Trade shows and B2B Events can be fun and engaging for the attendees, but they are mostly blissfully unaware of what goes on behind the scenes. Meetings at trade shows are the vehicles for building sales pipeline at events, which translates into measurable ROI from events. So the onus of the success of events falls squarely on the shoulders of the meeting manager.
Jifflenow’s executives have been to a large number of events, and speak to a lot of meeting managers. The easiest way to identify the meeting manager in the booth, is to look out for the most stressed looking person. We’re usually right 9 out of 10 times.
It’s understandable why meeting management is so stressful. There’s only one thing that makes it so stressful. Meeting managers find it difficult to cope with the uncertainty. They have quite a few things to be uncertain about. Let’s look at what they are.
Time-zones
Depending on the scale of the event, people come from all corners of the globe to engage in fruitful business conversations. While scheduling meetings between people from different countries, not taking into account the time zone difference can lead to the attendees missing the meeting. Some countries also tend to have different time-zones in their cities, and this can also derail the meetings. When meetings are voluminous, it would be difficult for the meeting managers to keep track of all the time-zones. Manually checking each and every attendee’s location would be very time-consuming, and would leave them with even lesser time to consider the factors described below.
Meeting Rooms
Meetings rooms are extremely valuable resources in an event, because it is where the sales pipeline is built. Meeting managers need to be on their toes, worried if the rooms will be available when they need it the most. They do not have a way to prioritize meetings based on the size of the deal being discussed in the meeting. They also run the risk of double-booking the rooms, because meeting room availability is not very transparent and easily accessible. Most importantly, they are worried if they are making the most out of their resources, and are constantly wondering if they are extracting maximum RoI from the meeting rooms.
Attendee Availability
All attendees have different agendas when they come to events. It’s not easy to get them to bend to the meeting manager’s will. Similar to meeting room availability, the meeting attendee’s calendar is also not available. The absence of a single attendee can seriously hamper a meeting’s progress.
Meeting compliance
Meeting managers overcome all the anxiety described above that can be attributed to the fickle nature of organizing meetings. All those efforts can be derailed so easily by the attendees just not showing up to the meeting. This always hangs over the head of the meeting manager. They do try to send meeting reminders, but even that demands a high degree of manual effort, when there are hundreds of attendees and multiple meetings happening simultaneously.
In conclusion, meeting managers at events are an incredibly stressed out lot, and who can blame them? But it’s not all doom and gloom. Jifflenow has a solution custom-built to address all these issues. Take a demo and see for yourself.
