Building market knowledge – know your profiles

Our events are aimed at attendees who face critical business issues and opportunities. They’re looking for insight and solutions to help them meet their business goals. We are looking to attract vendors and solution providers whose products and services help these primary market delegates do this. We need good insight from the outset as to how this value chain works so we can deliver the right audience profile and be able to maximise our revenue.

At IMAPAC the sales person has a key role in helping uncover this information at the beginning of a project

Your General Manager will have identified the most significant vendor profiles in the space. Target a few vendors in each category to ask for their views on the issues at work. Ask more than one in each group to get a broad picture. Try to speak to Sales, Business Development or business unit departments themselves rather than Marketing. They will have much more insight into these issues and will generally be more willing and able to discuss them with you. Use the answers to drive your sales strategy and help inform the development of the conference programme and delegate mix. On some projects you will also have a role to play in establishing information about the profiles and needs of the primary delegate audience. Identify with your GM the target industries and job titles the event will focus on. There are a number of valuable questions that will build our knowledge of the value chain. The answers will help you identify key issues for the conference agenda as well as grow our knowledge of potential sponsors and their goals and challenges

Some good questions to ask vendors
What do your clients tell you are the most important issues they’re looking to address?
What are your most important customer groups?
What job titles do you most actively sell to?
What other stakeholders and decision makers are relevant in your customers’ organisations?
What do you feel is your biggest opportunity in this space at the moment?
And the biggest challenge?
Who are your significant competitors?
What vendor groups do you believe have the greatest opportunity in this market?
What other sorts of products or services work in tandem with yours to provide solutions?
What about companies that look to sell to or partner with you?
What new products are around the corner?
Are other sorts of vendors looking to break into this market over the next couple of years?

The answers will give you great insight into the vendor marketplace, visibility on new vendor categories to target for sponsorship, and the sorts of opportunities and problems faced by your customers!

Key questions to ask potential primary market attendees
What are the most significant issues you face in your industry at the moment and how do these directly impact your role?
Who are the other significant stakeholders in the organisation connected to your role?
What are your major objectives for the coming year?
What is the big opportunity for the organisation?
What challenges do you face in achieving it?
What would you have to do in order to do so?
What kind of solutions are you considering using?
What sorts of vendors can help you achieve your goals?
What do you think about the current vendor offerings to the marketplace?
What stops you from using solutions that you don’t use? (eg. ROI; price; lack of perceived value; difficult to tell products apart?)
Are you aware of other sorts of solutions that might be relevant but that you’re not yet considering employing?

Use this information to build a picture of what our attendees want to achieve, what solutions might exist to help them do so, and what their attitudes are towards investing in them. It’s this info that will allow us to deliver world class, well positioned content to our customers!