From winning over the picky bride to finessing the inexperienced conference organizer looking to shave costs, events management is an exercise in tact and interpersonal skills.
Dawn Donahue has been in the events business for 35 years and says she’s learned to put in a lot of time at the beginning of a new relationship with a client to explain how an event is put together and clarify the roles of client and professional organizer.
She’s also learned to identify what questions the client isn’t asking.
“We learned that the questions they did not ask was where their knowledge ended,” she said. “And from that we identified that if we did not teach them the questions they needed to ask, we could never meet their expectations.”
For instance, one client spent time trying to renegotiate with suppliers in an effort to lower the quotes the client had been given instead of focusing on business development and getting sponsors.
“Even though they had the budget outlined with all the expenses and the revenue, what I never heard them ask was, ‘How do you get good deals? Who negotiates this?’” Donahue said. “We just automatically assumed they knew that as conference producers we would do our best to negotiate the prices on their behalf to get them the best deal.”
Donahue and her staff have created a three-step process to make sure everyone knows how things work when they first sit down with a client: they listen closely, ask a lot of questions and then begin educating.
That last step requires some delicacy, Donahue said.
“What we find in the first meeting, when we realize the pockets of knowledge that we should be teaching our clients, is that we have the discussion generally and then we go away and we do a report back to them with a section called, ‘Some questions you may want to ask us,’” she said.
“Then it’s in writing … and they’ll usually come back and say, ‘You’re right. Can you tell us more about this?’ We never assume that they want to learn anything; we just give them the opportunity.”
On picking the right clients | “If it’s a new client and they truly don’t want to learn anything, they feel like they’ve got it covered and they’re just hiring us because they have to, because they need someone to do the administration work, we oftentimes won’t take that contract. It’s definitely got to be an open understanding. In the real world, most people don’t understand the amount of work anybody does in their job.”
