By Jill Hawkins
Over 600 sales professionals gathered in Birmingham this week for the National Sales Conference, run by Lincoln West. Now in its tenth year, the theme of the event was growth and retention.
“We celebrated our tenth anniversary this year by inviting some of our legendary speakers back to our event along with new faces. A big percentage of our audience return year after year so we work with all of our speakers to ensure we always have fresh content,” said Carly Hearn, event manager, Lincoln West.
The event has implemented some changes post Covid-19: “Everyone is working remotely now and so the conference gives them the ideal place to get together. Companies now bring their entire sales team, along with customers, staff and suppliers, so this year we introduced ‘group tables’ to enable colleagues to be together for the event. This step has been really popular and companies are now using our event as a company networking opportunity, rather than hosting a corporate golf day.”
Another post Covid-19 change is the focus towards conference content, “we invest a lot of time into getting the content right, and we also introduced industry specific round tables. We worked with companies in each of our key industry sectors to create spaces and topics to really encourage interaction and the sharing of ideas,” comments Hearn.
Hearn thinks that creating more networking touchpoints is important to attending delegates, “we have moved away from a traditional big exhibition and now focus on creating engaging opportunities for sponsors and delegates to meet; we now have a longer lunch break with more networking time and this has been really well received. We also introduced a pre-event networking dinner, held on the evening before the conference, which attracted 130 delegates.”
“I’ve worked in events for 20 years now, and I think that event managers genuinely believe that they don’t work in sales, which absolutely baffles me!” says Hearn. “I see so much of the event management process as sales related; selling sponsorship, negotiating with speakers, arranging supplier contracts and working to get delegates into the event. I would encourage anyone in events to come along because there is so much to learn and be inspired by.”
Looking forward to 2024, Hearn reveals that they are launching an event in London in June and then will be back to Birmingham again in November. “We are also looking to develop focused content and round tables based on the hospitality industry because we have a lot of teams coming from this sector,” she concludes.
