2 Huge Mistakes that Will Sink Even Your Strongest Event

Warwick Davies contributed today's post. With 25 year's experience running conferences and trade shows, he owns and operates The Event Mechanic!

Having been around in the business a while, I have had the luxury of watching great shows come and go, like watching cruise ships in the harbor. 

What are the critical factors that will hasten the decline of an event? I’d boil them down to two:

1. Losing positive engagement with your key stakeholders, who are: 

• Top 10 sponsors
• Top 10 content drivers or thought leaders
• Top 10 attendee groups
• Top 10 suppliers (hotels and general service contractors)

Someone has spent years building the relationships that grew the event to be a market leader. As the event grew, you may have started to take things for granted or gotten greedy, with large profits rolling in, and forgot the nuts and bolts of keeping relationships healthy and mutually profitable. As the market grew, your competitors became hungrier than you, and started treating your stakeholders better than you, and they started to drift.

2. Not knowing what’s going on in your market from a DNA level 

Is your knowledge of your marketplace ‘imported?” Are you part of the market or just serving it?  If the latter, how do you know which innovations to feature without being too forward or not forward enough? 

That’s the bad news. How do you reverse the trends? Just do the opposite of the above: make a commitment to keep all your relationships healthy and your knowledge current and relevant. Resting on your laurels in this business is going to eventually end in disaster…

There's Something Happening Here

I'm an optimist.

But I can't resist thinking about Sinclair Lewis once in a while.

His 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, portrayed the election to the presidency of a populist, on his promise to make America great again.

Once in office, the new president outlaws dissent, tossing opponents into concentration camps and arming his stooges to keep the citizenry in check.

Dissidents who aren't imprisoned turn for help to a secret organization, the "New Underground," which smuggles them into Canada.

But as befits all tyrants, the president is eventually ousted in a White House coup. 

His successor, to create employment for the millions of jobless, declares war on Mexico.

But the war is unpopular and sparks nationwide unrest. The unrest provides an opportunity for the dissidents to return from Canada. They quickly form a resistance movement.

Civil war erupts in the final chapters.

NOTE: Opinions are my own.

Short and Easy

"It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’"                               

― A.A. Milne

Most often, your purpose in publishing is to inform and persuade. Why mask your meaning with long, difficult words?

Why say your product "will provide seamless multi-user functionality," when you mean it "supports up to 15 users?"

Why sound like some abstruse academic or dodgy bureaucrat?

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, " George Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language."

Latin and Greek words are grand, but their use in business is dreadful.

Just look at this balderdash from Accenture:

Insurers will need to open up to their ecosystem partners, sharing not only customer data, but customers themselves. To encourage and support such ecosystems, IT architectures will need to evolve, ensuring flexibility and interoperability with external partners and providers. A key challenge will be to orchestrate innovation and legacy evolutions while simultaneously managing security threats and changing IT processes to roll out and manage new products and services faster and cheaper.

Acccenture means:

Insurance companies need to upgrade their IT systems so suppliers can use their customer data. But they can't let the changes interrupt routine business.

This morning's lesson: short and easy.

Now, what about lunch?

No Agony, No Ecstasy

Like popes of old, today's venture capitalists have no patience with the tortured perfectionist.

"Perfection has no business in the world of entrepreneurship," Charlie Harary says in Entrepreneur.

Today's marketplace is "supersonic," so entrepreneurs must tightly cap opportunity costs—and quality.

He quotes LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

Products need only be "minimally viable," Harary says, and businesses thick-skinned.

"A little criticism or failure never killed anyone. Learn to embrace it and use it to make you great."

In other words, scrap excellence for the quick buck and one day you, too, will run a respected company.

This wolfish mindset explains why so many of the apps we buy are broken; the books, riddled with typos; the drugs, full of dangerous side effects.

It's not because we lack talent.

It's because we're in such a goddamned hurry.

As novelist Irving Stone said in The Agony and the Ecstasy, “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive."

Love Story

I remember little of my first formal date, except that I took the girl to see the schmaltzy blockbuster, Love Story.

The film's tagline perfectly states what every B2B marketer wants skeptical buyers to believe.

Love means never having to say you're sorry… you bought from us.

That's why B2B marketers adore case studies.

They're the ideal way to spread customers' love.

You're nuts if you're not dishing them out repeatedly.

Case studies are like movie reviews, except your customers are the stars and every movie's a love story.

And buyers can't get enough of them, because people love to compare themselves to others.

Here are seven case-study do's and don'ts. Keep them near and dear:

• Case studies adhere to a classic construct—a three-point story arc: problem, solution, results. Don't stray from that. 

• Make your customer the headliner. Keep you company off the marquee.

• Interview your customer in a knowledgable, but laid-back manner. Don't put her on edge with tough questions, or prompt her to say things she wouldn't say naturally.

• Use a lot of customer quotes for color and credibility.

• Illustrate your case studies with photographs and charts.

• Ask your customer to sign a release.

• Besides publishing the case study on your website, create a PDF version customers (and your salespeople) can download and share.