They sold out the room, then failed to deliver...

600 paying guests, an epic lineup of content, promotional hooks for days and yet, I left the conference not really feeling any smarter, more informed, more connected or excited about the subject matter, than when I walked through the door that morning... 

Everything about this conference looked absolutely spot on.  The professionalism of the collateral was next level, the website was super schmick, who owned the conference was clear and everything was transparent and above board.  I booked to see one speaker in particular, and the rest of the program was appealing from a subject matter point of view, it was easy to hand over my money. 

So I’ve done my due diligence 

• Reputable company 
• Speaker expertise checks out 
• Subject matter is relevant to me and my business 
• All appears to be professionally organised by industry experts 
• And the value proposition is strong 

So what happened!   Where was all the good stuff? 

I’ll tell you what I think happened.  My guess is that there was so much time, effort and expertise spent on marketing this conference, that no-one was on the job of checking that the content would actually deliver on the promise! Sure, some parts of it were okay, but nothing more than I could have watched on YouTube.  I'm seeing this a bit with AI too - people use AI to write the copy and sometimes that gets embellished!

So I'm wondering, were the speakers asked to send in abstracts to check they had to goods to deliver?  Did anyone reference check the presenters to make sure they were capable of presenting?  Did anyone without marketing nouse look at the program, the synopsis’, and the speaker bios just to make sure the marketers weren’t over-selling the offer? A classic case of over-selling and under-delivering, in my opinion.

The good news for you though is that all was not lost because as I said, they were exceptional marketers and to be able to sell out a room to 600 delegates in this market is impressive. 

For a lot of of us, the marketing is where we fall down.  We don’t feel worthy, we’re too caught up in the logistics, we think the marketing department will get it done for us, and in the end, we run into someone who says “Oh, I didn’t know that was on, you should have told me!”  

aaaaarrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!!!! 

So let’s get this right – let’s take the lessons from this experience and fill our rooms too.  Only we’ll have awesome content and not only will we reach an epic number of people, they will come back again and again, because we over-delivered on our content promise and brought them to the best event, conference, workshop, festival, meeting or gala, they’ve ever been to.