Category Archives: Conference Season

Before You Get All Excited To Learn About Trends for Fall Conference Season

Read SI’s Expose on “Future Trends” from a decade ago, which exposed these “future” trends as artifacts from the past that are polished annually and presented to you on a silver platter.

As per our post last week, with the exception of:

  • Gen-AI being the new fluffy magic cloud
  • Fake-take (sorry, intake) being the new dangerous and dysfunctional dashboards

Very little has changed in the past decade. As a result, do you need to be spending 5K to 7K on a conference to hear the same old, same old that you can read about here on Sourcing Innovation and over on Procure Insights for free?

And if you just want a vacation, take one. You can take a much longer, and better, one if you don’t go to an overpriced conference at an overpriced hotel in the center of an overpriced city.

Before You Get All Excited for Fall Conference Season

Read SI’s “Conference Season” series from a decade ago, and then tell me, with the exception of:

  • Gen-AI being the new fluffy magic cloud
  • Fake-take (sorry, intake) being the new dangerous and dysfunctional dashboards

Has anything really changed since 2014?

It’s Conference Season, so Marketers are Marketing Like Mad!

And, as usual, some of it is driving the doctor a little bit nuts.

So, dear Marketer, if you’re reading this, here’s a few tips when trying to sell to someone actually in the market for a Procurement solution, vs. just looking for a good excuse to get approval to go to a conference for a good time.

They don’t care about your story
Yes, PR people love stories. Yes, journalists love stories. Yes, company storytellers like stories. But guess what? People who are drowning in their job and need a system that can actually help them be more productive only care about what you or your product does, and how you or your product will do it, not what circuitous route got you to the point where you decided to start a company.

They don’t care about your passion
Yes, Investors do. They want people driven to work hard to solve a problem with a solution they believe will make them a lot of money. Yes, Executives use it as a check box, and it will differentiate you from the other collared shirt when you make the final three and get to present your case. But someone who is going to have to use your solution and follow your process day-in and day-out in the Tower of Spend isn’t going to care about that in the slightest until they see that your solution might actually help them.

They don’t care about your clear and regular communication, great service, commitment, follow-through, willingness to do what it takes to hit the implementation and integration deadlines, your ease of use, great UX, shiny new offering, or disruptive value proposition either (or any of the dozens of ways you can say this with effectively the exact same lack of meaning).
This is because this doesn’t say anything about your solution, the problem it solves, and how it is different from the 20 to 200 other solutions they could also choose. (And if you think the doctor is exaggerating, please refer back to the Source-to-Pay+ Mega-Map with 666 unique clickable logos for your research pleasure.)

In fact, during conference season, about the only thing most of them actually care about is if you have a booth, what Brand Ambassadors are going to be there, and if you’re giving away free booze, culinary delights, or unique (cool) swag.

Also, before we end this, just a little FYI that the analysts, consultants, and social media influencers (unless, of course, in the latter case, you have a cool booth with free booze, food, and SWAG and give them an all expense paid trip to the booth to show it off on TikTok) that you want to cover you probably don’t care about any of the above either!

Rabbit Season? Duck Season?

Is it just me or does the annual return of “conference” season remind you of the old Looney Tunes Rabbit Season, Duck Season shorts with all of the competing, similar, but yet mangled and confusing messages about what you should be focussing on, what conferences you should be going to, and what you should be hunting for?

For the younger generation, the classic “rabbit season, duck season” was a “hunting” trilogy of Warner Bros shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fud that began with Rabbit Fire in 1951, that was the first to show Daffy as a flawed, greedy, vain character who always, secretly, wanted the spotlight (and not just a screwball comedian who wanted to make you laugh).

In this particular episode, where it is supposedly rabbit season, Daffy lures Elmer Fudd (the hunter) to Bug’s burrow and convinces Bug that a “friend” is there to see him, seemingly aiming to take out the competition. High jinks ensue until Bugs manages to trick Daffy into saying it’s actually duck season, at which point Elmer tries to shoot Daffy. Then the two find increasingly creative ways to turn the tables until the hunter decides its rabbit and duck season, at which point both realize how stupid they were and work together to make it “Elmer” season …

So why do I think of this cartoon?

Well, first of all, many vendors spend a lot of the year trying to eliminate their competition from your consideration by claiming that the competitor’s product is lacking key features you need for efficiency, value, or ROI (Daffy tricking Elmer into hunting Bugs); then, during Conference Season, the competition (Bugs) strikes back with slicker messaging that encourages the buyer to turn on the vendor that may (or may not) have led them astray; then the original vendor (Daffy) starts copying the message of the competition, with a few twists to get the attention back; and the marketing and messaging dance continues until the buyer (Elmer) gets simultaneously so confused and so angry that he wants to eliminate both vendors (Daffy and Bugs) from consideration, at which point the vendors need to team up (or at least call a temporary back-room truce) in some way to trap the buyer back into buying at least one of their solutions, and if there isn’t complete overlap, preferably both!

As far as the doctor is concerned, this misses the point of conference season, which is supposedly to educate you about the offering and the value you can get from it. Which would be great if that was what the majority of events did, but over the years, I found that less and less of a reality at the bigger shows by the bigger vendors and conference players. Starting with the latter half of the last decade, the events at many of these players have become less about education and more about how spectacular of a show the vendor or conference group could put on as vendors, professional organizations, and conference groups tried to show value by showing how successful they were, instead of just keeping it simple and showing how successful you could be with their technology, education, processes, or platforms (built up from the technology and processes of their sponsors).

I don’t know about you, but I’m a little bit saddened by it — I know it’s been a staple in the enterprise software world for a while, going back to the old trade-show mentality where if you couldn’t afford the poshest venue and the biggest suite, then obviously you weren’t successful … but isn’t Procurement supposed to be about your success and not theirs?

Although it means regular work is less guaranteed, the doctor is actually quite happy to be independent now as it means he can pick and choose what conferences and events he does, and more importantly, does NOT have to even consider going to as, this year, he’s only seen ONE event by a top suite vendor he’d actually like to attend. (Compare this to the early and mid teens where he was quite interested in going to almost all of them … )

Now, I should say, this viewpoint, which is the doctor‘s and the doctor‘s alone, is lobbied primarily at a subset of the big vendor conferences and the big conferences / trade shows and not the smaller vendors or smaller workshops. There are still plenty of smaller and best-of-breed vendors putting on great educational events, many of which even us analysts don’t hear about until it’s too late, that are more than worth your time and money to attend.  (Heck, sometimes even us old dogs and cats who’ve been in this for over two decades will learn a new trick.)

In other words, given that your time, money, and patience is limited, don’t fall for the hype and instead look for the education that you need to make the right decision as to what platform, product, process, or service your organization needs next and whom you should buy it from. And enjoy the fact that you know you don’t have to go to everything or anything if it’s not relevant!