Vendors
with a large presence at HIMSS start planning for the next year almost as soon
as the current year’s event is complete, so my posts on vendor planning will focus
on things you can pull off between now and February. The first topic we’ll look
at is moving existing sales prospects to the close.

How many sales would you have to close to justify the marketing investment in HIMSS? If you're like most companies exhibiting at HIMSS, it would not take very many incremental sales to get a huge return on HIMSS. Creating a plan to move prospects towards a sale - and documenting the results - can make anyone look like a marketing star.

The
key advantage of an event like HIMSS is the availability of many prospect’s key
decision makers along with many of your company’s resources. At HIMSS you will
have demonstration systems combined with access to senior management, R&D
and product management folks, in addition to sales and marketing.

Getting
good results from attending a conference like HIMSS is all about good
execution. Like many marketing projects, this one is iterative – digging in to
each of the following tasks will provide additional information to refine
previous tasks.

First,
determine which resources will be available at the show. This includes demo
systems (noting features, versions, hardware and software), prototypes, and
human resources (both who and when). Coopitition – collaborative alliances with
sometime competitors – has become pervasive in health care. The HIMSS
conference provides a unique opportunity for partners to work together,
leveraging both sets of resources for integrated demonstrations and meetings
with customers.

Now
in conjunction with sales management, look at your sales pipeline and identify
key accounts to target at HIMSS. You will want to go back to the field to
confirm who will be attending HIMSS – you might even encourage their attendance
so they can get the equivalent of a corporate visit without making a special
trip (and allowing you to save that corporate visit for the close).

Once
you know which target accounts are attending, dig into the sales strategy for
each account. Are there common themes across accounts or will each meeting be a
one-off? Work with sales to determine what will be most effective in moving
each account forward in the sales process, and revise your demo capabilities
and meeting resources accordingly. Don’t forget to consider how you might leverage alliance partners
who will also be in New Orleans.

Once
you’ve identified your internal and alliance resources, identified your target
accounts, and refined your resources in response to sales strategies and
meeting objectives, it is time to start executing.

Working
with sales, invite and schedule each target account in accordance with your
resource availability. Consider ways you might increase the importance of these
meetings in the minds of your prospects: a special invitation, follow up calls,
and customized pre-meeting briefs can improve the attendance and effectiveness
of your meetings at HIMSS. And don’t forget post-meeting things like thank you
notes, and written summary of the meeting.

One
of the nice things about special meetings like these is that you can leverage
the HIMSS planning work you’ve been doing for months. It does not take closing
many sales opportunities that you’ve identified to justify your entire
company’s attendance at HIMSS, let alone justifying the extra cost and effort
these meetings require.

My
next post will look at the wonderful competitive intelligence gathering opportunity
that HIMSS provides. Until then.

Pictured right is GE Healthcare's NDA-only exhibit area from HIMSS 2006. This was a very cool way to demonstrate technology leadership. Entering
the enclosed exhibit required your name, title, company and
address (either scanned off a business card or typed) and a click to
accept a 3 line NDA - all done pretty quickly on a laptop. Inside was… well, I can't really say. But it's a great way to create
buzz and leverage some of your R&D feasibility work.