The ISV CEO stood off to the side of his company’s glitzy, and costly, exhibit booth near the conclusion of a recent three-day Dynamics conference. He was speaking to an old friend he had just met up with at the event, and was lamenting the dismal marketing production of the fancy booth.
“Not a single sales lead,” he said grimly to his friend as groups of conference attendees walked by. “I don’t get it. We’ve had some bad shows in the past, but nothing like this.”
It’s a lament we are hearing ever more frequently from ISVs. Not just poorly performing trade shows, but non-performing trade shows. In other words, the tens of thousands in outlay for a sponsorship fee, along with the booth hardware and employee salaries to oversee the booth…..a total loss.
What’s going on? We don’t have a definitive answer, because frankly, even though we’ve several times expressed skepticism about the ROI from trade shows in recent years, we have been surprised by the ever-more-disastrous tales of woe, and waste.
From everything we can tell, there has been an acceleration of a trend we first identified 3 years ago in a survey of Dynamics users and ISVs. To wit, users are doing ever more of their research about third-party solutions online, and they are conducting such research especially at the sites of information providers they trust, like MSDynamicsWorld (MSDW).
Our most recent survey of Dynamics users, conducted in March of this year, found that their most important resources for researching third-party solutions are found online, especially at third-party editorial web sites like MSDW. More than 60% go online for that key primary research—consuming ISV/partner white papers, webcasts, and articles. Only 16% of users surveyed indicated that they like to research third-party solutions at trade shows and conferences.
For ISVs, unfortunately, the rankings are reversed. Some 59% make trade shows and conferences their number-one priority for marketing outlays. Only 7.7% make online outlets their primary marketing outlay.
Marketing 101 tells you to sell where the prospects are. Too many ISVs, unfortunately, are marketing where the prospects aren’t. But, if trade show sponsorships are failing, why the continued heavy investment? (For more on that topic, read this!)
The trend promises to become more pronounced very quickly. By 2020, according to one analyst prediction, 80% of ISV purchases could be happening without any human interaction.
We think this is probably a tad extreme. But just a tad. The handwriting is on the wall, or on the online wall. Isn’t it time you re-examined your marketing budget priorities, and started focusing more of it on where the prospects are?
