I have seen companies spend thousands of dollars on flying in their entire sales and executive teams who then just meet and greet existing customers - results in lots of travel and entertainment expense with no results. To maximize your return on the investment in the marketing event do the following:

Plan Ahead of the event:

Goal: Have a clear measurable goal, in terms of number of leads generated, number of announcement made by the customer and number of PR carrying those announcements, number of existing client meetings.

Budget: Have a budget planned and approved ahead of time. Know that the walk-in crowd in the booth is most likely less important than the planned meetings with customer (ie., spend to have meeting rooms with wifi).

Speaker: Always get a speaker session and even better if you can get a customer to join you for the session. Try to get as many of your prospects to come to the session as possible, you will be seen as industry leader.

Marketing Message: What is the key message that you would like to give your customers - New Product launch, improved customer satisfaction etc. You need to have a message that is clearly articulated and every body at the event is giving out the same message.

Meetings: Sales should be responsible for setting up meetings with prospective customers and existing customers who are coming up for SLA renewals or major upgrades with the company executives. If a sales prime has no meetings scheduled, that sales person is not required to attend the session.

During the event:

Announcements: Company should made a major PR on every day of the event, they can be recent customer wins, product launch, patent win etc.

Meetings: Have the scheduled meetings with the prospects and customers and deliver the planned message.

Leads: Marketing would be responsible for generating the leads at the booth (collect contact information, give out brochures etc).

Speaker Session: During the speaker session, Marketing would be responsible for getting lead information from all the attendees (most event organizer would be happy to facilitate this).

Post Event:

Lead Qualification: Marketing would be responsible for qualifying the leads and only qualified leads would be handed off to regional sales teams.

Results Analysis: Marketing would be required to quantify the number of leads, PR coverage, number of customer meetings, number of announcements made by the customer etc and compare with the goals set out ahead of the event. Analysis of total expense on the event vs the budget allocated.

This analysis will determine if you should attend the event in the future, what changes you need to make in your plan and goals.

About the Author

Along with being a marketing ECO advisor at Entrepreneurcommunityonline.com, Pooja (CEO Blueknee Marketing) specialize's in developing marketing strategy, competitive analysis and pricing strategies.

You can follow my regular blog at http://blog.blueknee.com or contact me via email at pooja@blueknee.com.