Are You Getting the Most Intelligence ROI From Your Trade Show and Conference Budget?

For sheer Return On Your Investment, there are few Business Intelligence applications that can beat collection operations at Trade Shows and Professional Conferences, Meetings and Symposia. We're not talking about scrounging about the exhibits hall with a large bag, scraping brochures, pamphlets, product samples and business cards. Nor should we mention those intriguing collectibles that you can pick up to cheaply satisfy the kids' need for souvenirs from Dad or Mom's business trip. Look beneath the veneer of high-powered stage shows and entertainers, beneath the opportunities to bag a few rays in a nice warm climate, beneath the chances to lower handicaps or shop at outlet malls. What do Business Intelligence professionals find at meetings and events such as these?

A Target Rich Environment

They find a target rich environment where professionals from across the map meet with one thought running consistently in the back of their minds: information. Information shared between professionals at scientific and technical meetings. Information shared by vendors with customers and pseudo-customers. Information shared by booth mavens with whomever will enter their domain. Information shared by the hapless poster-children whose papers were not selected for presentation in the formal conference but who stand anxiously by, awaiting that odd visitor who'll validate his -- currently impoverished -- professional standing. And, information collected by publishers looking for new advertisers in the industry journals. Information collected by the myriad — and largely unaccounted for — consultants who're trying to remain abreast of changes in the industry and in individual companies so as to be better able to ply their trade. Information collected by the media representatives who cover industries and companies. Information collected by analysts of all shapes and sizes. Information collected by the trade show and conference organizers themselves so as to better understand trends, individual exhibitors and where they're going in the future.

Information sharers and collectors who are — or should be — the objects of affection and attention by anyone seriously interested in Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence that encompasses collection about competitors, customers, regulators, vendors and subcontractors. Business Intelligence that includes counterintelligence as a necessary part of any intelligence function or activity. Business Intelligence that is serious, worth its investment and moving toward more and more popular acceptance each year.

None of this is to say that conferences and other meetings exist solely for the Business Intelligence promise they hold. Neither is it to day that people who are actively engaged in the process of collecting, analyzing and protecting information started doing it the day after the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals came into being. But, the central organizing principles of the intelligence profession have provided the impetus for many companies to develop more rigorous, comprehensive and integrated approaches to capitalize on the wealth of information of competitive value that can be found in these environments.

Levels of Sophistication

As businesses employ measures to exploit such opportunities as those presented by such meetings, it's reasonably easy to determine levels of competency, levels of performance, levels of productivity. In our experience both in the US and abroad, there are clear distinctions in terms of sophistication and organization. Perhaps you'll have an opportunity to see where you stack up against the Business Intelligence professionals in other firms.

At the lowest level of sophistication is the Business Intelligence organization which no coverage, interest or competency in exploiting the information richness of the trade show and conference environment. Only a slight steep above these firms are those where Business Intelligence is thought to be operating under cooperating conditions: employees of the firm travel to meetings and in order to get their vouchers paid, the traveller has to file a trip report on his activities. In pico-seconds it becomes clear to the busy, returning traveler that a two line veni, vidi, vici report will suffice to get the voucher paid. Any information, let alone any intelligence, that may be gleaned from these kinds of efforts are purely happenstance.

Next in line are those organizations where the Business Intelligence cadre actively seek out people who have returned from company sponsored travel and actually sit down and interview the returning source about what he or she may have learned during the meeting. In most cases like these, there's precious little difference in this approach from those who would foolishly respond -- without question or refinement — to the business leader who forms collection objectives in ways such as "Tell me everything about Company X." Virtually anyone who's been in this business for more than a week knows about this formula for failure in satisfying collection objectives.

