This will probably get me blacklisted by half the events in the space, but I don’t care … especially since I have no interest in going to half the events in our space anyway. (Now, are both sets the same? Probably Not. Am I blacklisting myself from events that might be worthwhile? Probably. Do I care? Well, if you’ve been reading the doctor‘s rants for eighteen (18) years, you know the answer … the truth comes first!)
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but a recent article by Gaurav Sharma on how his buyer’s mindset is bugging him on a point, along with recent conversations on LinkedIn, have convinced me it’s time to write it.
Most of today’s big events are a complete waste of time and money for practitioners and vendors alike! I’m talking the ISMs, eWorlds, DPWs, and events like that. And I’m dead serious.
Why?
Vendor: You’re paying 50K to 100K for that event. When you consider the cost of the booth display materials (5K to 10K); the booth, equipment and services rental (30K+); giveaways and fancy dinners (5K to 10K+); getting and housing a small team there (20K to 40K); etc., it’s a lot of money. And for what? A chance to hock your wares to a small (less than 50%) set of attendees who are also being shouted out by 50 to 100 other vendors? At least half of whom have no decision or spending authority at the end of the day? Besides the ability to say for three (3) days: “look at us, we made it“?, what do you get? Maybe a handful of leads if you’re lucky? With each of those leads costing you 10K+. And nothing if you aren’t so lucky!
For each 10K you spend, you could have an expert write a piece of content that could be part of a year-long educational campaign that could be used to generate real leads through sign-up downloads, webinar sign-ups, follow-up conversations and downloads (when someone contacts you to learn more, and thanks you for educating them vs. just shouting marketing soundbites at them), etc. For the 80K you would spend on a glitzy event, you could get 4 custom pieces of content, 4 webinars, and a year-long educationally oriented marketing campaign that you’d be thanked for.
Practitioner Organization: It will cost you 7.5K to 10K for each senior lead, director, and CPO you send to a 3-day event. You’re probably budgeting 25K to 30K to send a small team. And what are you getting for it? A bunch of high-level presentations on various topics by a bunch of people you don’t know, usually not much different than the presentations you saw two years ago on the same topics by different people you don’t know, which aren’t deep enough to teach you anything (except re-emphasize important areas you need to drill down deep on).
A bunch of discussions with random vendors, many of whom won’t be relevant to you, while you completely miss the chance to talk to those vendors who would be because there was no way you could get to them all and without good pre-vetting and education, you were just rolling the bones and engaging randomly (or, if you were hungry, with whatever vendor rep offered you the most tantalizing dinner option).
For that same 25K, you could have an expert from a niche mid-sized consultancy come in and give your team a 1 to 2-day course on a specific problem or area of relevance — i.e. what do modern e-Procurement systems do, how do you select the right one, and who are five vendors that are commonly used by your peers; what regulatory changes are coming in global e-Invoicing requirements over the next two years, and what will we have to do to keep up; how can we address carbon accounting reporting requirements while embedding better carbon management into our supplier development and supply change management; etc. And let me repeat — your whole team, not just 3 people where 2 of them are responsible for multiple areas (or everything) and have no time to train anyone else or oversee the process, program, or technology that needs to be put in place.
The only people who get their money’s worth at these events are:
1. Consultants who don’t sponsor, don’t stay at the overpriced event hotel, but just go and spend their entire time talking to vendors they don’t know (to engage with them firsthand on fact-finding and relationship building) and Directors/CPOs (to find out what the common themes are that they should market too) and come away with verified/renewed focus and new options to sell to their clients.
2. The Organizers who get the fame and the fortune (as they collect a cut of all money coming in).
But does this mean all events are, or have to be, bad?
No. An event would be very worthwhile if:
- it didn’t try to be everything to everyone (and ended up being nothing to anyone),
- instead focussed on a market niche (market size – geography – problem or process), and
- kept the size down, the balance appropriate, and the value up.
Let’s dive into this.
Focus
For an event to be truly valuable, it has to address a relevant problem or technology for a (similar) group of organizations which have a similar problem or need. By this, I typically mean market size (small to mid-market, mid-market and above, large mid-market through global enterprise), region(s) with similar market dynamics (North America and Western Europe, Central and South America, India, China, etc.), and a focus on a technology (Procure to Pay, e-Procurement, I2P/AP, Supplier Management, Direct Sourcing, etc.) or problem (Carbon Regulation and Accounting, Data Management and Predictive Analytics, etc.). This allows organizations to self select as being interested, or needing insight, in this problem or technology, vendors with appropriate technology to come forward (and be vetted by the event organizers as relevant), and the event to ensure value will be received by all attendees — practitioners will get relevant talks and panels (as all the sessions will be appropriately oriented) as well as a chance to learn about solution providers who provide solutions relevant to their peers (and possibly them) and vendors will know that the practitioners are actually interested in the type of technology they are offering, and leads will be real (and more plentiful).
