In the Internet era, it still makes sense to travel to B2B meetings.
In the good old days, people used to fly to various cities to conduct business and shake hands on deals. Even today, airlines are busy announcing the acquisition of new aircraft with enhanced Business Class facilities and the more popular Executive Class with added features (flyer comforts). They must know something that the die-hard advocates of the internet or virtual business meetings at virtual offices have not perhaps understood.
With the proliferation of the internet and video conferencing, a lot of meetings are being conducted in the virtual world. Yes, they are helpful, but let’s see if they can substitute in-person business to business meetings.
In-person meetings provide a sense of intimacy, connection, and empathy that is difficult to replicate virtually. More than 8 in 10 executives prefer in-person meetings to virtual contact and face to face meeting requests are 34x more effective than over the phone or video conferencing.
Events like user conferences, tradeshows, and roadshows are especially effective in engaging business to business relationships in both the quality and number of meetings. In 2016 alone, U. S. companies held 1.9 million meetings that sustained 5.9 million jobs and generated more than $100 billion in local, state, and federal taxes.
Globally, for the sake of efficiencies, large-scale events are becoming popular, with millions of dollars being spent on every event participation. Ginormous footfalls are recorded at events such as the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) at Las Vegas and large audiences gather at the Dreamforce convention at San Francisco and at the MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona, to name a couple.
Here, there is a sense of being with people but in anonymous crowds of like-minded people looking for deals. This is as good as a virtual reality that gets meaningful only when a relevant handshake and conversation lead to an influence revenue projection.
How does an enterprise ensure that they give a ‘business class’ experience to prospects, customers, partners, influencers at such events? Fortunately, the tried and tested method of juggling with spreadsheets based calendars and multiple back and forth emails and phone calls between requesters and meeting managers has met its comeuppance at the hands of the software solution called the Meeting Automation Platform (MAP) that takes the unpredictability and drudgery out of pre-meeting scheduling, in-meeting management, and even post-meeting analysis.
With integrations to Calendar software, Sales CRM, Marketing Automation tools, Event Registration, and other software, a comprehensive MAP such as Jifflenow provides a good, clear view of how meeting objectives have been met and the influenced revenue projection. Combine this with the plan of sales executives to meetings conducted and other such useful metrics and we can take the guesswork out of business attribution and more importantly pitch for better budgets for the upcoming event.
As large corporations are beginning to see confirmed meetings rise 40% to 200% through the use of MAP, it is estimated that over 80% of Fortune 500 companies will be on the platform by 2021.
To experience the significant impact of Meeting Automation Platforms on your business, schedule a demo with our experts today.
