: exclusivity makes it more important.
- Start the event late in the afternoon and keep it going after working hours.
- Email and call all possible customers and potential customers.
- Have clear indications for finding your location.
- A location that is easy to commute or drive to.
- Have enough parking space, but not too much: to many empty spaces give the feeling of over estimation.
- Use social media during the event or conference for getting attention: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

How to keep the attendees

- Have interesting or renowned speakers.
- Have interesting content.
- If your audience is mainly male, make sure all your female employees are present and stay.

Keep event costs low

You need to keep the conference costs low in order to achieve a positive ROI (Return On Investment):
- Hold it at your premises: stay away from exclusive (expensive) locations.
- Walking lunches.
- Only a small selection of drinks: beer and soda.

Conference needs to be remarkable

In any case you need to have something remarkable that people will remember afterwards.

The all important small talk afterwards
This can even be the late ending of the after party. Give them something to talk about on the next day in their office.
Just for this small talk reason, don’t organize an event or conference on a Friday, as people will have forgotten about it on Monday. Make sure they can talk at their work about your conference the next day and even the day after: Tuesday or Wednesday are the best days of the week.

Live blogging
Make it look more important by reporting about the conference life on the Internet: Twitter or blogging from the conference.
Post pictures of the conference of attendees almost live on the Internet (on the company or conference blog).
Embed a short video from the conference on the blog.

Twitter
Use texting (sms) or Twitter for collecting questions:
- Many people don’t dare to speak in public.
- Even less people dare to pose a question in public.
- Anonymity will increase the number of questions significantly.
- People can send questions during the presentation.
- Questions will be clearly stated as they are limited to 160 characters (or 140 in case of Twitter).
- Display the questions on a screen, but also present them on the conference website.
- Prepare a number of questions upfront in order to get a conversation after each presentation.
- People not attending the conference can pose questions to the presenters.

As there are less successful events or conferences, if you manage to organize and operate a successful event, chances are people will remember it longer.

How difficult was it to get attendees for your conferences?
How successful were your conferences?

Number of visitors down

Our number of monthly visitors has been decreasing since a few months.
This is probably due to:
1) Google cleaning out their links
Google decreased significantly the number of links to our website: from 38,500 to 9,200 for ‘LEADSExplorer’.
However since Microsoft launched www.bing.com (But It’s Not Google) Google increased the number of links to 10,800.
Whereas Bing gives 10,900 links.

2) Less blog aggregators
When sending out pings for the blog, many of the blog aggregators just don’t respond anymore.
Even Technorati has been out of order many times over the last 4 weeks (Doh! The Technorati Monster Escaped Again): not updating and they even missed a few of our blog posts.
Less blog aggregators in operation drives less visitors.

3) Less bookmarks
Our blog posts have been bookmarked less.
This can be due to:
- The content was addressing more Sales and Marketing issues, whereas previously the subjects were more SEO and recession issues.
- People in need for a job don’t waste their time on book marking
- Maybe people used to bookmark at their office which they don’t do any longer.

Typically bookmarks attract non-business visitors which have less value for our business.

Conclusion: Less ‘Residential visitors’ – relatively more ‘Company visitors’.

Number of free trials up

On the other hand the number of free trial requests went up significantly: it almost tripled since a few weeks.
Strangely several visitors requesting free trials only visited one page and then headed straight to the free trial page, as if they had visited before.
As we track all visits and no previous visits have been registered for the visitors or the company, it is likely they have visited before from a different PC at a different location (home?) or have been ordered to sign-up for a free trial.

What has changed?

Is the economy picking up again?
Is there a new hope?
Are we coming out of the recession tunnel: a decision point?
Are people starting to look for new solutions?

Is or has LEADSExplorer gaining industry recognition?
It did gain several links in blogs and articles on the Internet and has been referred to on LinkedIn Answers and a few Tweets on Twitter.

The next goal is to convert as many ‘Free Trials’ into paying customers.

What are your experiences and your take on the current situation?
Do you see or experience changes in customer behavior?

Long ago Sales was Sales and that was clearly stated on the business card:
- Sales
- Sales representative
- Pre-sales
- Sales manager
- VP Sales

Hiding the Sales function

Then companies or was it the people themselves started to hide the real purpose of the function:
- Business Development Manager/Executive
- Evangelist
- Consultant
- Strategic Partnership Manager/Executive
- Branch Manager
- General Manager (of a micro company)
- CEO (of a micro/small company)
- Commercial Lending Manager
- Customer Service Inbound
- Call Centre Operator
- Key Accounts Representative
- Account Manager
- Key Account Manager
- New Business Manager
- New Membership Manager
- Product Manager
- VP Professional Services
- …

Why lie to potential customers?

Has Sales obtained a bad image?
Are people ashamed of being in Sales?
What’s wrong with being in Sales?
Why hide the real function behind a fancy name?

What impression does it give to your potential customers if you lie upfront about your function with the function on your business card? Can you and your company still be trusted?
It is not because all of your competitors are doing it, you and your company show follow suit.

Be proud of being in Sales

You should be proud being in Sales as selling is the most important function in a company:
No Sales – No company.

You bring the revenue: the profit center – The others are the cost centers.
Cold calling companies to companies in your market in order to generate leads.
Finding the leads converting into prospects and generating sales.
Once people have become customers, customer retention is required.
All Sales these are activities with the goal to generate revenue.

Selling is probably the most difficult job or function in any company:
- People don’t come to buy automatically
- People don’t just buy it needs convincing.
- Competitors are everywhere.
So be proud of being in Sales and show it.

People might even respect you more as you don’t hide yourself behind a fancy name.

What is on you business card?