How does the organization of your event looks like?
You are probably familiar with that famous children’s game, where children queue up in a line, a message is whispered into the ear of the first child and is passed on till the last. In almost all cases the original messages has changed profoundly.
In our business conversation with longer chains of command, we have seen similar processes, especially when the organization of an event is not rather straight forward, for example because there are third parties organizing the event.
So what we try to figure out in our first contacts is how remote we are from the real decision makers. The best situation is when we can talk directly to the people who are organizing the event. But all to often we do get the first email from the most junior team member, or an event organizer who has to go back to their client for any minor decision.
We have a list of about 25 datapoints, where we try to seek information to make sure we select the best speaker, and brief the selected speaker on what he or she can expect. Some of our questions sound pretty basic: who is organizing, what does the audience look like, when is the event, where is the event, what is your budget and what is your target with the event?
Do those questions sound obvious? Getting straight forward answers is not always easy, and to a large degree the communication between us, the event organizer and the real decision makers is tough, because of the too long chains of command.
Sometimes we see very complex processes, for example where a business school is organizing events for corporate clients. Then not only the professors and the company involved make the decisions, but the participants, often high-end executives take actively part in the process.
We plead for a KISS-approach: Keep It Simple Stupid.
