As Mustang Marketing’s clientele continues to grow—both in terms of the number of clients we have and their stature—any opportunity we have to be in the same room with our clients’ entire team is an important one to jump on.
And so jump I did, all the way to Chicago for the 2014 Marketing Leadership Meeting at the Hyatt at O’Hare last month. Our new client, who provides large point-of-purchase printing displays for companies like McDonald’s, had a trade show booth at the conference, and I went to not only provide support (and a few pieces of trade show collateral), but to meet their whole sales force and get a stronger sense of what kind of marketing direction and materials would best meet their needs.
Basically, we covered in a few hours what would have taken weeks to coordinate via email, phone and video conferencing.
As we draft Mustang’s take on the strategic marketing plan, the RoadMap, for this client, it’s critical to have this kind of understanding about how their sales cycle operates, how they interact and promote themselves to clients, and what they hope to achieve in the future. All of that was on display for this conference, and even more. I got to see what this industry looked like on a small scale—what our clients were doing, what their competitors were doing, what strategies were working and which were being developed, and how they handle local marketing versus national events such as this.
The wealth of client-level knowledge I was able to absorb would have made its way to the Mustang team whether I attended the conference or not, although I would argue it would have happened more slowly and with a lot more calendaring. But being in that atmosphere, the place where this new client gets to show everything they have to offer—and their competitors get to do the same—would have been much harder to come by without taking this cross-country plunge.
All that alone was enough to make the trip worthwhile. But the icing on the cake was meeting the now-famous, World Cup American soccer hero Tim Howard—and getting his autograph for both my son and my coworker, Michael.