During the week of July 22, I am going to live the Beverly Hillbilly lifestyle.

During the week of July 22, I am going to live the Beverly Hillbilly lifestyle.  

My first stop will Chicago where I will attend and write about the LTC & Senior Living LINK conference, sponsored by Lincoln Healthcare. ON Wednesday I will fly to Florida where I will attend the Marcus Evans Long Term Care Summit.  Because the attendance is limited to top level executives of senior housing communities, the only reason I get to attend is because I am publish Senior Housing Forum.

As I talked with David Drey of Marcus Evans about how this whole thing works, it goes like this:

Sponsorship

The cost of putting on the summit is paid a select group vendors, that are looking to tell their story to large senior housing companies.  They pay big money(meaning tens of thousands of dollars).  Here is what those sponsor’s get for the big bucks:

  • A series of private individual meetings with the C level customers and these are customers how have been prequalified as being actively in the market for those services and who can make big dollar buying decisions.
  • The vendors also own their particular market space.  This means there is only one marketing company, one emergency call vendor, one architect and so on.   It also mean having the opportunity to do five to a dozen in-depth pitches over the course of two days where it would take months or years to secure the same access, if possible at all.
  • The reason vendors keep coming back and paying the big bucks is that they are able to leverage these meetings into contracts with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Attendees

In some sense, attending these C level summits are the ultimate version of a condo pitch weekend, though with some big differences here is why it works:

  • This is not high pressure sales.  It a consultative sales experience, meaning the attendee C level executives meet with the Sponsor C level executives and get to know each other, looking for a fit.  The sponsors get to know the prospects corporate culture and needs.  The attendees get a chance to understand the company’s value proposition.
  • The executives get a chance to hear presentations and participate in discussions that are very specifically targeted at the needs of senior executives of large organizations.
  • A big challenge senior executives face is that because they don’t need continuing education credits it becomes harder to justify the cost of attending open conventions and trade shows both in terms of dollar costs and more importantly time.  Further most of the presentations do not specifically address the issues facing corporate executive staff. Because these summits are focused, compressed it solves these problems.

 If you have been or are a sponsor, what is your experience? If you have attended was it worth it?  Would you go again?  Did you end up doing business with any of the sponsors?

Steve Moran