The growing ability of leading comms providers to stage their own powerful 'customer persuasion' events was aptly demonstrated at Twickenham Stadium on November 12th when Britannic Technologies staged its 12th annual Convergence Summit.
The Twickenham summit, supported by major vendors such as Mitel, Avaya, Gamma, Jabra and Polycom, was well attended by current and potential Britannic customers. The line-up of speakers was impressive and a busy exhibition hall and full spin-off seminar rooms were testament to the reseller's long standing reputation for imparting knowledge and sharing ideas with its clients and partners in a compelling networking environment.
In a packed seminar room delegates listened attentively to presentations from futurologist Mark Brill, Avaya Managing Director Simon Culmer and Vice President Ioan MacRae, Mitel Chief Technology Officer Jorgen Bjorkner and Microsoft UC Strategist for Skype for Business and Office 365 Robert-Jan Gerrits.
These were industry heavyweights, underlining the status of the event and the content they delivered was informative and thought provoking. The common strand running through all the messages delivered was that the digitalisation of communications is now happening at a pace, driven by millennials (employees born between 1980 and 2000) who, as Gerrits put it, are 'always mobile, always moving, collaborate early, often and always and have grown up on social networks'.
Britannic undoubtedly throws a lot of its own cash, resources and partner marketing development funds at the Summit which illustrates how vendors are now happy to take a supporting role in the mechanics of customer engagement and persuasion. Alternative Networks' Fusion Live event has had the same impact since launching a couple of years ago and, as one vendor representative at Twickenham put it: "I am frankly surprised more of our reseller partners don't go down this route as we are happy to put funding behind any event that ultimately brings business to us."
Britannic Sales and Marketing Director Jonathan Sharp conceived and founded the event in 2003 and it has been the mainstay of the company's annual marketing activities since then. For the first time the event was also duplicated for northern customers and partners at Old Trafford on November 26th.
In between delivering his event summary keynote and announcing one of many competition prizes, Sharp sat down with Comms Dealer to outline the genesis and aims of the event. "Many years ago we were introducing CTI technology and it scared the hell out of our salespeople," he said. "It was in the data world, it was all about integration and they weren't overly keen to take it out to market.
"I really wanted to force their hand so we set up a seminar and brought together partners, prospective customers and sales people and we promoted how CTI could help organisations become more efficient, which created interest and demand. Customers were speaking to salespeople saying they loved it, so it was all about creating a need around new technology.
"On that basis I ran CRM workshops for two years and then one day I was talking to our BT account manager who asked what we do to market ourselves. I explained that we ran a few events and he said 'have you ever thought of doing a bigger one?'. I said that sounds interesting and he made a call there and then and within a minute he said 'BT Tower in six weeks, it's yours. We'll pay for the lot but you have got to run it, promote it, get the speakers and get the audience there'.
"Of course I said yes and when he left I thought, oh hell what have I done? But we put it on. We got other partners to come and we got some great speakers. I think we got 40 people at that first event but we signed a big order on the day and I remember standing up and saying in my intro, welcome to our first ever convergence summit. It was only when I sat down that I realised what I said and we have done it every year since."
Aside from giving the Britannic brand greater awareness and providing a platform for the introduction of new technology and networking, the Summit is about sharing strategy and vision as Sharp explained: "The morning presentations are about the state of the nation, how we see things from a global perspective and where the industry and market is going. Beyond that the exhibition and break out seminars give people the chance to drill down in more detail.
"Ultimately, the event gives us a bigger market outreach, unearths new opportunities and enables us to share what's possible. And as a spin off we run 10 to 12 smaller seminars and customer workshops with partners on more specific subjects across the year."
Staging an event at venues like Twickenham or Wembley, where the 2013 event was held, are not cheap. Sharp budgets around £50K for the event each year, but he does get support from partners and he never find it difficult to justify the expenditure.??"The types of organisations that attend are of the highest level, we are pitching at a the top level too so the sales values are high and we use it as a mechanism to cross-sell and up-sell," explained Sharp. "We have won multi-million pound deals at the event so the RoI is always easy to measure."
Clearly, marketing the event is crucial to its success and Sharp uses social media, You Tube, Twitter and a separate website to promote the summit and achieve a 'following'. "If you do it right and give people what they want they'll keep coming back," he added. "You don't know what you don't know. My role is share the art of the possible."