Convergence was a unique and powerful marketing event for many ISVs and partners for many years.
It gathered in one place thousands of people from all walks of Microsoft Dynamics life– users, partners, programmers, and Microsoft execs– for several days of networking and learning. Friends catching up, ISVs launching new products, partners making product presentations, Microsoft insiders providing previews about the next generation of products. It usually paid all kinds of dividends to ISV sponsors, including a boatload of serious sales leads.
Unfortunately, Convergence is no more. After recent years of changes, it is being replaced by several separate events, each targeted at a segment once part-and-parcel of the Convergence lovefest.— “Envision” for top execs, “Ignite” for user techies, “Build” for developers, along with the previously established Worldwide Partner Conference and the User Group Summit events. Each of these events now becomes a separate, and pricey, marketing expense.
Convergence’s demise is throwing a monkey wrench into the marketing plans of many Dynamics ISVs, to put it politely.
Instead of expending $25,000 or $30,000 for a small booth at Convergence (including the travel, personnel, and setup costs), ISVs now face the prospect of paying north of $100,000 for multiple small booths at three, four, or even more separate events, to get the same results they used to get at Convergence.
What to do? Well, you could swallow your pride and cough up those additional marketing dollars, knowing there’s no guarantee that all these conferences will somehow separately achieve the synergy of Convergence.
Or…..instead of rolling the dice in the new reduced-odds Dynamics events casino, you could use the current post-Convergence marketing squeeze as an opportunity to test new, proven, and highly cost-effective online techniques.
If you have pulled back on Microsoft event sponsorships for 2016, put a portion of those funds to work with a marketing program from MSDynamicsWorld.com. As just one example, you could target the diverse MSDW audience of over 50,000 users, partners, developers, and others via webcasts and white papers about your company’s solutions. We can develop a plan that achieves your strategic marketing and sales goals – not for three days, but throughout the year. Use the fresh leads continually coming through to generate ongoing sales.
Yes, Convergence is history. But significant change sometimes reveals exciting new opportunities. The end of Convergence is one of those times.
