Today we got some evidence that the full-on Get Engaged engine works.

BEI had over 55 people attend their event on Exchange 2007, Vista, and Office 2007! It was literally standing room only.

What I saw today is that when all of the pieces of the puzzle come together, it just works!

Here's what they did.

• Enough lead time.
  • We've talked about the runway for a while. With 2.5 months of driving attendance, commitment to the Shark Tank Blitz, and numerous other efforts very frequently (see Seth Godin's post on this here), they had a HUGE registration number (over 75) and an enormous conversion rate
    
• Smart targeting
  • BEI took our suggestion about the location for the event (Silver Spring) based on data mining and used our list to augment their own efforts. (About 20% of the attendees were net new off of the MS target list)
    
• Leveraged www.microsoftpartnerevents.com
  • BEI took full advantage of the MPE team to help with the logisitcal and administrative efforts associated with managing an event. They used www.clicktoattend.com to handle registrations as well. 
    
• Had a Microsoft presenter
  • BEI didn't even have to present. We helped them find a qualified Microsoft Across America presenter to show the tools and engage the audience. BEI could focus on follow-up, facilitating networking, and building trust as an advisor (and a close ally to Microsoft)
    
• Took advantage of offers
• They had signed up early enough to receive a full complement of Office 2007 Beta 2 DVD's and Vista RC1 DVD's to hand out to customers (plus some nice giveaways)
  
• Utlized Best Practices
• BEI has made every single one of our bi-monthly Event Prep calls. They took some of the suggestions they heard on the call and implemented them (e.g. a pre-event piece of paper that asks "what do you expect from the event?" which they shared with the presenter)

 It's just great to see all of this come together. GREAT WORK Ellen, Mike, Matt and Team BEI!!