Melbourne sales team at HIC 2014
HIC 2014, Melbourne. Our first expedition into the world of exhibiting. HIC is Australia’s premier digital health, e-health & health informatics conference.
In the past, we have visited many conferences as delegates and whilst there, we have talked to a lot of those exhibiting. These conversations have caused us to be rather skeptical about exhibiting ourselves.
The sort of conferences we attend are within the mobile/communication field, which on first assumptions would be perfect for us to exhibit at, right? We also see heaps of companies that are within our direct industry there exhibiting; but when we ask if they would do the same again next year most of them say “no.”
This does not fill one with confidence.
There have also been conferences we’ve attended where, the exhibition rooms in particular, have just been awful.
We then decided to approach the matter differently. We looked at the industries that use us and, in particular, those industries that we are very strong in and have a good understanding of. We then went looking for conferences within these fields. One such industry is the Healthcare Industry. We have a lot of high profile companies within this industry, including the likes of BUPA, Healthscope and Peter Mac.
We figured that this approach would work because we’d very likely be the only SMS supplier attending, and also likely to be the rarity – the shiny new toy – at these types of conferences.
Being that the conference was on IT in healthcare, most of the other exhibitors would have reason to use SMS within their business and many already did.
When we looked through the exhibitor list of HIC, we saw a few of our customers listed; no competitors! This was a great sign – if our customers were there, the others could easily become our customers, too!
Our thoughts, optimistic as they were, came to fruition. We were of interest to many of the exhibitors, as well as the delegates, and many of those we spoke to already used SMS or had been meaning to talk to an SMS company.
We were there. And now we’re looking to do more of this. Get in touch if you think your conference would benefit from us being there.
