failure Archives : Conferences That Work

The Audacious Meeting Industry Offer of a Lifetime: I Get to Pay for the Privilege of Sharing My Expertise!

Monday, October 9th, 2023 by Adrian Segar

A [MARKETING PERSON] has invited me to share my expertise at a meeting industry event. Well, there’s nothing unusual about that; it happens frequently. BUT THIS TIME I GET TO PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE!

Pay me? No, you pay us!

I’m regularly asked to speak, present, or run a workshop at meeting industry events. While I love to do this, the requests are often silent about something important.

Namely, any mention of compensation for my appearance.

Here’s what I wrote about this in 2021:

“Tip: If you…want to get someone like me to speak at your meeting, try including what you will offer for fee and expense reimbursement in your initial request. Initial offers of payment are so rare, your inquiry will immediately rise to the top of my pile.”
—Adrian Segar, January 2021, Why people continue to speak for free at meeting industry conferences

Someone I’ll call [MARKETING PERSON] clearly read this and decided to go the extra mile. A [LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY] was indeed featured in their email, after explaining why they were anxious for me to be there.

‘Attendees to [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] genuinely need the help and expertise of companies and advisors just like yourself. That’s why we have introduced a new format, “Meet the Experts” for our 2023 show.’

In a genuinely innovative twist, however, I would get to pay the [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] so people could meet me, the expert, to “share your insights and advice with attendees”.

Here’s the emailed pitch, anonymized to protect the guilty.

The Letter

9/29/23

Subject: Are you a [TOPIC] Expert?

Hi Adrian Segar,

How are you doing?

I wanted to let you know about Meet the Experts, a new initiative for [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] in [DATES] at [VENUE, LOCATION] which I think you will find interesting as a way for you to participate in the show and generate valuable leads.

Attendees to [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] genuinely need the help and expertise of companies and advisors just like yourself.

That’s why we have introduced a new format, “Meet the Experts” for our 2023 show.

[MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] will bring together the brightest minds in the events industry, and this [DESCRIPTION OF OPPORTUNITY] will feature experts such as yourself creating the ideal platform for you to showcase your knowledge and connect with a highly engaged audience.

This is more than just a networking experience; it’s a golden opportunity for you to share your insights and advice with attendees seeking guidance in their businesses.

By joining “Meet the Experts,” you’ll gain access to registered attendees who are actively seeking solutions to their business challenges and [TOPIC].

As an expert, you will have a dedicated meeting space within the [VENUE LOCATION] complete with a table and chairs, where you can have focused meetings with individuals who need your services.

Attendees will apply for a meeting with you in the leadup to the event and once you have pre-qualified them will be able to schedule a meeting on [DATES].

After the event, attendees will have the opportunity to provide feedback and rate their meetings with you. This feedback will help you focus on hot leads post-show.

Each company participating in the program benefits from the following:

Featured in a “meet the experts” email to registered attendees to drive meeting requests
A dedicated meeting space within the [VENUE LOCATION]
Branding, logo and messaging incorporated into the [VENUE LOCATION]
A table and chairs to conduct meetings
A link for attendees to apply for a meeting with you (ability to accept or decline)
Dedicated Meet The Experts profile on the event website, event platform and event app
Included in our pre-event marketing campaign for Meet The Experts
A lead scan licence for scanning attendee badges

Price [A LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY].

The Meet the Experts Program is limited to just 6 experts, Do let me know if you would like me to secure one of those spaces for you.

Kind regards

[MARKETING PERSON]

The Offer of a Lifetime

Truly this is the offer of a lifetime! Though, surprisingly, not everyone agrees. A colleague of mine who received the same pitch sent it to me with the comment:

“All I can say is Ewww”

I’m not sure whether to admire or be disgusted by [MARKETING PERSON]’s chutzpah.

Regardless, apart from sharing it here, I am ignoring their remarkable offer.

Tags: eventprofs, failure, marketing, meetings| Posted in eventprofs | No Comments »

If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it. But.

