PAN Your Next Event

So many organizations I talk to have events. They lay them on, they put in the resources, they put in the time, they invite people and at the end of it they say, “I made lots of contacts”. But the point is, what was the point? Why have you put this event on? Why have you spent this money? Why have you done all this? What's the outcome?

So if you want your events to pan out use the PAN formula - P.A.N.

Don't just put an event on and let it evolve or leave it to someone in the office to do it all. Sit down with your team and go, why are we having this event? What are we trying to achieve? How are we going to be able to link in with different people, capture details and make an offer? Why are we doing this? So before you make any sort of event happen, make sure you plan it.

You're at the event so roll your plan out, make it happen, action the contact points, action your follow-up points, action the meetings you've got to have when you know who's already coming, make sure you pair people up and so there is a real focus to what's going on.  When you add focus and targets to your meetings things happen.

N - Next steps

How do we move things forward after the meeting? What are we going to do? What have we achieved and who's going to be accountable? 

An example would probably make some sense.  An accounting firm I work with, like so many others, they have events and people turn up, they swap cards and at the end of it they go, what a great PR event that was? So we changed things a little. We sat down and went why are you having this event?  "Well we have one every two months, it's for public profile, but it's also to try and build up clients.” Great, how are you going to get new and different people into your events rather than the same ones? So they started a bring friend system.

Their regular guests brought new people. They brought people from one of the banks commercial banker division  - they're looking for business and they brought their clients. We then asked the question - how many of these commercial bankers are coming? Well it turns out there's four or five. How many do we know? Only two.  Who's in charge of getting to know the other three? Who's in charge of building that relationship and how are we going to capture that information?

Well, we're going to make an offer.  Here is an offer that it's normally $1200, but if you want to know what your business can do in these circumstances it's only $395 today, if you're interested.

Have an offer, have a capture mechanism. That planning then became action and the right people sat with the right people. We got to meet lots of people and probably 40 – 45 percent of the people in the room had never been there before. At the end of it, with the offer, they had five potential customers who took up the $395 dollar special and so it's not about that $1600-$1700 that was generated it's about these extra five people that came through the door.

So the simple action of P - planning, A - Actioning the plan and then N- working out your Next steps and making that happen will turn a very high resourced effort and investment situation in

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