The Association of Collegiate Conference and Event Directors recently released the schedule for their 2011 annual conference. This conference is a must if you are a housing, professional and continuing education, or university conferencing professional.

This year’s conference will be held in Orlando, Florida, March 27 – 30, 2011.

I’ve been invited to present an advanced institute session as well as a concurrent presentation. Building the Ultimate Conferencing Sales Machine is a day long session institute program. I will be talking about a pragmatic approach to planning, executing and managing a successful business development plan for conferencing.

I’m also presenting Hidden Causes to Common Conferencing Marketing Problems. In this session, I will discuss the hidden causes to common conferencing marketing problems and strategies to fix them.

Hope to see you in Orlando!

Growing conferencing revenues is top-of-mind for many collegiate conferencing and event professionals as evidenced by the interest in our recent presentations at ACCED-I 2010. In fact, the conference was dominated by concurrent sessions and workshops on marketing and sales.

With the difficult economic climate, many conferencing units are refocusing … or beginning to focus on business development.  The ‘build it and they will come’ strategy and easy growth environment has been replaced with a new reality for conferencing professionals … competition and increased pressure to generate revenues. One session attendee reported that her unit is facing a growth target of $7 million dollars in the next five years from a current level of under $2 million.

Over the last few years, we have had the opportunity to ‘secret-shop’ a number of collegiate conferencing units for our clients and for our own research.  From finding conferencing centers in Google searches to contacting collegiate conferencing units through email and by phone calls, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. Many units are simply not managing their customer touchpoints … and thus are losing potential opportunities.

Consider the following secret-shopping calls and worst practices. Institution names have been removed and caller voices have been disguised.

Utter meeting confusion …

Consider this buying path. Listen to the conversation

Some can’t wait to send  you back to the web …

This unit was happy to ask about our needs … but direct us back to their web site anyway.  Listen to the conversation

And another … Listen to the conversation

Pass the buck …

If you were a corporate meeting planner, would you waste your time here? Listen to the conversation

Others share their internal dirty laundry …

Wow.  Listen to the conversation

If you are looking to grow conferencing revenues, consider the buying experience of your target audience and develop an intentional strategy to manage your touchpoints.