Usually, organizations at the previous level either go away pretty quickly or they vault into pro-activity. Here is where the Business Intelligence practitioners actually pre-brief or sensitize their corporate travellers to the specific, outstanding collection objectives that remain unsatisfied. They actually get out of their offices, visit the prospective travellers and prepare them not only about what the leadership may need to know and what might be gained at the conference, but they also prepare the traveller for a scheduled debriefing his return. Not only does it close the loop, but it alleviates the travellers' natural antipathy to writing a report himself. And who knows? Maybe there'll be some other jewel that will drop from the interviewee's lips — a jewel that's only recognizable by the intelligence professional — during the debriefing that would otherwise go unreported.

Moving up the food chain we encounter the Business Intelligence manager who actually identifies the conferences, travellers and objectives well enough in advance that some basic planning and development can occur. Planning such as matching your internal correspondents or collectors with their colleagues — perhaps even unknown to the traveller at the planning stage — who will be attending the conference. Matching them with the colleague who works for, or used to work for, the competitor you're interest in learning about; matching your traveller up with the person who's presenting a paper where there may well be something of competitive value, something that can satisfy some of your current or standing Intelligence requirements; matching them with certain, potentially lucrative sources drawn from the various other populations found at the meeting.

At the next level are those firms where the Business Intelligence management plans to another degree: helping to do such things as prepare their correspondents throughout the firm to actually understand different means of collecting information, ranging from specialized training in obtaining it from the individuals with whom they associate without causing those sources to become suspicious, afraid, or uncooperative. At these firms, Business Intelligence management ensures that they maximize the participation of their internal correspondents by making certain that there is always a quid pro quo of some sort. Most often these correspondents share in the intelligence products of the firm's efforts, get to participate in something they believe to be important for their and the company's welfare or even use the opportunity to satisfy some latent Walter Mitty-ish desire to do something more than the average employee. Sometimes, this advance preparation extends to arranging for cooperating employees to serve in professional organizations in such capacities as members of paper solicitation and selection committees. This allows them to encourage the submissions of papers by those working for competitors in whom the firm has an interest, and even to helpfully provide assistance in the development of the paper. In other situations, these kinds of correspondents can be prepared with specific and pointed questions which can be asked of a speaker from the floor — questions which tend to be answered since they're offered in an atmosphere of collegiality, enhanced by a desire of the paper presenter to impress his colleagues anyway. The next level of Business Intelligence unit involvement in trade shows and the like involves actual travel to the meeting or trade show site, where they set up a debriefing site where correspondent employees arrive at certain scheduled times to meet with company members. These company debriefings allow a variety of benefits: ­ real-time intelligence collection and first-line analysis;­ education of sales people in newly introduced products or services of competitors which may have been launched at that particular show and which they need to have knowledge of in order to sell effectively against them;

­ immediate recall of events which would otherwise be degraded with the passage of time; ­ opportunities to levy additional requirements on the attending employees when events and reports dictate expanding the coverage — something which could obviously never occur if the firm had limited its collection activities to post-conference debriefings and the additional opportunities had been missed; and, ­ from a counterintelligence perspective, reporting on the questions and interests of those people known or reasonably assumed to be working for competitors who are conducting their own activities at the meeting, and, in this way, providing early warning to the company's attendees as to what questions are being asked, with what level of competency, and by whom.

And the tally?

How does your firm measure up, in its level of competency and dedication to information collection in such a rich environment? Whether you're looking at this set of levels as examples of how you might think about increasing or expanding your coverage, or if you're simply assessing the extent to which your competitors may be employing such methods at conferences so as to perhaps protect yourself, it might be well to consider what's happening in the marketplace today. And to react accordingly in order to prevail.

About the author: John A. Nolan, III CPP, OCP is Special Advisor, Intelligence Training and Solutions, DynCorp International. Previously he was Chairman and Managing Director of Phoenix Consulting Group, which provides competitive intelligence, counterintelligence and professional development/training programs across a variety of industries. He is also a co-founder of The Centre for Operational Business Intelligence in Sarasota, FL where corporate intelligence practitioners from around the country and the world learn the tools and techniques necessary to prevail in the marketplace.