Too often companies treat executive briefings and events as two completely different things.
- The event team owns the big conference.
- The executive briefing team owns the executive experience.
- Marketing owns the messaging.
- Sales owns the customers.
And everyone wonders why the customer experience feels a little disconnected. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Your executive briefing program and your event marketing program have more in common than most organizations realize. Both are designed to bring the right people together, create meaningful conversations, educate customers, strengthen relationships and ultimately move business forward. So why aren’t we treating them as two parts of the same customer engagement strategy?
Start With the Customer, Not the Program.
The first overlap is simple: the customer doesn’t care which internal team owns the experience. If a customer attends your annual conference, participates in an executive briefing, visits your booth at a trade show or joins a private dinner with your leadership team, they see one company. They don’t see:
- Executive Briefings
- Events
- Field Marketing
- Customer Marketing
- Sales
- Product Marketing
They see your brand. That means the experience should feel connected. The messaging should be consistent. The customer data should be shared. The follow-up should be coordinated. And, most importantly, the teams should understand what the other is trying to accomplish.
There Are More Overlaps Than You Think.
At first glance, an executive briefing center and a trade show exhibit don’t seem to have much in common. One is intimate and designed for your top tier customers. The other might have thousands of people walking through the show floor.
But look closer because both require:
- Experience design – How do we want the customer to feel and what do we want them to do?
- Content and storytelling – What are we trying to communicate and how do we make it relevant?
- Technology – How do we use digital tools, presentations, demonstrations and data to enhance the experience?
- Hospitality – Food, beverage, meeting spaces, reception, transportation and all of the little details that influence the experience.
- Brand environments – Whether it’s a 10,000-square-foot exhibit or a 1,000-square-foot briefing center, the physical environment matters.
- Audience strategy – Who are we inviting? Why are they there? What do we know about them?
- Measurement – Did the experience accomplish what we wanted it to accomplish?
That’s a lot of common ground!
Share the Resources.
This is where the opportunity gets interesting. Instead of having two teams independently build their own capabilities, companies can share resources.
Content
A presentation developed for an executive briefing may become a great keynote, breakout session or booth experience. Likewise, content developed for a major event can be repurposed for executive briefings.
The key is to stop thinking about content as something created for an event and start thinking about it as something created for the customer journey.
Creative
Your event team may have designers, producers, fabricators and experience designers. Your briefing program may have presentation designers, content specialists, hospitality teams and technology resources. There is an opportunity to create a common creative language and potentially share the resources who make it happen.
Vendors and Partners
Companies often have overlapping agencies and suppliers supporting events and briefing programs. There may be opportunities to consolidate and share. That doesn’t mean one vendor should do everything because the needs of the EBC and needs of event programs are very different, but it means you should at least ask:
“Are we buying the same capability twice from companies that understand and have the skill sets for both tradeshows and briefing centers?”
About the Author.
Dave Brull is the Vice President, Global Accounts at Kubik. He has over 20 years of integrated sales and marketing experience including partnering on experiential activations across the globe for brands such as Johnson Controls, HP Inc., Microsoft, Philips, and Verizon. He brings a unique viewpoint since he has worked for brands, associations, and agencies over the course of his career. He also sits on the BOD of The Exhibitor Advocate Association and the Advisory Board for the Global Association of Customer Engagement Professionals (GACEP).
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