Balance
There should be considerably more practitioners than vendor reps. At least 2 to 1, and preferably 3 to 1. The event organizer can limit vendor registrations based on attendees, as well as the number of reps a vendor can send. This helps the vendors (by ensuring there are more than enough practitioners to go around, which means they will spend more time talking to practitioners than each other) as well as the practitioners (by not only ensuring they aren’t overloaded by irrelevant vendors but by ensuring they have a lot of peers to talk to for insights as well).
Size
A good event is big enough to ensure there is enough variety in vendors and in peers to talk to, but not so big you get lost in a sea of people. In the doctor‘s view, it’s 50 to 500-ish, depending on whether:
- you’re narrowly focused on one specific (emerging) problem and want to only talk to senior peers: in which case you’re looking for a round table event, 50-ish senior practitioners, 3 to 5 vendors with 2 reps each, and a single large meeting room at a hotel
- you’re focused on acquiring or upgrading a best-of-breed module to solve a small set of problems such as data analytics, supplier management, or strategic sourcing: then you will want 200 to 300 people, 5 to 10 vendors with 2-3 reps each, a lot of common sessions, and a few breakout sessions on particular problem types or advanced solution features (predictive demand modelling, sourcing optimization, supplier development program implementation, etc.)
- you’re interested in upgrading your sourcing or procurement capability across the board and/or learning about the current advancements, best practices, and issues in the space in which case you’d want a slightly larger event focused on your market size and geography, with maybe two to three dozen vendors with 3-4 reps each, 500+ (but < 1000) participants, and multiple tracks … still capable of being held at a large, but affordable, hotel
And since all of these events are smaller, it shouldn’t cost an attendee more than 5K in the worst case for 3 days of valuable information and vendor discovery or a vendor more than 20K for a low-cost booth and valuable leads (+ rep costs). And while this is still a sizeable amount of coin for a smaller procurement organization to send 3 people or a vendor to have a both and send 3 reps, it’s still less than half the cost of a bigger event for both parties for considerably more value.
This was the direction I’d hope a certain new event organizer would take when it started a few years ago as a smaller event focused on smaller players and newer tech, and the direction I’m hoping the next new event org will take. Not one big event that tries to be everything to everyone and instead ends up being just a sea of noise, but a series of smaller events across the Americas and Europe that are focused, give more affordable opportunities to more smaller, relevant players, and much more value to the attendees.
Will it happen? History has repeatedly shown it won’t, but if it ever does, the value will be unparalleled to all the attendees.
For those curious, the doctor‘s original response to Gaurav on “better events” was the following:
Instead of oversized, overpriced, events pretending to be everything to everyone we need smaller, more focused events that focus on particular problems or technologies for particular markets for (dedicated) Senior Leads, Directors and CPOs only.
- T: Sourcing for the Mid-Market in North America and Western Europe
- (Primarily EN business, similar processes)
- T: e-Procurement for Mid-Market and Large Enterprise in Central and South America
- (lots of e-Invoicing Regs, all Spanish or Portuguese)
- T: Supply Chain Logistics for India and China
- (where we’re still buying everything from)
- P: Carbon Management for the modern LMM or Large enterprise in the Americas or Europe
- (relevant supply management, carbon accounting, etc. tech for enterprises facing regulations)
- P: Procurement Maturity for the growing Mid-Market
- (focusing on maturity models, emerging best practices, and new category / knowledge management tech)
Then, when a CPO spends her 5K to go and discuss, she’s focused on a relevant topic, learning something, and seeing demos from vendors with appropriately focused solutions on one or more aspects of the problem (vetted by the organizer). Everything is relevant. For 10K, she can take the lead or director who will be charged with the program and system implementation. Money well spent.
And if she’s in a larger organization, she can take that 10K she saved and invest it in a startup fund, which could also be present at the event, that is collecting funds to seed various startups in S2P+ disciplines and direct that the money be invested in a startup focused on tech to solve her biggest problem. (And this foreshadows an upcoming article.)