How to Get the Most from Mining & METS Events
Industry events represent one of the largest discretionary investments a METS business makes in a given year. By the time you factor in the stand, travel, accommodation, freight and the time your best commercial people are off the road, a single event can take costs well into five figures. Many businesses are still measuring the return on that investment the traditional way, by counting the business cards collected or the leads generated on the day, but doing it that way likely sells the investment short.
The nature of the buying decision in mining
In mining, multiple stakeholders influence major projects and procurement processes are structured and lengthy. This means the relationships you build at an event may not translate into a commercial conversation until months or even years later and treating an event as a lead generation exercise with a 48-hour window misunderstands how your buyers make their purchasing decisions. To get the best return from your investment you should treat each event as a chapter in a longer commercial strategy.
Before: define what success looks like
The most common mistake METS exhibitors make is arriving at an event without a clear answer to the question: what are we here to achieve?
Brand awareness, new lead generation, progressing existing opportunities, strengthening customer relationships, launching a new product or gathering market insights are all legitimate answers to that question. Arriving without having answered that question means your team will default to whoever walks past the stand, rather than pursuing the conversations with the people who are going to have an impact.
Your objectives should shape:
– Who you target in pre-event outreach
– What your stand messaging says
– Which of your team attends
– How you define a quality conversation versus a courtesy chat
During: listen as much as you promote
An event is one of the few opportunities in the year to hear directly from your market at scale. The questions being asked from the stage, the objections raised in meal break conversations and the themes that come up repeatedly across two days of interaction are commercially valuable intelligence that slips under the radar when you’re busy at your stand.
Pay attention to the challenges your prospects are facing, the priorities that are shaping their investment decisions and the gaps between how you are positioning your offering and how the market is understanding it. Use the relevant insights to shape your sales approach and your marketing messaging, while tweaking your broader strategy for the year ahead.
After: don’t judge success too early
A conversation with an operations manager today could influence a capital expenditure decision six months from now or maybe the increased awareness you received at the event means your business makes it into a new project shortlist. These outcomes won’t show up when you’re counting the business cards you collected at the event.
Before the event becomes a distant memory, take the time to record what worked, what didn’t and what you would do differently then brief your team while the conversations are fresh. Tag every contact against a commercial context and feed what you learned back into your sales and marketing strategy so that the next event always builds on the learnings from the previous one.
A practical tool to help
Use these tips to continuously improve your event strategy and you will take exhibition visits from a cost line into a long-term growth investment.
To make the post-event debrief process easier, we have put together a one-page Event Success Scorecard that walks your team through objectives, event snapshot metrics, market insights captured and next-time improvements. It doesn’t take long to complete and gives you something concrete to carry forward.
If you want to build a stronger before, during and after framework for your next event, we can help. Get in touch: teamagency.com.au/contact/
