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Events can fail for a number of reasons. Maybe you didn’t make enough sales as a result of your event to justify the time and money you put into it. Maybe you didn’t invite the right attendees, or didn’t convert enough registrants into attendees. Maybe you attempted to handle all of your event management and event logistics-related tasks in house, and wound up neglecting to address critical components.

When you have a national or global organization, it can not only be impractical to gather key personnel and partners together to learn about your new products, processes, or systems, but impossible. Similarly, delivering important information regarding your products and services to your best prospects and current clients can be an enormous challenge. Executives at the highest levels and professionals at mid-size and start-up companies all have limitations, whether those limitations have to do with time and money or goals and priorities. When it makes more sense to practice knowledge sharing via the Web than by hosting in-person events, conducting webinars can be your best option.

The adults in his life might have been saying important things, but all Charlie Brown ever heard was: wah wah-wah wah wah-wah.

How many times have you invested in sales event promotion only to wonder whether the time and resources you’ve spent on planning and execution will actually result in enough wins to justify your expenditures?

You have decided to hold a lunch and learn event. You have picked the date, solution, venue, meal, prospects, and the message you want to deliver. The invitations have gone out and your staff has started to call your best prospects and customers to fill the event. All are great steps but have you made your lunch and learn different. Remember, your prospects are everyone’s prospects and are getting called all the time for different events. How do you make your lunch and learn different.

We have written several blogs lately around event audience acquisition strategies, lunch n learn events, how to put them together, and how to drive attendance. What we have not talked about is what the subject matter should or could be.  Two blogs ago I wrote about the economy growing and getting better; if you did not read it then I recommend you do. It was not the most well written blog, I admit that, but it was the content was the most important. It was titled “Is the Economy Growing; What is Your Organization Doing to Keep Pace”.

Because we are seeing a 34% growth rate so far over last year and we have doubled our staff size, we wanted to let you know what is working for our information system partners in successfully driving an increase in their sales and profits and how our partners are getting their message out to their prospects. Our partners are the most successful and effective by using event audience acquisition strategies for driving attendance to lunch and learn events. These events are used for getting the message out about their products and services surrounding their offerings and specialties and how those products and services not only save time, money, and the ability to respond faster to today’s growing business needs but in the long run actually pay for themselves thru ease of use, manageability, and decreased down time.

As you can see from the graph above out of the 138 events that we have driven attendance for 64% has been on storage and virtualization (VMWare, HP, EMC, MS Hyper-V), 18% on Data-Deduplication, and 18% has been on business application solutions. In the past month, we are seeing an increase in HP’s 3Par Solution (Virtual Storage).

How high is the ROI? I am not sure as to the exact dollar amount but I can tell you we consistently put 20 to 50 qualified prospects in a room every week for our partners and they consistently return to us for event audience acquisition. Also the cost per lead is lower than any solution that we offer and the cost of sales is lower for our customers. Maybe they only get one or two more sales out of the event, maybe they finally get that prospect in a room that they have been targeting for years, or maybe they are looking to get the word out on their company by having us dial 200 dials a day for two weeks straight I am not 100% sure . I do know that they keep coming back and telling us that they are successful and repeating the formula over and over.