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Growing your fees through events

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29th Jun 2010
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In the second part of his events series, marketing expert Paul Shrimpling outlines how to turn your client event into a profit generating exercise.

My last article explained the marketing merits of running events, but how do you ensure your event is successful?
Having run more than 100 events for accountants and many more for business owners, I’ve discovered that there are three steps to events success:

  1. Get your ‘pre-event process’ to work (i.e. get bums on seats at your event)
  2. Get your ‘during-event process’ to work (get the attendees to take action at your event)
  3. Get your ‘post-event process’ to work (create lots of dialogue with attendees afterwards)

Step one: Getting people to your event

  • Identify a large enough list to approach and tell them about your event. Write to them. Email them. Phone them. Visit them. Use all your influencing skills to make this happen. (To find out more about influencing skills, click here).
  • Make the event ‘offer’ irresistible – give crystal clear and powerful reasons why they should invest their valuable time in attending your event.
  • Work with a joint venture partner who is also committed to getting bums on seats. Banks are a logical choice (even though they’ll fail to deliver half the number of bums on seats they commit to – be warned). Corporate lawyers, IFAs and IT providers are better bets.

Step two: Get people to take action

  • Make your arrival processes finely tuned:  Registration, badges, coffee, and bacon butties
  • Make your presentation memorable: Ensure you have a good speaker, good content and finish on time.
  • Make your call to action clear and easy and painless, and make them expect (want) a follow up contact.

Step three: Follow up

  • Systemise, diarise and track your follow up contact processes
  • Systemise, diarise and track your follow up contact processes
  • Systemise, diarise and track your follow up contact processes

The three-part repetition above is deliberate.

Almost every firm I have seen (and I’ve been to see many) have fallen at the final hurdle. They work hard at creating a remarkable event. They work hard at getting bums on seats. They fail dismally to follow up well enough and the event fails to deliver on their expectations.

It’s not rocket science; it just involves well planned hard work and a great follow up procedure.

Are you making the most of events in your firm? Post your comments and questions below.

Paul Shrimpling
www.remarkablepractice.com

Paul Shrimpling is managing director of Remarkable Practice and author of a white paper entitled ‘The 7 big mistakes that accountants make that costs them a fortune in lost sales, lost profits and lost personal cash’.

 

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