Kessler Group Management Forum

Microphone on stand in front of blurred out audience in greyscale.

The Client

Kessler Group

Timing

August 2015

The Project

We were approached by Kessler Group for our event management and business expansion skills. Kessler design strategies that help financial services companies develop effective partnerships enhance the value of receivables portfolios, and increase the performance of delinquent debt portfolios. Kessler deals with some significant clientele, businesses that handle utilities, communications, and more. For some years before our involvement, Kessler ran a forum event in Sydney for many of these companies. The event aimed to convince these potential clients to take advantage of the services Kessler offer in receivables management. The challenge of this event is inviting debt sellers and buyers into one room when they don’t really enjoy dealing with one another. Our task was to run the most successful forum to date. It included a full day of speeches, IT-based tools, and reporting techniques, discussions about customers, call centre solutions and deal structuring. Kessler also had a few presentations of their own, and on the whole, there was a lot of quality content for the delegates to soak in. It was also essential to ensure that everyone had a good time, not only to have them return to the next event but ideally purchase Kessler’s services.

The Interesting Bit

This one was a little different to standard events as there were some follow-up goals. For this reason, our pre and post work is the part of this project we are most proud of. Anyone can run a good event, well maybe not anyone, but Cuckoo certainly can, and that was the easy part. The challenge was bringing in some new business as a result of the event. To achieve this, we decided to apply marketing principles to the promotion of the event. We were given a list of potential invitees from which we created a micro-site to manage recruitment emails (and follow-ups to those emails), a ticket booking system, seating management to make sure guests were seated with appropriate people and some essential relationship management between two groups who usually don’t get along. We arranged hotel accommodation for guests, invoicing, venue scoping and organisation, online satisfaction survey post-event, reporting on the results of the event, an action list for customers that required follow-ups and secretariat services on the day. As mentioned above, the key for us was to apply marketing principles to event promotion to ensure success. We spent a lot of time writing the invites, making sure they were customised to appeal to the specific guests. We provided differentiated EDMs based on the client at the stage of RSVP they were at (interest, confirmation, payment, etc.) Our post-event survey was structured in such a way that potential follow-ups could be easily identified. Business forums are more than an event in a nice room with interesting speakers; they have a goal. To achieve this goal, it is essential to have the right people in that nice room and have the event create opportunities that can be turned into new business.

The Results

  • Largest number of attendees to a Kessler forum
  • Out of 200 participants we identified 10% more opportunities as a result of our follow-up survey