How Finding Your Addressable Audience is the Difference for Success and Failure in Events: An Interview with Marketing Guru Shauna Peters

Since my March interview with Shauna Peters, vice president and marketing strategist for mdg, a Freeman Company, I’ve heard a lot about the ‘addressable audience,’ which I believe is a key concept that every event marketer needs to embrace to maximize their event attendance. Since a lot of the ‘buzz’ on this topic is coming from mdg, I decided to […]

Have Conversations with 100% of Your Sales Prospects

Most event salespeople are transactional. Their outbound phone calls and emails, whether to sell a booth or a sponsorship, tend to approach the sale as a transaction – a one-time thing. And then they wonder when these attempts don’t generate the successes they desire. Why? One key factor is that the salesperson is choosing the time, […]

The Seven Conditions for Successful Event Sales

If you are good at it, there is nothing more satisfying than being a salesperson. You have few of the mundane tasks often required in other kinds of roles and your individual performance can have a direct and immediate impact on your (potentially unlimited) income. The sales role also rewards an entrepreneurial mindset, as the most […]

Reviewing Event Profit, Product, and Marketing Strategies to Eliminate

Building successful events has many elements, but the three most critical for sustained success are Profit, Product, and Marketing. They comprise what I would call the Event Triangle. Here’s how I would describe them: Profit – The ability to build an event for which revenues continually exceed expenses. Product – The event consistently delivers benefits […]

Launching an Event: How to Avoid Financial Disaster

In theory, launching an event should not be too difficult. The steps of a launch can be laid out much like a pilot’s nighttime view of an airport runway’s landing lights. If you are methodical in execution, analysis and do things in the proper order, you should be successful. That typically is how it happens, […]

Why you should replace 20% of your sales staff – NOW

I have strong opinions about sales staffs, having managed them in some shape or form since 1996.  As I’ve previously written, I believe only 20% of salespeople are more than order takers.  Given that assertion, I was asked recently, “What about the other 80% of our sales staff?  How should I manage them so that I can […]

Have We Failed to Innovate in Our Events? An Insider’s Perspective from David Saef

I met David Saef at the recent Exhibit Sales Roundtable and was impressed both by his presentation (though not necessarily agreeing with everything) as well as his overall point of view about our industry. David is the SVP of Strategy at Freeman. In that role he helps Freeman’s many clients with their marketing strategies, including […]

Will your lack of respect for your customers come back to bite you?

A colleague advised me when I started in the business that I should “do as little as possible while trying to get the maximum out of others.” Left unsaid, but understood, was the presumption that as long as I got mine, making the minimum effort was OK.Fortunately for my bosses and my clients, I rejected that […]