Microsoft has done an admirable job expanding the Dynamics marketplace over the last decade, to an estimated 200,000-plus organizations and growing . In the process it has helped create a thriving community of add-on sellers, partners, and consultants.
For ISVs selling into this market, the most readily available route has been an old-time marketing vehicle: trade shows. For some years, when there were just a few trade shows that brought most players together once or twice a year, the marketing process was pretty straightforward. You bought booths at one or two or three shows, did your demos for three days, and came home with a pocketful of sales leads.
Over the last couple of years, though, the number of trade shows has literally exploded in number, far beyond what most ISVs can reasonably plan for, or pay for. Moreover, the events have become ever more expensive.
Welcome to what some Dynamics ISVs have come to refer to as the ‘Live Events Shakedown’.
At first glance, the fact that there are now more than a dozen national or international Dynamics-related trade shows to choose from seems like it could be a good thing, since the trade shows are becoming ever more focused and segmented. There are shows for executives, users, developers, partners, and IT. And that doesn’t begin to touch the growing regional event circuit, organized by individual Microsoft partners.
Unfortunately, more events does not automatically translate into larger conference attendance budgets for people in your target market. Instead, it means tough choices among the growing list of conference options. Now, the same audience that used to be accessible at a handful of annual events is spread thin across multiple events that run nearly continuously, bouncing between countries during the traditional conference seasons.
As an exhibitor, you must decide which shows to exhibit at and how to justify paying the higher sponsorship and associated costs that come with reaching your more fragmented target market.
For instance, it could be that Dynamics technical types and users are influencers in your selling process, and senior executives are the final decision makers. Suddenly, there are eight or nine conferences for you to select from. You could be looking at trade show marketing budgets that have expanded to several hundred thousand dollars from some tens of thousand of dollars just a few years ago.
How do you make your decisions? With great difficulty, since there is no way to “test” one conference versus another before committing and attending. If you remain enamored of your event strategy, the only option is to grit your teeth, pay the fees and associated costs (travel, employee time, setup), and hope for the best.
But, there is another way, which gives you the best of audience segmentation and the opportunity to measure your results one step at a time – and at a fraction of the cost of all the trade shows. Online marketing programs like those provided by MSDynamicsWorld.com reach your core audience all year round. They empower you to target from among all the key audiences in the Dynamics community — executives, power users, partners, etc.— and reach them with convincing thought leadership content, case studies, business opportunities, and technical know-how.
Once you go in this direction, collecting ever increasing numbers of serious sales leads in a fraction of the time you would spend on trade shows, and at a fraction of the cost, you’ll wonder how you ever let yourself be taken in by the ‘live events shakedown’.
