If your client is feeling overwhelmed, they may be looking to control something and a budget is a good place to start. They may start whittling away this and that in the hopes of regaining control again. Know that this is just a symptom of a larger anxiety.

If you come in at this point, with a hardcore sales approach, you’ll lose them. You need to focus your energy on creating a connection. They need to be courted and you do that by showing them you have what they need. But first, you need to figure out what that is.

Get them off of the nickels and dimes and onto the larger picture. Ask about their vision for the event, their goals, and what they want. Let them bask in the “what will be” for a moment. Listen to what they’re saying. Make note of what they want and how they communicate it to you. What words do they use?
They should be telling you what they value. If you’re telling them what they value, you’ll be swimming upstream. Instead, find out what they find important and mold your event approach to that. It won’t feel like a sale. It will be a conversation. Next, mimic the language they used when talking about the event. Reiterate their vision to them so they know you’re on the same page.

Then, talk about how their desired cost-savings only add up to a few dollars. Show what it will impact. Then switch the conversation to what the event could be and what that would mean for all involved. Paint a story that the customer wants to be a part of. You can do this by basing it on what they told you. Then talk about attendee experience. Ask them which scenario provides more value for everyone involved? The cost-savings one or their ideal? The economic outlay is not that much more for the ideal version, but it yields a much larger potential for greater return on investment.

For most customers, buying a car is a long-term commitment; at least from the payment side since most people finance them. Have you noticed how salespeople talk about cars? They ask about monthly payment. After all, that’s what most people care about in their budget. It doesn’t benefit them to talk about how much buyers will pay over the life of the loan. Most people would experience buying paralysis hearing that number.
With events, it’s the opposite. The larger shock is in the line item. Events are something people will pay off at one time, unlike a car. Don’t allow the conversation to turn into an analysis of line-item charges. They’ll experience the same buying paralysis that they would if they saw what they’d actually be paying for a car in the long run.

Instead, talk about return on investment. It will cost you X, but you’ll bring in Y. (Hopefully, Y will make X look teeny, tiny.) Then show them the results you’ve achieved through other events for clients. Don’t just look at ROI as money. Broaden that definition to show how your efforts have brought in more attendees, grown name recognition, and continued to increase attendance years later.

Ask the tough questions so they see the hidden costs of how they’re currently doing things. Find out about their challenges. Look for correlations and get them to open up. Ask them problem-solving prompts like, “How is that affecting this?” This allows them to start to see the challenges they may not have seen before. And since it’s them seeing it, not you directly saying “Your problem is this,” they will be more receptive to your planning solution and event expertise.

Show them what they’re missing or what could be, but make sure you do this step after you know what they value. If not, you could be offering something they are not at all interested in.

Because you already know what your potential client finds value in, you can quickly structure this conversation to show what they’re getting from you over and above your traditional services. If you show them value at every meeting and in every call or if you explain they’re getting something with you that most event planners charge for, they are more likely to feel good about spending the money, which brings us to…

Have you ever known someone who is so wise it feels like every moment spent with them is a life lesson? You feel compelled to take notes. If you can do the same for your clients (in a humble way, of course), they will see value in simply talking to you.

This may seem disingenuous but keep track of all the times you counsel them on the phone or over email. They may not be aware how often they lean on you for support or the answers to their questions. This is not so much so that you will throw it in their face one day and say, “Look what I’ve done for you” but so that you can recognize the pattern of the type of help you provide. It may assist you in creating more valuable content or programs.

You also want to show them best practices you’ve shared with other customers and what’s worked for them. Whenever possible, use clients that are similar to the one you’re trying to win over. That way their success will feel more achievable. Using big name market examples (not your own) that other event planners have been involved with doesn’t bring value to your client. It just shows you can read articles.

This will help your prospective client place a value on your services that they won’t find with another event planner. Make sure they understand the institutional knowledge you have and the bargain that it is.

You need to look at who you are working with and make sure that they understand the importance of diversity for your event. This means putting in place a framework and a guide on what your team needs to know when it comes to diversity.

