How to Get Time on Your Side

In enterprise organizations, it’s never a single person in procurement who’s the decision maker—especially when it comes to SaaS solutions that have the potential to impact the global supply chain. For veteran corporate marketing director Nourhan Beyrouti, this is one reason why events are imperative. 

“These kinds of products are not Canva or things you can sign up for with a credit card,” Beyrouti offers. “Events are an opportunity to sit down with a key customer, discuss efficiency gaps, and explain the product.” 

Beyrouti has worked in marketing for over two decades, most recently as the senior director of corporate marketing and brand at e-commerce OXM platform Delivery Solutions. While there, Beyrouti championed technology that freed his team to focus on the finer, more nuanced aspects of relationship building. 

For events, this meant targeting the right contacts and sharing relevant information ahead of time to set the stage for productive in-person conversations. The perennial challenge is in doing the necessary due diligence at scale, given that most conferences usually don’t release their attendee lists until days before guests arrive. 

“We know these people. We know their contact details. We just don’t know which events they’re going to,”

Beyrouti says of the ordinary state of affairs. But by taking advantage of Vendelux’s capabilities—namely, the ability to see if prospects are predicted or confirmed at a conference months in advance—he’s found a way to transform a universal handicap into a differentiating asset. 

“We all know that time is the most expensive commodity,” Beyrouti says definitively. “If you have a head start knowing that these groups of people are going, you hyper-personalize your outreach to them.” 

Nowhere has Beyrouti seen greater returns on Vendelux’s technology than at March’s Shoptalk meetup in Las Vegas, where he leveraged the platform to draft communications that resulted in 16 confirmed meetings and another 60 visits to Delivery Solutions’ booth. 

Crucially, Beyrouti organized sessions with multiple stakeholders at single companies to preempt future games of telephone. He describes the scene and the impression it left on contacts:

“We have somebody from warehousing, we have somebody from distribution, we have another person from last mile and e-commerce all sitting together and, they’re saying, ‘Oh wow, you knew who to invite! The conversations went extremely well because they were not generic,” Beyrouti continues. “They were personalized based on products, services, and what the current state was.”

Beyond a talk-track, Beyrouti notes that his team arrived on-site with stats, graphs, and background information because having the right people assembled is only one part of the equation.  

To give shape, substance, and weight to conversations, it’s necessary to do some homework. With Delivery Solutions, Beyrouti put himself in the place of customers, shopping for products online and seeing firsthand what type of delivery services were available.

“If they already have same-day delivery, we’re not going to sell them same-day delivery,” he explains. “We approach them with another product line or hub and move on from there—organic scaling is key.” 

Despite the fact that this type of information is public and readily available, it could easily be overlooked in the scramble to prepare for a mega conference like Shoptalk.

“Just a small amount of predicted or confirmed information is essential to us so we can craft messaging around a relevant and in-demand product that they need,” Beyrouti attests. 

As his success at Shoptalk and other events proves, even a teaspoon’s amount of added intel can result in interactions that are ever more “precise and surgical”—as Beyrouti puts it—if placed in the right hands.