Winning Meetings and Events for your Venue

Rob Davidson, Anthony Hyde

• Publisher: Goodfellow Publishers
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781908999863, 9781908999887
• eBook ISBN: 9781908999870
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

Meetings and events are a major source of revenue for the venues that host them. But competition to win meetings and events is growing fast as new venues, large and small, are opening up all over the world and existing venues are expanding, refurbishing and modernizing their offer in order to increase their share of this lucrative market.However, in properties ranging from conference centres and hotels to universities and unusual venues such as museums and tourist attractions, busy sales and marketing staff often struggle to keep up to date with the many tools and techniques that can help them bring business to their meeting rooms. New staff in particular often feel the need for a structured, comprehensive guide to sources of business for their venue as well as detailed instruction on the most effective ways of winning meetings and events to fill their meetings spaces and create loyal customers.Winning Meetings and Events for Your Venue is the solution to these issues. It provides a clear and comprehensive guide to the wide range of techniques required by sales and marketing staff to effectively win meetings and events business for their venue. An easy-to read manual setting out the most useful and relevant techniques in a coherent and logical manner, it includes: •Guidance on key tools and techniques from traditional face-to-face selling and negotiating skills and the use of social media to site inspections and exhibiting at trade shows.•Case studies of transferable best practice in this field, drawn from a wide range of venues of all sizes in the UK and overseas. •Advice from experienced sales and marketing venue managers, demonstrating original ideas that really work – and explaining why they work. •Checklists at the end of each chapter summarizing key points and also a short quiz for the reader, to check their level of understanding of the chapter's content.Rob Davidson is a Senior Lecturer at University of Greenwich Business School. He is a respected academic in the meetings and events field, and the accomplished author of seven books and a great many reports on trends and developments in the global meetings industry. He has experience of training venue sales and marketing staff both in the UK and overseas. Indeed, it was his experience of running these training courses that led to the realization that there was a vast untapped market for a manual on this subject.Anthony Hyde is the General Manager - Business Events at the highly-successful Barbican venue in the City of London. He is responsible for the commercial sales, marketing and PR, event management and technical production for conferences, banqueting, exhibitions and corporate hospitality. He has 15 years' experience in meetings and events sales within multi-purpose venues, and is widely recognized in the UK and beyond for his work with MPI – Meetings Professionals International, one of the principal global professional associations for the meetings industry. He was UK President of MPI's UK and Ireland Chapter during 2009/10.

Table of contents

• 1 The Structure of the Meetings and Events Industry
• The value of meetings
• Terminology
• Demand for meetings
• Segmentation of demand for meetings
• 2 Sources of Business
• The leads database
• Clients already known to the venue
• Unrealised business
• Sources of new leads
• The leads qualification process
• Venue sales and venue marketing
• 3 Developing Relationships with Clients
• Customer Relationship Management Systems
• Key Account Management
• Negotiating with prospects
• Agreeing a price
• Demonstrating and adding value
• Providing solutions
• Dealing with objections
• Walking away – unsuccessful negotiations
• 4 Working with Intermediaries
• The role of intermediaries
• Types of agencies
• Agencies’ remuneration
• How venues can work effectively with agencies
• The role of convention and visitor bureaus
• How venues can work effectively with CVBs
• 5 Site Inspections
• Types of site inspection
• Preparation for the site inspection
• The visitor’s arrival
• Harnessing the visitor’s imagination
• Dealing with objections
• Managing the site inspection conversation
• Site inspections as part of familiarisation trips and press trips
• Ending the site inspection
• 6 Winning New Business at Exhibitions
• Exhibition visitors
• Choosing where to exhibit
• Choosing how to exhibit
• Design of the stand
• Before the exhibition
• At the exhibition
• After the exhibition
• 7 The Changing Market Environment
• Advances in venue design
• Advances in technology
• Sustainability
• Generational factors
• Growing interest in unique venues
• Appendix: International associations of interest to venue sales professionals
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