The Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services events team in the past year added value to the division's sales and marketing initiatives by building events designed for greater engagement with attendees and working with the sales staff to identify potential new customers.
The events team, led by senior events manager Phyl Monroe, also is integrating marketing aspects into the event much earlier in the planning cycle.
Monroe, who resides in the marketing department and operates in a shared services environment, annually manages about 25 seminars and four trade shows, three of which have attached events, and three customer advisory board meetings. She also plans one large annual customer event at a nontraditional venue, such as the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York. Global information services and publishing company Wolters Kluwer has about 20,000 employees in 35 countries.
In conjunction with designing events for the company's Corporate Legal Services Group, she also handles all vendor negotiations, logistics and site selection with some outsourcing for hotel negotiations and a third party to assist with high-end customer events.
Wolters Kluwer's five business units, including corporate, retain coordinators to organize smaller meetings, with high-level negotiations and marketing initiatives handled by senior event managers, who also implement registration technology and consistent marketing approaches.
Monroe, who has been at the company for four years, has begun constructing the marketing features of an event sooner in the planning process.
The team at the creation of an event will envision where staff will be located, what the floor plan will be, which color schemes to used and the methods needed to optimize the sales team's interaction with attendees in order to gain the highest return on investment.
While developing event programs, Monroe aims to support the sales staff 's efforts to reach the right people and build the experience around those interactions.
"Many of our programs are thought from inception about how it is going to be done" from a sales and marketing perspective, Monroe said.
"When I design an event, I put a lot of thought into what is going to happen. I think about what happens when the attendees approach the door," she said. "We think that process through and align it with the sales staff, so that the sales staff is getting the opportunity to shake hands and make the customers feel special and important."
While some event-marketing integration tactics are new, they are an extension of a larger Wolters Kluwer strategy that began several years ago when the Corporate Legal Services marketing group built a proprietary database to house attendee contact, registration and invitation lists. That information is then loaded into Wolters Kluwer's customer relationship management software.
"Every time we come back from a seminar, we take those 100 attendees and load them into Salesforce," she said. "Then, salespeople are sent a note to follow up with them."
At trade shows, where the company often has "crossover opportunities" with multiple business units represented, Monroe and other event managers share pre-show registration lists with the sales and marketing staffs to identify prospective clients.
Monroe has had to apply that philosophy for events both big and small. In recent months, members of the Corporate Legal Services sales team came to Monroe to help design more intimate events with about 10 to 15 customers and their local sales representatives.
One way of reaching this segment has been to pull lists from other legal community associations and inviting them to seminars previously reserved for current clients.
"We try and keep the salespeople in touch and in front," Monroe said. "That's what I feel my job is. There is no point in having us if we aren't adding value. The only way we can add value is to create these opportunities."
Originally published Feb. 15, 2010