Someone’s grandmother once said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”. I don’t think it was something that mine ever said, but I’ve definitely heard it mentioned a few times. The principle is simple enough: if you want to create something, improve something, or change something, there is usually a degree of disruption involved in getting there. Sometimes things won’t work. Sometimes money will be spent without producing the return you hoped for. Sometimes you will make the wrong decision.
In other words, progress involves risk. And I think exactly the same principle applies to growth in events.
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with organisations that have ambitious targets for growing their conferences. They want another 300 delegates. They want to double sponsorship revenue. They want a bigger exhibition. They want to reach new audiences or turn a relatively small conference into a major fixture in its market. All perfectly reasonable ambitions, but the conversation can become slightly more difficult when we start talking about the investment, resources, and risk required to achieve them.
There is sometimes an expectation that growth should somehow pay for itself before it has happened. An organisation might want an additional £100,000 of sponsorship revenue, but be reluctant to invest £20,000 in the sales resource required to generate it. They might want hundreds of new delegates but be unwilling to significantly increase the marketing budget until registrations start coming in. In effect, they want the additional revenue to arrive before taking the risk required to generate it. Unfortunately, growth rarely works like that.
The magic money tree
Firstly, I think there’s a perception that sales and marketing professionals have access to some sort of magic money tree. We all know how those tend to turn out. Give us a database, a sponsorship brochure, or an advertising budget and we’ll simply switch on a new supply of revenue. I can tell you with some authority that, in most cases, we can’t. Good salespeople and marketers can absolutely improve performance, but they cannot manufacture a market that doesn’t exist, and they cannot compress a twelve-month sales process into four weeks just because somebody forgot to start it earlier.
“Can you sell £200,000 of sponsorship?”
Potentially.
“When is the event?”
“Next month.”
Oh.
Growing an event takes time, sometimes years. Sales pipelines need to be built, relationships need to be developed, audiences need to become familiar with the event, and marketing needs to reach people repeatedly. This is particularly true if you are trying to attract people who have never previously engaged with your organisation. Your loyal annual attendee might receive an email and register immediately because they already understand the value of attending. Someone who has never heard of you may need to encounter the event five, ten, or perhaps twenty times before they finally decide that it is relevant enough to justify their time and money.That means growth requires investment before the return is certain.
There’s another important issue here too, because sometimes the growth opportunity simply isn’t as large as an organisation believes it to be. This is particularly relevant for specialist medical, scientific, and academic conferences where the potential audience can be surprisingly finite. If there are 1,000 people who could realistically attend your event and 600 already do, appointing a marketing agency isn’t suddenly going to produce another 1,000 potential delegates. Likewise, if there are only 40 companies with a genuine commercial interest in your audience and you already work with 25 of them, doubling your sponsorship income might require a rather more sophisticated strategy than simply making more sales calls.
The addressable market is such an important part of setting growth ambitions
This is why understanding the addressable market is such an important part of setting growth ambitions. There might still be opportunities, but they may require changing the proposition rather than simply selling more of the existing one. Perhaps you need to expand into an adjacent audience, introduce new content, attract different professions, look internationally, develop new commercial products, or increase the value of existing partnerships. Growth might be possible, but sometimes achieving it requires changing the event itself.
And change, of course, introduces risk.
I think this is where some organisations become uncomfortable, particularly associations. Understandably, associations tend to be careful with money. There are trustees, boards, committees, members, and stakeholders to answer to. Nobody particularly wants to sit in a board meeting explaining why £20,000 was invested in a marketing campaign that generated £12,000 of directly attributable ticket sales.
But there’s another side to that calculation. What if the £20,000 campaign generates £60,000? Brilliant. What if it generates £25,000? Perhaps that’s still worthwhile, particularly if you’ve attracted a new audience who might attend for years to come. And what if it only generates £12,000? Clearly that isn’t the result you wanted, but the important question then becomes what you learned from the £20,000 investment.
Perhaps one marketing channel performed extremely well while another produced virtually nothing. Perhaps thousands of people visited the website but didn’t convert, suggesting that the issue is the proposition rather than the marketing. Perhaps a new audience showed considerable interest but the ticket price was too high. Maybe you started too late. Perhaps your messaging was wrong. Or maybe you discovered that the market you thought existed simply isn’t there.
None of those are necessarily comfortable answers, but they are useful ones.
The problem comes when our desire to eliminate risk actually prevents us from learning any of those things. We ask sales agencies to work entirely on commission. We reduce marketing budgets. We wait until registrations are already coming in before releasing additional spend. We avoid testing new channels because the existing ones are safer. We ask for guaranteed returns before approving investment.
Which brings me back to the omelette.
If your ambition is to run broadly the same event next year, with broadly the same audience, the same sponsors, the same format, and the same financial outcome, you probably don’t need to break many eggs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Stability can be a perfectly legitimate objective.
But if your ambition is meaningful growth, then something has to change. You may need to invest before you know the outcome. You may need to try things that haven’t been tried before. You may need to accept that some ideas won’t work and some money won’t generate the return you hoped for.
The important thing isn’t to avoid breaking any eggs. It’s to make sure you’re breaking them for a good reason.