If in doubt, throw a big event
In his thirteenth article for the Consulting Balance, Mark shares how despite some reservations, he managed to host a two-day conference for multiple clients.
“You should have a client conference.”
This simple comment from a board meeting set some serious wheels in motion, despite creating a dilemma. It was immediately clear to me that it was the right thing to do, but I had no idea if our small company would be able to pull it off.
In my prior enterprise-focused company, we had held a conference with our best customers' senior executives. I had seen first hand the positive impact such events had on our relationships and our ability to work with these customers. It would be amazing if we could have this with our clients at Nexient.
On the other hand, if we held such an event, would anyone come? And what would we talk about? With our cashflow still very tight at this point I was also concerned how much it would cost to put on and if we’d even see a return on that investment.
After discussing the idea with my entrepreneurial executive team, we decided to go for it. If we managed to pull it off, it would create something really valuable for the company. We even came up with a name for our conference. I’ve previously talked about how giving a new idea a name helps it take flight. In this case, we decided “Nexus” was the perfect name for an event that would bring people together.
Addressing the demoralizing details
We agreed that we could use our individual client innovation days as a model to build on. Essentially, our concept was to hold a similar event over two days with multiple clients at once. This actually reflected how we approached software development. We were early adopters of the Agile methodology and this was a good example of how we would take fundamentals from that and apply them to things outside of our day to day. In this case, we had tried something small (innovation days for a single client) and proven that it worked. The next step meant bringing five to ten clients together for the same type of innovation day.
With a name and loose format decided, we next needed to figure out where to hold our event. Our clients unanimously loved the wine country portion of our innovation days so we decided to stick with that. We had a very small marketing team at the time, so I got personally involved in finding a spot - certainly no hardship for me. Hamel Family Winery had one of the most beautiful properties, an independent family run vibe and of course, fantastic wines. It also had a library room that held around 20 people with a spectacular view of the vines. At the time, they didn’t do a lot of corporate events and we were able to rent out the whole property for a couple of days mid-week.
Our next challenge was to recruit some startups to come and present. We used similar criteria to what we had for our innovation days:
We wanted the founder, CEO, or CTO to do the presentation. This feels more authentic and less of a sales pitch;
We wanted technologies that were visually interesting so that they demoed well;
We wanted cutting edge, but also production ready so that interested clients could move right into a trial.
This event would be for multiple clients at once, so we also added a new requirement - the solution had to be useful across industries. However we had no idea how many clients would show up, so we had a bit of a “chicken and egg” problem. To make the conference more attractive for clients we needed to convince some startups to come. But we needed some clients signed up to make it more attractive for the startups to spend a day with us. We solved this by leaning on our relationships with startup founders, pulling in people who were close with our leadership or board members and were willing to take a chance on our new event.
Two more challenges remained:
what to talk about
how to get clients to come
1. What to talk about
With the presentations from startups pinned down, we turned to ourselves and what we would be offering on top of two nice days away. We decided we should kick everything off with a keynote to flex our thought leadership. So far we had been explaining our product-centric development process at a high level, comparing our product mindset to an IT mindset. This conference would be a good opportunity to expand on this and get more feedback. We broke it down into the problem we were trying to solve (how to get enterprises to move like startups and deliver consumer-grade experiences) followed by our approach as a solution (small cross-functional teams working in Agile sprints to regularly release new features and focus on growing revenue). We’d already had some positive initial feedback, but this was the first time we’d dedicate 90 minutes to the topic with a room (hopefully) full of clients. It was terrifying to say the least.
It turned out that when we did the keynote, people all agreed that this was one of the central problems they were trying to solve. We realized we had really tapped into what was about to become an industry trend.
2. How to get clients to come
The final piece of the puzzle was to ensure clients came. Our aim was to get close to ten clients there as we figured this was a good size for great conversations. It took everyone on our field and leadership teams to lean on their existing client relationships - especially for East Coast clients. It was a pretty big ask to get them to spend two days on the West Coast as after travel, they’d be taking almost three days out of their week. To help with this, we scheduled the event close to the weekend hoping that people would see it as an opportunity to extend their trips.
As an additional incentive we also invited clients to bring a guest. If they didn’t have to explain to their partner why they’d be gone for three to five days in wine country, we thought they’d be more likely to accept.
In the end, we attracted nine client attendees from seven client companies. With the startup people and our team, it made for a good sized crowd.
The power of a conference and how to make it happen
By pulling off this first Nexus conference successfully, we had created an expectation that we’d do this again every year. And we had created a valuable sub-brand for Nexient.
If you’re looking to do something similar these are my tips:
Just get started - when we first started thinking about whether to do this and if we could succeed, there was a long list of reasons why it wouldn’t work or was too risky. Luckily, we ignored all of those and dove in. We broke the problem down into many sub-parts and worked our way through each in parallel.
Lean on relationships - hopefully you’ve got some really strong relationships with partners and clients that you can appeal to. We had to lean on our connections quite a bit to get both the startup founders and the clients to join our first conference. Luckily, we had enough strength in these relationships to pull this off.
Ideas can take on a life of their own - we knew there was some energy around the product-centric approach to enterprise application development, but weren’t sure exactly what it was. By putting our concept forward, we were seen as leaders. Just having a first draft of a concept is enough to get a group of smart clients to help you refine it and begin to shape it into an industry-leading offering.
