Conferences in 2024: MeetMax User Day

Insights

A relationship business

Salespeople play an essential role in making sure conferences and events are valuable for investment banks. They know customers’ preferences and can follow up with people they know will be invested and see value. An engaged and focused sales team is a key differentiator – it gets the right clients into the right meetings and ensures firms see appropriate revenue for their efforts. But it’s important to ensure that this information isn’t just living in a great salesperson’s head – investing in a really effective CRM is crucial to make sure firms can maintain and benefit from client relationships through turnover in their teams.

Levelling the playing field

Conferences are also an area where mid-tier firms can hold their own against the bulge bracket, but not by trying to outdo larger competitors on meeting quantity. Instead, by focusing on attracting high-calibre companies and differentiating their events, smaller firms can shine.

No matter what size a firm happens to be, attention to detail in the lead up to a conference helps make sure it works for everyone. This includes facilitating event attendance, having smooth allocation processes, and ensuring transparent commercial conversations with customers happen in a timely fashion, potentially even before an event takes place. Attendees and panellists alike agreed that a growing aspect of success for institutional salespeople is the ability to ensure customers pay for unique and high value services. The most successful salespeople often ensure these conversations happen before their firm delivers value to customers.

Valuable relationships for corporates

So-called private company ‘tracks’ became popular during the pandemic when events went fully virtual. Post-pandemic, lots of firms have tested these tracks at in-person events. This approach has been successful so far, and accordingly there’s an appetite to continue them and even in some bases explore events specific to private companies.

From the investment bank perspective, hosting a private company at a conference is an opportunity to showcase the investor types to which they can provide access. Bankers are doing an increasing amount of research to prepare both the companies and investors for their one-to-one meetings to ensure conversations are impactful. For the companies, this preparation can include overviews of the investor’s firm, strategy, holdings, and the personal backgrounds of the prospective investors. For investors, preparation helps ensure the conversation can start on a higher level – instead of spending half an hour on due diligence and overview questions, that information can be shared in advance.

Preparation is key

We heard that the most valuable banker relationships demonstrate a deep knowledge of the firms they work with and can make tailored recommendations about how to get the most out of events. This can include going above and beyond: arranging extra meetings, preparing briefing notes for both parties. Hyper-personalisation can unlock additional mandates and ensure relationships remain successful into the future.

Conference organisers further stressed the importance of preparation for valuable, successful events. One participant shared that the only disappointed attendees at conferences tend to be those who don’t spend a significant amount of time preparing.

For PE firms seeking to differentiate themselves in the current market, preparation is also a key piece of the puzzle. Putting in the work beforehand means firms can go beyond the typical scope of a first meeting and present their offering in the best light. It’s about standing out from the crowd and being memorable to prospective partners.

To find out more about how Singletrack can support your events, get in touch now.

Brian Bock

Published: 30/10/2024

Meet the team: Singletrack Support

All our customers will interact with support more than once during their journey with Singletrack, whether it’s fixing problems or answering questions. But what does the team do, and how do they do it? Find out from Tom Thompson, Head of Support, in this article.



Tom Thompson](/content/insights-category/meet-the-team-singletrack-support/index.html)

Blue Ocean Equities finds efficiency and boosts growth with Singletrack

London, 8 August 2024: Singletrack, the leading capital markets workflow and analytics solutions provider, today announced that Australian full-service advisory and equity broking firm Blue Ocean Equities has gone live on the Singletrack platform, across sales and trading, research and corporate access, as well as using Singletrack for their CRM.