Convention And Exhibition Industry Transformation Under The New Normal: Improving Customer Management Level

According to incomplete statistics, in the first 11 months of 2014, 2423 national economic and trade exhibitions were held in 30 provinces of China. The total exhibition area was about 71 million 100 thousand square meters, representing an increase of about 4.2% and 2.6% respectively over the same period. On the topic of how China's Convention and exhibition industry adapted to the new normal, it was heated by the guests at the Eleventh China International Conference on exhibition economy (CEFCO), held recently in Kunming.

Wang Jinzhen, vice president of China Council for trade promotion, pointed out at the CEFCO forum that under the background of the global economic adjustment and the growth and differentiation of major economies, China's Convention and exhibition industry still has problems such as slow marketization, irrational structure and weak international competitiveness. Whether it can adapt to the new normal economy has become an important challenge facing the exhibition industry.

"Domestic exhibition companies have deeply felt the challenges brought about by the new normal." Pan Tao, a senior observer of the exhibition industry and director of marketing software for bitter gourd, said: "a lot of visionary exhibition companies, with information technology, start from customer management CRM, optimize business processes, improve efficiency, reduce operating costs, consolidate the foundation of exhibitions, and enhance the competitiveness of enterprises. Like CHIC Clothing Fair and Shenzhen home textile exhibition are typical representatives.

China clothing and Accessories Fair (CHIC) is China's largest apparel industry exhibition, in the past 22 years, has been "guided the progress of China's garment industry, promote the development of China's clothing brand" for the purpose of exhibition. CHIC data management in the past is also relatively systematic. The organizing committee has built an exhibition database based on Microsoft Access system, and has a special data administrator to manage it. When other personnel need data, they can query and update through data administrators uniformly, and share data by exporting Excel forms. This system has supported the rapid development of CHIC clothing exhibition in the past 20 years. However, with the development of business, the disadvantages of this system are becoming more and more prominent. For example, collaboration and sharing are not convenient and timely, Excel data tables bring more security risks, and the history of multi session can not be quickly querying and retrieving.

At the end of 2013, CHIC decided to upgrade the data management system, chose balsam pear software as a service provider, and deployed the exhibition CRM customer management software. All business people can operate in the system at the same time, without the need of a single data administrator, and more convenient to manage customers; and by setting permissions, each salesperson can only manage their own data, greatly enhancing data security; bitter melon CRM flexible contract template and express template function, compared with the mail merge function of Access and Office, it is stable and simple, and greatly improves the work efficiency.

The Shenzhen home textile exhibition held by Guangdong home textile association is also a big exhibition in the industry. It has two sessions per year and more than 120 thousand square meters per session. In 2012, the association deployed the audience CRM to manage one hundred thousand home textile and apparel Buyers in China. In 2014, the business process of the exhibition was systematically combed, and the CRM was deployed. The registration and booth allocation were implemented in the CRM management software of Momordica charantia exhibition. Contract signing The whole business process management, such as collecting and invoicing, statistical analysis, etc.

Before deploying balsam pear CRM system, the association uses Excel to manage exhibitors' information. When leaders want to check the progress of the exhibition, they need to gather all the salesmen's forms together, with low efficiency and error prone, and the full custom report function of the bitter melon CRM system (including three types of simple reports, group reports and matrix reports) does not need to be customized to develop, and can generate statistical reports for any fields. It saves the cumbersome summary process and saves two development costs. With the help of custom fields, custom views, and flexible system structure, helping hosting has significantly improved the management level and reduced the cost of information implementation.

"Data assets, which are the core assets of the exhibition organizers, have been upgraded and representative for the CRM customer management system in one south, one north and two brand exhibitions". Pan Tao The introduction said, "in the process of software implementation, the two hosting teams left us with deep impression. The leaders of the two exhibitions, from the above to the future, are strategically advanced, while the middle managers are proficient in business, pragmatism and efficiency. The brand exhibition will pay more attention to practicing internal strength, and other small and medium-sized exhibition enterprises may become more difficult under the new normal.

You bet, Exhibition Under the new normal economic situation, intensified competition at home and abroad, the market mechanism of survival of the fittest and the jungle will force China's Convention and exhibition industry to usher in a new round of shuffling. Industry experts predict that China's exhibition industry will develop towards brand concentration and brand specialization in the future.

According to Mr. Pan Tao, "in 2013, compared with 2012, the revenue of Momordica charantia software grew by 47%, but in 2014 it increased by 106% compared with 2013, and we expect growth rate to be maintained in 2015." Seeing from the growth of bitter melon software's revenue growth, it may indicate that increasing the input of information will be a major feature of the new normal of the Convention and exhibition economy. The exhibition enterprise layout and Exhibition CRM customer management software will become the industry consensus of the Chinese Convention and exhibition industry reform in the future.