• Start to read metrics on diversity and inclusion. For example, there are more CEOs named John then there are female CEOs at large companies. Become educated on what is happening around you so that you can take the steps to change the norm. Don’t only read the metrics, but read the news and see the stories that are happening. Make sure that your team knows your stance on diversity and what they need to do to accommodate all.
• When assembling your team, try and have diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, personalities and genders. This makes sure that you have thought of everything when it comes to planning your event. Think about your own group of friends, you are not all alike because that would be boring. You have a difference of opinions and ideas that make you see things in a new light. Set up your event team like that.

Now that your team is organized you need to start getting your event in order. This means thinking of ways that you can add diversity into your event and thinking about certain scheduling conflicts when it comes to logistics.

• Whatever type of event you are hosting, whether it is pharmaceutical conference, technology summit or celebrity food event you need to keep your attendees in mind. When it comes to the date of your event, make sure that you steer clear of any major religious holidays and festivals. You don’t want to neglect some of your audience because your show falls on a sacred day for them. You would be losing an attendee and they would be losing out on valuable information from your event.
• Invite a diverse group of people to your event. If you are hosting a global event, don’t just send invitations to people in your local area. Do your research and find other countries that would have an interest in your event and start placing ads on big media sites in the area. Do whatever you can do get a large group of people at your event from varying backgrounds, cultures, abilities and more. This is good for not only your event, but your attendees because they are able to network and learn from people with different views from them.
• When thinking about your event agenda try and add some topics on diversity or inclusion. If you are hosting an event with a keynote speaker, considering inviting someone who is a diversity expert who can speak to the audience on the topic. If you have a large tradeshow, add a track on diversity and inclusion in events to encourage speakers to submit topics.

Most meeting-schedules are crammed from minute one to the last second. The meeting owner in most cases has many goals for the occasion, all to be targeted in this one day. The solution is as simple, as it is effective: limit the number of goals to ONE.

Then take a close look, to see if even this one goal can be achieved in one single day. Maybe it is too much for the attendees to be convinced there is a problem, define what exactly it is, find the solutions and work on actual implementation in just a few hours.

Restrain your urge to estimate everything from the positive side. Transferring 200 people from one breakout session to another, including toilet-stop and getting a drink, is simply asking for trouble. It is better to ‘blow some air’ into the schedule. Embrace the slow philosophy in terms of your events.
Cancel 20% of programmed items: it will push you into making better choices when it comes to content and it will help you find time to really achieve things.

Nobody ever complained, when a meeting finished early. So, don’t hesitate to tell your guests drinks will be at 17.00, while planning to finish at 16.30. It will bring you the luxury of having the ten minutes extra time to spend, in case a programmed-item turns out to be even more interesting than expected.

When a schedule crashes, it’s often the wrong things that are sacrificed to getting back on track. Already in the meeting design phase, the amount of time for interaction is cut down, and this gets reduced further everytime a speaker is added to the line-up. Just because this one Professor or top-manager ‘simply has to be on stage’, there suddenly is only five minutes left for Question & Answer; completely ridiculous, of course! Or breaks are brought back to 10 minutes for coffee or half an hour lunch, ignoring the importance of networking; an opportunity wasted!

That is why you need the guts to make choices. If there is a really good reason for scheduling the extra speaker, is it better to have no Q&A-time, then just five minutes… if you take your guests seriously? But even better: give the floor to the people in the room and skip one of the speakers. If you get to be really engaged as an attendee, if the event does end up running late this will be more acceptable than a speaker going over time.

This at the very least means, planning enough time at the end of the day to summarize and take decisions. Running late earlier in the program can not lead to forgetting about the harvesting.

Also during the course of the day, delegates need time to convert what they’ve seen, heard and experienced to their day-to-day reality. If you are shooed from one item planned too tight to another, you will not be able to process and implement what you’ve learned. So once again: allow time, to reflect and settle.