Organising a national roadshow

This unique opportunity came upon my apprenticeship. In collaboration with my manager, we were in charge 2 years in a row of HPE's annual roadshow, featuring 7 cities in a month.

🔍 Background Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company, coming from the split of the Hewlett Packard group in 2015. The company is divided in two approaches, direct and indirect. The latter is called the Channel and covers the network of resellers and distributors.

In France, the Partner Tour has been a annual rendez-vous gathering HPE management team based near Paris, HPE sales teams deployed in the regions, and the partners. Nicknamed "Tour de France", it is the occasion to reaffirm the company's strategy and focuses, provide updates on the solutions and programs of the company. That is why it is generally in the beginning of the calendar year, 2 or 3 months after the beginning in the fiscal year in November.

Working as an apprenticeship on such a massive project was a great opportunity to manage a big scale event, deployed in 7 cities over a month.

🧭 Problem Definition Despite its recurrence, the target audience number is not a definite guarantee. Given the massive budget of the event and its potential, driving traffic was a priority on top of managing the logistic of the roadshow.

📝 Contingencies 7 cities in a month. It is a tight schedule to ensure, so the calendar needs to be set quickly, coordinating the availabilities of the key stakeholders, the local contingencies and availabilities of the venues. Working with an event agency was a real asset at this point. Moreover, in terms of content, it needs to be replicable on various cities while still being adapted to the local audience.

Juggling between sponsors. Because of the potential of the audience and the opportunity to bring the management at a local level, there is a strong demand for different business units to be included in the event, and sponsors to fund the event, with each their requirements of product placement or mention of their solution. On top of the budget scheme to monitor, the proofs of costs and execution to provide after, the content needs to be remain valuable to our attendees. In other words, 4 business units and 5 sponsors need to be included in a quality content of 2 hours.

Reinforcing the relationship with the existing partners and acquiring new ones. The resellers of HPE are classified in tiers, with different certifications from Platinum, Gold, Silver to Business Partners based on precise criterias (sales revenue with HPE, product trainings performed, ...). This means that the content has to appeal to partners from different sizes, with different level of knowledge about HPE. On one hand, the existing partners must come out of the event convinced of the value of the company and pushing their efforts to upgrade their certification. On the other hand, the event must lead to the gain of new accounts.

🗺️ Solution

Combining efforts with the entire sales enablement team. After brainstorming with representatives from the various sales enablement services (finance, education, consulting), we realised the potential of incentivising our existing partners. Indeed, one of the criteria defining the Partner status is the amount of points in product training: by going to any HPE sales training, the reseller gets points. By putting the Partner Tour as an educational exercise, the partners had an additional stimulus to attend.

Providing content to the Channel. With the support of the Sales Management, every collaborator working in the Channel had access to email signature banners and ready-to-post content, hyperlinked with the registration page.

Regular reporting. Since one of the KPIs was the number of attendees, it was important to provide regular reporting to the sales teams. As a result, 3 times per week for 3months, I sent out a report including:

• A map of France with the number or registrations versus the target audience number

• A registration report with the names of the company and the status of the partners, split by cities

• Ready-to-post content

It was a solid way for the management to monitor the efforts of the teams, and for each account manager to check which of their accounts was missing.

Attractive message. When conceptualising the message of the roadshow the first year, we were immediately drawn by the value of customer testimonies. Indeed the passed year, HPE had released videos featuring purchaser explaining their usage of the technology. That is why we decided to hold the events at our customers' establishments - keeping clear of the traditional convention centers or theaters. As a result, the venues of the roadshow included a hospital, a newspaper factory, a school, a football stadium,... Each time, we got the IT Director testifying about his customer journey, from his criteria of choice to the the implementation of the technology and the current usage. This way, we got to adapt the message to a local business, bringing the business case to life.

The second year, we pushed it further by bringing the F1 theme. HPE had just announced its partnership with DS Automobile and Virgin Racing and announced its 2018 corporate mantra, "accelerate your business". As a result we decided to create our own introduction video featuring our local managers, including the theme of racing in our content, and building an interactive presentation using Sli.do and Prezi.

✅ Assessment

The target audience has been reached two years in a row. As a consequence, the Tour de France was featured as a best practice shared with HPE EMEA in 2018. Moreover, locally, it is an annual gathering that the partners have identified as an opportunity to meet both their account manager but also the Sales Management team. Every year it is a boost in the number of leads and deal closures.

Both roadshows required for us to take advantage of the momentum, and I managed to create some content for us to share post-event (in French).