Ready for Events That Work?

I’ve got just three words for you: Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. That’s right, the meals you need to eat anyway can be big lead and revenue tools when you invite a few prospects or clients along. They’re easier, cheaper and way more effective than those useless old trade shows and you get to control the whole thing without those pesky competitors, students, people who can’t make decisions and tire-kickers who waste your time.

Breakfast events are a terrific way to engage prospects and clients both. I like to do them in a downtown spot close to where they are all going to go to work. The emphasis for breakfast should be on content. The venue can be anyplace that knows how make watery scrambled eggs, soggy bacon and cut up fruit. What you need to focus on is some great speakers who are interesting enough for people to get up a bit early and arrive at work a bit late. Personally, I don’t think you can beat a panel discussion for breakfast. Pick a topic of some interest in your industry, find five people who know something about it and get one of your senior execs to be the moderator.  Your panelists can be clients, consultants, journalists, bloggers, authors and people looking to do a little personal branding on your dime. Have a good list of back-ups in case your speakers fall through at the last minute (in my experience about half of the people who commit will never end up actually making it). Skip the sales pitch, but make sure you have eager Squirrels all over the room and don’t be afraid to force your guests to take some information or nasty little trinket on the way out. I think you need about three months to knock it off a decent breakfast.

Lunch is a bit harder to drag people out for, so you need either a really interesting speaker or a really interesting venue, but probably not both.  I’d aim for a central location, and see if you can snag a private room at a top business lunch spot – the type of place everyone says they frequent but really don’t. Even the power lunch spots can put on a decent lunch for a reasonable budget. What you want is a room that works for both eating and talking. I sat recently through a prospecting lunch held at a very popular and expensive steak house. It would have been great except for the unfortunate fact of the very high-backed chairs blocking the view of the poor speaker labouring away at the front of the room. Come to think of it, I don’t actually remember what she said, but I did get a swell nylon bag, a pad of post-it notes and a handy notebook.  More on that later. For lunch, you can get away with doing a sales pitch or a product demo as long as there is some up-front value from your speaker. Lunches are great for prospects and I think you can get away with a reasonably competent speaker from your company. Look for a Wind-Up Evangelist or a Demo Dude. Ideally, time it around a content launch, like a new white paper, which is, I hope, timed to support a new product. If that won’t work or you don’t have anyone smart you can chuck in front of prospects, try to find someone who’s recently written a book about something slightly related to whatever it is you sell. They are usually more than happy to talk about their book and you’ll have a nice thing to give away. Nylon bags are not nice things to give away, even if there’s a book inside. If you are going with a single speaker, you can probably put one of these together in about eight weeks.

Dinners are much harder to get people to come out for so you will want to spend some time finding a really great speaker who people want to hear, and then up the ante by holding it someplace they really want to go. The trick with dinners is exclusivity: the crowd needs to be uniformly senior, selectively chosen and well chaperoned by sober Sales Squirrels. Dinners, I think, work best for customer groups with, perhaps, a small number of very senior prospects who can be led to believe that you do these all the time for all your customers. Your location needs to be something special – an exclusive new club, a posh restaurant, an impossibly opulent hotel or it needs to have a killer view. I have rented art galleries, bank vaults and castles with great effect.  It should be a place that locals would likely enter only for a wedding. Indeed, it should feel like a wedding only without the taffeta and sobbing. For your speaker, you are going for amazingness. We’re not talking some astronaut flogging a non-stick pan here, people. We’re all about an incredibly smart academic or a senior executive who never gives speeches or a slightly rumpled but still lucid journalist — the kind of person whose TED Talk you share with other people. The presentation should be brief, powerful and absolutely free of PowerPoint. I mean it. No slides. Not one. Throw away your projector. These take months and months of planning and it’s best to start with your speaker: lock them in and work out from there. Keep your list small enough that it doesn’t feel like bingo at the Legion but large enough to give everyone some new people to meet. Keep your subject matter high level and universally interesting: leadership is a good one, service, innovation and looming demographic change also work nicely.

In all cases, the challenge will be bums in seats, and this, friends, does not happen by itself. After the menu is selected, the speaker booked and the invitations designed, your event will succeed only with the help of some diligent follow-up, polite nudging, friendly stalking and, when those don’t work, a little guilt. This is a great activity for all those outbound Squirrels who hate cold calls. Send your invites. Count to ten days and make them work that heck out of that list.

Next time we will talk about what to give people (no nylon bags) and what to do when it’s all over.

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BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
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