52 Bicycles

The group that came to my latest Sales and Marketing Breakfast was set of old hands who had been there before (perhaps too cold for the new faces?) but the conversation kept taking interesting turns. We discussed the efficacy (and relative cost) of exhibiting at trade shows, marginal discount pricing, and generally the business trials we’ve all been through. It was a fairly disparate set of perspectives - two devices (one medical, one security), two software (one for financial institutions and Element55 for time capture). Interestingly, all were B2B sales (though one is a distributor relationshipswhere the end-user is a consumer).

The model of the small table of conversation really increases the quality of the conversation. Four people can talk about one subject, and all participate. I think with five or six at a table two sub-groups form, and you have two or three people in each conversation, and it breaks down as you have more. So keeping the group small actually increases the number of participants for a given discussion.

It’s certianly possible to have more people focused on a single topic, but then you start breaking into speaker/audience dynamic, with maybe a panel of participants while others listen. But that’s a completely different type of experience, and not clear to me that it is more valuable.

This is useful food for thought both in my future event organizing, but also in the context of networking - bigger groups will not have the same dynamic, and will behave more like broadcast - or like a long table, i.e. either speaker/audience or a breakdown of micro-conversations that do not cohere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Reddit This