CPA firms both large and small are investing thousands of dollars a year in bringing clients and resources together for social and educational panels, dinners, happy hours, briefings, CFO breakfasts and more, in the hopes of not just thanking their existing clients, but obtaining new clients through the process.
As I travel the country helping firms with their branding and marketing efforts, I often attend such events as a guest observer, taking notes on their structure, content and arrangement, and I am often disappointed by the final result as it pertains to their business development goals, particularly what happens before and, most importantly, after the event.
A typical event goes something like this: Clients are invited through an email invite with the generic subject line such as, “You are invited to hear our economic outlook.” At the very bottom of the email, almost with trepidation, is a note hesitantly stating, “Please feel free to bring friends.” Date and location are included.
The event takes place. Clients attend and listen to a speech. After the speech the guests typically stand in a corner with one or two other friends or colleagues. Hors d'oeuvres are passed, drinks are served. Everyone leaves, typically exhausted, rushing back either to their family dinner or to the office. The following day, the attendees get called by a marketing coordinator to discuss their feedback. And that’s that -- thousands of dollars spent, clients forgetting the event two or three days later, and not much in the way of actionable items afterwards.
There is definitely room for improvement, particularly as so much is being invested for such events, and the ROI is quite low. We have distilled a few steps you can take to improve this important effort and make the process more measurable, both for providing more value to your clients, and for creating buzz and new business opportunities.
Step 1: Who to invite to what
For an event to be successful, we have to visualize who we want to attend, and curate our entire program around their attendance. Building a program for everyone in our distribution list defeats our goal of an event that all attendees enjoy.
Therefore, as a first step in the event planning stage, we highly recommend you look through your client, prospect and center of influence list and divide your attendees into extraverts and introverts. Not sure each one is? Take our
Why do we recommend dividing your attendee list and event type by personality? Science! From a scientific basis, different personality traits prefer different structures and event types.
Extraverts actually gain energy from socializing and meeting new people, and are definitely attending your function to network and exchange business cards. The case is the opposite for introverted individuals who actually feel their energy level simmer in a large, social setting. As my Introverted Coaching colleague Heidi Brown states, being at a social venue for introverts almost feels like “a New Yorker stuck in the middle of Times Square.” It is purely uncomfortable. Bringing introverts to a room to converse with complete strangers during happy hour is completely outside their comfort level.
Therefore, think clearly about who you want to attend to which of your events, and structure your event accordingly.
If you want to invite your more social, extraverted prospects, then you should be hosting a more social function -- a cocktail party at a local restaurant, perhaps, to introduce some of your partners and recent firm updates.
Want to invite more of your subdued, introverted connections? How about a function that will be more educational in content, say a briefing about the recent updates with tax codes? But keep it as that and don’t confuse the message by also adding to the ending a happy hour to have a forced mingling session. Instead, combine the educational content with a dinner, so everyone enjoys the conversation in a more intimate setting.
Step 2: The invitation process
For an event to be successful, the most important component must be the buzz created around it. A templated email coming out of your customer relationship management system that has a high chance of going into a spam folder probably isn’t going to cut it.
As a next step, call up the guests you want, create buzz around the event, and tell them you’ll be sending them three to four private invitations so they can go out and invite their friends. Typically, extraverted people have more extraverted friends, and introverted people tend to have more introverted friends. So your room will hopefully fill up with more similarly minded individuals.
We recommend a hand-written invitation, followed up by an email invitation, so people have multiple tangible avenues to remember and promote your function.
Step 3: During the event
It’s amazing to see internal employees almost kick back once the event is happening, assuming the hard work is basically done. On the contrary: This is when the real work begins. Prior to the event, a steering committee of your top executives and those who have the highest attendance of clients and prospects should sit down and map out who will be with which attendees, what are the top questions and topics to raise with each of them, who you need to introduce to new divisions and partners, and so on.
Remember, just like you have a goal at the event, your attendees too have a goal for attending your event. Either they want to meet new people, or they want to learn, or they want to go back to their office the next day more educated. Whatever their goal is in attending, you should seek to address that during the function.
Step 4: Post event
As you can imagine, this is when the heaviest lifting of the event takes place. The next day, preferably by 10 a.m., you should have a personalized email already drafted, ready to go to each attendee, asking what they thought about it. You should also ask if there was someone at the event, a topic discussed, or a best practice mentioned that they would like to hear more about. That will give you the feedback to see if your attendees actually walked away with what they were looking to gain by attending.
There are so many more ways to make your events powerful and high-impact. I know of so many CPAs who have built their entire businesses through this avenue. The key is knowing exactly how to curate it in order to have the best results.
