Here's a scenario that most event professionals will recognize. You're in a conference room, at the business end of a long table, flanked by directors and senior managers. A pair of VPs sit back in their ergonomic chairs at the far end of the table, scrolling on their phones. Between them sits the CMO.
You begin your presentation, a milestone report on the annual customer marketing event you've been preparing for three months. You've met individually or in small groups with each one of these colleagues over the last 90 days, so this should be a simple status update.
You're three slides in, just about to announce the early registration numbers, when one of the VPs in the back puts down his phone long to say, "I don't know. Are we completely sold on the name of the event?"
Everyone turns to the CMO. She shrugs and raises her eyebrows as if to say, "what else you got?" And for the next 20 minutes the room devolves into an impromptu brainstorming session, while you calculate how many hours this whole mess is going to set you back.
Sure, this is an extreme example, but most event professionals will admit that, as well intentioned as our leadership may be, they're removed from the day-to-day event management and often don't know what it takes to bring all the moving parts together.
Event production is, after all, a highly-specialized field. Yet unlike law, physics, surgery, or other skilled professions, events are often treated like a hobby: something that anyone can do. And whereas you wouldn't dare weigh in on the company's go-to-market strategy, every day event professionals get advice on their craft from the unlikeliest of places. So how to cope?
Heather Mason is the President and CEO of Caspian, an event production agency based in Los Angeles, California. She recently stopped by the Cvent Podcast Studio to have a conversation on ways that event professionals can take greater ownership of their work and become empowered within their organizations. The full-episode is totally worth a listen, but here are three takeaways on how you can be better advocates for our events when collaborating with management.
Focus on your goals, not your budget
Event budgets are an eternally sore subject when working with departmental and company leadership. And it's easy to let that pesky number dictate the conversation around your event. “A lot of event professionals get distracted by the information they're given," says Heather, "and they get stuck. They’re told, 'here's the budget. Now deal with it.'" Heather says this thinking is backwards. Rather than focus on the resources going in to our events, you should start by asking our leadership to look at the desired outcomes.
"So if someone says, 'here’s the budget and here are the goals,' ignore the budget and focus only on the goals. Ask them how much those goals are worth, what are the tactics to get to those goals, and how are we going to measure them. And now you drill down to each of those goals, specifically saying ‘if we were able to accomplish all that you're asking for, what would be the value of that?’” By focusing on goals rather than budget, you can show your stakeholders what your events are really worth, giving you more leverage right off the bat.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
When developing and executing an event plan, not all input is helpful – and some can be downright counterproductive. The sad fact is that not everyone should get a voice in every decision. To avoid getting bogged down, Heather suggests being very clear about roles and responsibilities early in the planning process.
"It sounds really benign," she says, "and that's the nice part. It's a little bit of a trojan horse; because you're approaching an executive, and you don't want to get them suspicious. You want them to believe that they’re still in power."
Setting roles and responsibilities begins with building your team. "You write down the names of the people you need and the levels of authority they have: input, whether they’re an approver, etc. And then you go through and say “Okay, this is the team I need to do this job. Then you write down what everyone is actually in charge of, and you link it to the timeline."
"Now you can say to your executives, ‘okay, here's our team. Here are the roles everyone has. Here are their levels of authority, and, should any of them step out of the timeline, here is a cost, that I think we could all agree is a reasonable cost of changing our minds at the last minute.’ Now, you also show them the good side of that. You want to show them what happens with the budget when the team is moving forward on the timeline."
"So, roles and responsibilities is a place where we really try to go deep and get an understanding of what role everyone really does play. And if they’re going to poke at us at the last minute, we tie them into milestone check-ins, and we try to tie those changes to financial implications. It doesn't always work, but just the act of writing it down tweaks some executives in the way you need them to be tweaked a little bit."
Event professionals need allies in the C-Suite
While there's a lot you can do to implement better event management processes from the bottom up, it's always nice to have an executive ally or two, and sometimes, change needs to be initiated from the top down. For Heather Mason, that executive ally is often the CFO. That's because, "the CFO is going to care about budgets and timelines. You tell the CFO up front that this is the budget and the only way it's going to change is if we start changing our minds."
She suggests going straight to the CFO whenever another executive suggests changes to the plan that impact the timeline, "because the CFO will then go to the executives and say ‘you caused this budget to go up.’" Not only can this strategy act as a check on last-minute changes to the event plan, but it also puts you in a position to ask for extra resources to manage those changes.
Taken together, these three strategies can give you some much-needed leverage when working with executive stakeholders. It's also helpful to remember that, when it comes to our events, you're the expert. Making event-related decisions is, after all, what you were hired to do. Sometimes, some people just need to be gently reminded of that fact.
You can hear my full conversation with Heather Mason on this week’s episode Don’t Forget Your Name Badge. And if you want to hear more great conversations about events and marketing, subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or Google Play.
