Having Customers Market to Prospects at Events

There’s nothing like a satisfied customer to help get a prospect excited about doing business with you. Especially when that customer can deliver an endorsement of your company in an informal, peer-to-peer encounter without your direct involvement.
Although some marketers might shudder at the thought of giving up control over the interaction, brands can stack the deck a little bit to ensure that the right prospects are matched with the proper customer-endorsers.

Five tips:

1. Select the Audience. When some healthcare companies hold golf clinics for its best customers, they hand-select pairings for the clinics, decide who will sit with whom at meals, and carefully determines each foursome for golf—ensuring that each attendee will have relevant networking opportunities with customers who share similar challenges. Many keep the attendees at an intimate size, perhaps 60 total, thereby making sure everybody can connect with one another. Ratios of one staff member to five guests and two prospects to each customer are typical.

2. Facilitate Connections. Don’t be shy about putting the two sides together. Make it clear that your intentions are for prospects to be able to learn from the attending customers and ask off-the-record questions. Most healthcare event marketers try to keep the events casual, but they are decidedly not casual about introducing attendees to one another.

3. Integrate Off-line. Particularly for events that are more formal, it can be important to include unstructured opportunities for customers and prospects to interact. When Toshiba America Medical Systems holds seminars on new and emerging techniques and technologies, for example, the agenda includes presentations from satisfied customers. But the interactions that take place around the presentation are often as important as, if not more important than, the presentations themselves. To accommodate those needs, Toshiba always integrates break times and casual conversations between presentations.
“People might not feel comfortable asking a question [during the presentation],” says Jim Burch, the company’s director-customer communications. “Or, it’s not a question they have, but the need for a dialogue.”

4. Use Suggestive Content. As always, the content is the catalyst for the conversation. Present the right topics in a way that gets everybody talking and the magic starts to happen. “Select a topic that encourages dialogue to take place around the area you’d like discussed,” says Burch.

5. Don’t Over-control. Be up front about your matchmaking intentions but don’t go too far. It will be obvious—and, dare we say, unpleasant—if you try to steer the customers and prospects too much. Try to keep it very loose; establish the rapport during the cocktail hour, then just let things take their course. If you set the groundwork correctly, results will follow.