BORDER-CROSSING: Last fall, IBM piloted a new approach to its sales meetings. Instead of pushing out packets of information and bullet-pointed solutions, participants encountered content distributed in a fluid and flexible environment.
make a story transformational for others.…Help [audi- ences] co-author the story to help them find out who they are.” (For additional examples of specific insights, see “It’s in the Cards,” on the opposite page.) The reinvention process also included real-world testing.
Roth’s team created pilot events—including a third-party event, Sibos, one of the world’s leading financial-services conferences, where 8,000 attendees gathered last fall in Amsterdam.
Committing to Content As Roth and his colleagues worked to fit the experts’ insights into a new meetings framework, they drew some lines in the sand. “We knew we would be moving away from things like direct monologue to more dialogue with customers, and away from supplying fragmented information toward dynamic storytelling,” Roth said. “We also wanted to move away from pushing data, to where we come prepared with information that we just distribute in different forms.” Roth added: “Sales events in the past were very pre-
dictable. You come in and register, and maybe we bait you with a giveaway. But people really are just talking to people they already know—they aren’t getting anything out of it, except materials and sales pitches.We wanted to do away with that, and commit to content—to problem-solve with real clients in real time, not stickto a PowerPoint or script.
We want to make a con- nection in the formof a relationship.” In fact, one of the
team’s primary insights from its research was that it is critical that content, not technology or the physical environment, drive the meeting experience. That was a major shift. In the past, the sales and marketing space at Sibos had been divided into several topical areas; experts made presentations at separate podiums, while attendees moved from subject to subject. “Too often marketers begin with tools—the floor plan, the budget, all the hard objects,” Roth said, “and push the content to the last.” For the Sibos pilot meeting, those divisions disappeared.
CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE
IBM created a cloud-based database holding all the content, so that it could be made available on a variety of tools, including iPads, touchscreens mounted on the walls and embedded in tables, and mobile devices. IBM’s content experts then moved among the attendees, answering the questions that they could, and linking in other experts and tapping into additional content as needed. Whiteboards were installed, so if a topic of conversation got complicated, an expert had the ability to breakit down. The meeting was designed for interaction and collaboration —not simply to make a PowerPoint presentation look good,