Is it time for sales to shift gears?
When a show launches, the sales conversation is built on vision: the audience you'll deliver, your competence, your commitment. A few cycles in, it often narrows to a transactional rebook, and the relationship goes quiet between one show and the next.
That silence is getting expensive. In-person demand is strong, which is exactly the problem: new launches are flooding in, corporate flagship events are competing for the same buyers and sponsors, and rising costs are squeezing exhibitor budgets. The exhibitors who come back out of habit rather than conviction are the first to leave when someone offers them a better relationship and a viable alternative.
Join Mark Brewster (CEO and Founder, Explori) and Dr. Barış Onay (Co-founder, Precision Communities) for a frank conversation about what sits alongside the scarcity sell: customer success functions, consultative selling, sales incentives that reward the right things, and what AI now makes possible for teams managing hundreds of exhibitor relationships.
Barış brings twenty years in executive roles at public and private equity backed organisers, including CCO of Tarsus Group and Group Marketing and Digital Director at Hyve, where he saw first-hand what a dedicated customer success function does for exhibitor retention.
This is a conversation between two people who have tackled the problem from different angles, at scale. Bring your questions.
What we'll get into
- Why the launch sell and the rebook sell are different conversations, and what gets lost in between
- The real cost of exhibitors who come back out of habit: how to spot them before a competitor does
- Add a customer success function or rebuild the sales playbook: the honest case for each, from someone who has done it at scale
- Why bolting a bonus onto NPS backfires, and what to incentivise instead
- What AI changes for a sales team managing hundreds of exhibitor relationships