Monday, July 28th, 2014 by Adrian Segar

“If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it.” When you’re trying to sell services in a capitalist society, this makes sense. (Yes, people often build material things before they try to sell them, but it’s often not a great idea. Conducting a little market research first is smart.)

Here’s Seth Godin’s explanation:

Architecture students bristle when Joshua Prince-Ramus tells them that they are entering a rhetorical profession.
A great architect isn’t one who draws good plans. A great architect gets great buildings built.
Now, of course, the same thing is true for just about any professional. A doctor has to persuade the patient to live well and take the right actions. A scientist must not only get funded but she also has to persuade her public that her work is well structured and useful.
It’s not enough that you’re right. It matters if it gets built.
—Seth Godin, If you can’t sell it, you can’t build it

But.

As a consultant, you have no authority, only influence. And sometimes you will fail.

Even if you’re right and do an amazing selling job, sometimes you will fail.

Because sometimes it’s not about you, it’s about them.

If you can’t handle failure—having your great advice ignored—you won’t be consulting for long.

Photo attribution: Flickr user norio-nakayama

Tags: consulting, failure, selling, Seth Godin| Posted in Consulting | No Comments »

Five lessons event planners can learn from the iPad launch

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Seth Godin wrote a powerful post—Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever—about why Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day of the iPad launch. Here are five of his secrets that are 100% relevant to the fundamental challenges facing event planners today.

2. Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what? (Please don’t gloss over this one just because it’s short. In fact, it’s the biggest challenge on this list).

Designing events so that they will appeal to the least adventurous attendee guarantees the same-old snooze-fest. Event planners need to aim higher and use innovative formats, even at the risk of jolting people who didn’t expect to be jolted.

3. Make a product worth talking about. Sounds obvious. If it’s so obvious, then why don’t the other big companies ship stuff like this? Most of them are paralyzed going to meetings where they sand off the rough edges.

How many events have you attended that you still remember years later? (Or a month later?) It’s possible to create memorable events. And the best ones are memorable not because they had great content or great presenters, but because wonderful, unexpected things happened there. We know how to create events like this: by using participant-driven approaches. But we are afraid to take the risk of trying event formats that are different. Apple took that risk with the iPad launch. If we event planners won’t take the risk, who will?

6. Create a culture of wonder. Microsoft certainly has the engineers, the developers and the money to launch this. So why did they do the Zune instead? Because they never did the hard cultural work of creating the internal expectation that shipping products like this is possible and important.

Until we fully embrace the belief that it’s possible to successfully employ powerful interactive formats at our events, we’re going to be churning out more Zunes than iPads.

7. Be willing to fail. Bold bets succeed–and sometimes they don’t. Is that okay with you? Launching the iPad had to be even more frightening than launching a book…

Apple has been willing to make mistakes: the Lisa and the Newton come to mind. You can’t have great success without risking some failure.

Every time I facilitate an event I welcome the possibility of failure. Not the kind of failure where the event is a total bust—I’m not that far out on the edge—but the failure of a session’s process, or the discovery of a flaw in a new approach. And you know what? The new things I try that succeed more than outweigh the failures I experience. And, bonus, I get to learn from my mistakes!

So take some risks with your event designs. Have the courage of your convictions, trust your intuition, and be willing to make mistakes.

9. Don’t give up so easy. Apple clearly faced a technical dip in creating this product… they worked on it for more than a dozen years. Most people would have given up long ago.

We event designers can learn a lot from the success of the iPad launch.

I think we face a long hard road in changing people’s perceptions of what is possible at an event. It’s not easy to challenge hundreds of years of cultural history that have conditioned us to believe that we should learn and share in certain prescribed ways. But the rapid rise of the adoption of social media has shown that people want to be active participants in their interactions with others, and we need to change our event designs to satisfy this need when people meet face-to-face.

I’m willing to work on these issues over the long haul. Will you join me?

Tags: event-planning, failure, giving up, iPad, lessons learned, mistakes, Seth Godin, taking risks, wonder| Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »