90p Admin

Regarding MotM vendor sponsorships: I think we may have been a bit aggressive on pricing. Both Altec and Avalara have (mostly) politely said that our asking sponsorship fees were way too high for what they felt was perceived value. I explained the group was active Sage 100 resellers that are engaged with customers to provide quality third-party solutions, yadda, yadda, yadda. But ... it didn't change anyone's impression. I have asked them both: a) If we were to add additional benefits in the packages to make them worth the price, what would those benefits look like? b) If we kept the benefits the same, what would be a fair price? The questions for you all: 1. Should I reach out to other potential sponsors with current pricing? 2. Should we revisit the options before reaching out to others? Maybe have joint sponsorship for lunches and dinners? I'm looking for suggestions.

Did they reply to your questions?

I passed the baton of pricing this a few days ago so will let the group think revise as needed. From my perspective I'd be ok with no vendors. For a two day seminar we have very little member to member time and when we have the vendors do a lunch speech they either went over or wound up not paying us or only paying after we chased them. Biznet even bad mouthed us behind our backs despite at least one member referring decent business to them. My TL;DR: We're going to miss seeing you at the event.

I'm ok with that approach - I'm going to open it up to other vendors as-is and if no one steps up, so be it. The only change I would like to make is to offer a session to the entry level sponsorship as a carrot. I have informally started discussions with a few other prospective sponsors and they all felt that the $1500 should include a session. Could everyone please respond if this is ok or not. I'm good either way. My early stage discussions lead me to believe that if we don't offer a session at the $1500 level, we will get no sponsors. Again - I'm ok with that.

I'm okay with a session but do we want to limit the number, say three max? First come, first served?

I haven't seen an agenda yet. If we have a full agenda I'm just as ok not having any sponsors. It's a canned Powerpoint that goes long and becomes impossible to get rid of the vendor when they run over their time. And just to circle back and clear up any mis-understanding then I'll step back and let you decide because we're good at letting vendors run up and over the top of us. Each of these opportunities also were to include some additional marketing to the group. Lowest level were announcements on our blog and literature to the attendees. Heck I wouldn't care if we sold 100 of literature/blog at $250 each - I just am not going to sit through 100 canned pitches... You have a finite inventory (presentation time). Do not under sell it. I'm not saying the pricing is right - but you cannot realistically have more than a couple speakers. If we sell 5 vendor presentations I can tell you 100% I will not be at the conference.