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A four-day gastronomy route that took the annual dealer meeting out of the conference-room format. The aim was to deliver the commercial agenda without blocking relationships from forming.
What was the problem in front of the company?
The annual dealer meeting had run in the same format for years: a full day of presentations in a hotel function room, dinner, and the return journey the next morning. Attendance was slipping a little every year, and some dealers were sending an employee in their place.
Sales management's read was this: dealers already received the commercial agenda by email. The only distinctive value the meeting offered was personal relationships, and the conference-room format was not producing them.
How was the programme built?
The commercial agenda was not removed, it was repositioned. Only the first morning of the four days — 2.5 hours — was given to the commercial presentation; the rest moved along the route.
- Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Mardin were combined into one route. Transfers between cities were by road; the hours in the vehicle became the sections where the conversation that never happens in a conference room actually took place.
- Workshop and tasting sections ran in sub-groups of 20-25. A single group of 70 turns into an audience in that kind of session.
- Sub-group composition changed every day. Regional representatives spending time only with their own region would have defeated the purpose of the gathering.
Where were the regional managers placed?
Regional managers were distributed across the sub-groups rather than seated at a separate table. The management team clustering among themselves is the most common — and the most quickly noticed — mistake at dealer gatherings.
What was the result?
Most of the invited dealers attended in person this time instead of sending an employee; by the company's own record, attendance by dealer owners rose noticeably against the previous year.
What stood out in sales management's review afterwards was that although the commercial agenda had been delivered in less time, the number of questions and requests received in the following weeks went up.
What is the general lesson from this case?
At dealer gatherings the volume of content and its effect can work in inverse proportion. A meeting loses its value not when the commercial agenda is shortened, but when the time for relationships to form is eliminated.