Convincing management to invest more money into business events. Here's how you do it...

Are you in charge of organizing business events for your company, and you find yourself having a million fantastic ideas for the event? Then it can be frustrating when you are limited by your budget. The time has come to turn to management and convince them to increase the budget for your events. Because with more budget, you can:

  • Invite more guests and create more sales opportunities.
  • Add more value to your events, in order to create an unforgettable experience for your guests.
  • Organize events more often, so your efforts are not just an annual one-trick pony.

 

Unfortunately, company management is not always eager to simply dole out a budget for all your good ideas. You will have to convince them of the added value of your endeavours.

This blog article gives you three tips that will help you convince management to up their investments in business events, so that you are one step closer to a bigger budget.

1. The board of directors is no stranger to FOMO

Everyone has at least a slight fear of being left out – including management. That’s why it’s a smart move to check out the competition. How often do they organize events? And what kind of events are they setting up? What advantages does their approach give them? And above all: how could you do better?

When you start your presentation off with these insights, you immediately create a certain sense of urgency among the people in the boardroom. The feeling that your company is behind on the competition is of course something management wants to resolve as quickly as possible. This will make them more receptive to what you say during your presentation. Not a bad starting point for being heard, right?

2. Only one things matters: impact on the bottom line

At the end of the day, management only cares about one thing: the profitability of the organization. Every euro invested, must generate profits. So when you are convincing management to free up extra budget, it is best to demonstrate how your approach will succeed in generating more profit.

And that is precisely where the biggest challenge lies for those organizing business events. It’s not easy to clearly demonstrate the revenue generated by these events. To a limited extent, it is; when deals are closed during the event itself. But the added value of one event contributing to a sale later on is more difficult to demonstrate.

InviteDesk allows you to capture this information for everyone to see. The platform is connected to your sales data. Combined with event-related data from guests, we can provide valuable insights into how your events contribute to business success. These insights are crucial in demonstrating to management exactly how much your event is generating in terms of sales.

3. How will you be spending the newly available budget?

Map out exactly what you want to purchase with the additional budget you’d be getting. What location do you have in mind, how much does that exclusive speaker charge, what additional peripheral activities do you want to offer, or on a smaller scale: what one-on-one experience do you want to be able to offer customers?

In addition to that, certain investments can also end up saving the company money. By automating time-consuming tasks, you create extra bandwidth for employees. This allows those employees to then focus on more important tasks, such as sending out individual invitations, calling invitees, manually updating guest lists, etc. We recommend quantifying the costs that would be saved by freeing up people’s time.

In summary, management needs to get a clear picture of what the budget will be used for. And, even more importantly, what you can achieve with that extra budget.

A crucial step to increasing profitability with business events

If you don’t yet have a good understanding of exactly what happens at your event, and what the exact financial impact was, then you are not ready to take your event approach to the next level. Knowledge is power. Statistics and insights help you make smarter tactical decisions in terms of the type of events that work best for you, what type of guests to invite, and so on.

The InviteDesk platform helps you map out these insights. In addition, it also offers the possibility to speed up a lot of time-consuming tasks. Selecting a suitable guest list based on a few parameters, and setting up automatic mail flows before, during and after an event are just a few examples of how InviteDesk can help take your events to the next level.

Curious to see what else our platform has in store? Then watch the online InviteDesk video demo.

Making business-event organisation a piece of cake

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