Coronavirus is hurting conferences and events, but don’t let that stop your events team

Yes, times are tough – especially for those organisations that rely on events. In the IT industry, now is events season. Normally our amazing events teams would be drowning under the workload. Except we know they don’t drown – do they?

That’s because they’re awesome. They really are. They are your best kept, secret weapon during this crazy insane Coronavirus (or COVID-19 if you’re all technical and stuff).

Events and conferences may have been postponed or even cancelled – but that doesn’t mean you should downsize your events team.

Far from it.

Right now you should not be retreating from your customers – you should be moving closer to them. This is where your events team is the perfect group to redeploy. Your other teams are likely working overtime handling all the other operational problems that have recently arisen in addition to their existing jobs.

What are events teams brilliant at?

• Organising events
• Getting buy-in from customers and partners
• Ensuring registrations
• Chasing up attendance
• Making sure things run smoothly
• Keeping the peace
• Providing safe environments for everyone
• and the list goes on…

Always lead with empathy

If you’re finding it tough – do you think perhaps your customers, partners, suppliers, and communities are too?

Our role as business leaders, marketers, and sales people is to see the world through our customers eyes, to understand them, to know their challenges, to celebrate their wins, and to lift them up when they’re down.

Now is the time to get closer to your customers, not further away.

So what if you can’t hold your in person event?

So what if your big conference isn’t on?

Use this time to;

• Conduct more customer interviews
• Build new or closer knit communities
• Customer Advisory Boards
• Deliver more roadmaps
• Network through your customer
• Organise Win / Loss reviews
• Finish those case studies

You events team is likely vastly underutilised, and these activities really shouldn’t be an afterthought.

But now you have some extra time and talented, skilled, and experienced people with some additional capacity.

Let’s put them to use and serve our customers.

Learn more about them, understand them, support them.