Making events an accountable part of the sales cycle and culture has always been an issue for businesses. Believing any opportunity to meet customers or partners face-to-face, or bring employees together at a corporate event has always ‘felt’ like the correct thing to do. Time and time again budget holders were left questioning and unable to answer what the return was. The set up, management, delivery and measurement so often fell short of being properly planned and integrated into wider internal and external customer sales and experience strategies. But that is all changing.

There is now a growing recognition and a desire amongst corporate event managers and other lines of business (sales, marketing, procurement, finance, HR teams etc.) to be much smarter in the way that events are run, and how they can prove accountability to the business. Here’s why:

1. Businesses need to differentiate to win. Real world face-to-face interactions (via your events) allow these points of differentiation to be delivered, experienced, captured and capitalised upon.

2. Events can contribute significantly to the overall experience and perception customers, partners and employees have of your brand. By being joined up with business and sales objectives events become an integral part of their company’s purpose and accelerate opportunity and belief.

3. Without a strategy you're committed to and a plan to deliver against it, you are vulnerable. Knowing why, how and when you need to run an event will ensure it provides and delivers value to all.

4. The customer is at the heart of everything. Successful events are not run by a siloed department. They are an integral part of the sales cycle and experience process. The face-to-face opportunity events provide has relevance to every part of your business.

5. First class experience is expected as default. Providing a personalised experience to each delegate individually from the very first communication is paramount. The more you can demonstrate you understand their needs and preferences, the more relevant you will be to them and the greater their desire to engage and attend. You can also serve them better too.

6. Technology is an enabler. The right event management platform will enable your business to set-up and deploy an event in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost by anyone, at any time, anywhere in the world. Intuitive to use, aligning to your brand for a seamless look and feel and providing relevant data and insight to enable you to deliver a great delegate experience on any device, pre event, during the event and post event, should be the basic criteria.

By aligning to business strategy, applying good planning skills, integrating with other business activities and colleagues and using the right technology tools and applications, any event can now feed both the attendee and the business with richer and more valuable experiences and outcomes. All of which can be measured and reported more accurately and effectively than ever before.

Tool up to win

Event managers that have a good understanding of their organization’s purpose and strategy will be better placed to make lasting and valuable contributions to the sales and experience effort and ensure all future events are correctly funded and attended.

Choosing and using the right event management technology to bring it all together, attract the right delegates and remove the uncertainty of event accountability is time worth investing. A simple gap analysis of how you currently run events versus how you must plan and run events in the future is a critical first step. With that knowledge, there is only ever likely to be a limited number of event management platforms and applications capable of meeting your needs. We understand that and this is why we built Mitingu.