MYOB Conference Success

This weekend Richard Ashby (Director) and I (Debra Houghton, Practice Manager) fronted an exhibitor’s stand at the annual MYOB Partner Connect Conference, held in the picturesque South Island town of Queenstown.

It was the first outing of this type for the GS Tax Team, and it’s sometimes hard to know what to expect when you book these events. Questions like; how many attendees will there be? What is the format and agenda? What will the stand and venue be like? And what will we actually get out of it? The answers to these questions aren’t always available until you arrive and setup, but with good planning, working technology, and being clear in your objectives will help.
We spent time thinking about what we wanted to promote. We considered our target market and pitched our promotional material around this.
We were pleasantly surprised on our first day. The venue and setup far exceeded our expectations. We were welcomed in person and given all the help we needed during the day by a very down to earth, energised, friendly MYOB team. The event made good use of digital technology, enabling us to collect attendee’s details, through scanning codes on their name badges, and equally, provided an opportunity for the attendees to obtain our background information, by scanning our stand barcode.
The inclusion in the event of prizes for the most collected exhibitor barcodes, also encouraged the attendees to come and see us. At first we thought it would be a game of hit and run, the attendees essentially dive bombing our stand to grab our code (and potentially our novelty branded toolkit) and then racing off to the next one. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that most were actually keenly interested to find out why we were there.
The event timetable provided plenty of opportunity for us to talk and network, both with the attendees as well as the other exhibitors. Our objective behind attending the event, was to source new contacts for our database, to be able to send the attendees our tax specialist weekly update and our monthly newsletter. I am sure that from our new contacts obtained over the course of the event, we will be able to continue to develop our Tax Team through networking and continuing to build on our new relationships.
We look forward to investing in and attending next year’s event!