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About Netafim
Netafim is the global leader in precision irrigation for a sustainable future. With 29 subsidiaries, 17 manufacturing plants and 4,500 employees worldwide, Netafim delivers innovative, tailor-made solutions to millions of farmers, from smallholders to large-scale agricultural producers, in over 110 countries. Founded in 1965, Netafim pioneered the drip revolution, creating a paradigm shift toward precision irrigation. Today, Netafim provides diverse precision irrigation solutions for agriculture, greenhouses, landscaping and mining, accompanied by expert agronomic, technical and operational support. Netafim is also leading the way in digital farming for irrigation, integrating monitoring, analysis and automation into one state-of-the-art system. Specializing in end-to-end solutions from the water source to the root zone, Netafim delivers turnkey irrigation and greenhouse projects, supported by engineering, project management and financing services. For more information visit www.netafim.com
The Challenge
Netafim’s corporate marketing team was gearing up for Agritech 2018 , one of the most important trade shows and conferences in their field that takes place once every three years in Israel.
Netafim considers Agritech an important platform for maintaining and strengthening its leadership position, to host official delegations from various countries and launch new products and offerings.
Their goals for this event were defined as follows:
- Sustaining and strengthening Netafim’s position as an industry and innovation leader
- Successfully launching NetBeat, Netafim’s new digital farming product, which is planned to serve as one of their flagship products in the near future
- Identifying new, meaningful business opportunities
Agritech, with its attached conference, multiple events and satellite activities, is an important strategic event for Netafim, making the preparation work extremely time consuming and complicated to execute.
G2M Team was contracted to serve as a key player in the project team, taking responsibility and ownership of several event-related areas of activities, serving as a force multiplier to the Netafim’s internal marketing team.
What did we do ?
As mentioned above we took ownership of several areas for Agritech:
Event concept and ideation
We started with understanding the company’s values and unique sales proposition as well as on conducted a thorough marketing-focused competitive analysis.
We got the initial brief for the high-level goals for the event and conducted internal brainstorm sessions at G2M TEAM. We then presented several directions for the overall event concept, theme and message box. The selected theme and messages later on affected many other aspects of the event (booth, content, in-booth materials, graphics and more).
Booth design, production and management
We prepared the brief document for the booth design and production work and sent it to selected booth design and production companies. We then managed the vendor selection process together with Netafim. This included answering questions from the competing companies, running intro meetings, getting proposals, participating in internal discussions with the Netafim team and more.
Once a vendor was selected, we worked closely with their team on the full management of the booth design, planning, graphics, buildup, etc.
We also managed the booth-related logistics and operations, from identifying the right vendors and defining needs to getting proposals, participating in negotiations, handling invoices, and managing all communications. We also managed the logistical and operational aspects of the booth on-site. This included booth cleaning, hostesses, AV, catering, security, and more.
We defined the non-Netafim personnel needs for the booth, contracted people accordingly (baristas, service people for food and beverage, hostesses), and managed them on-site.
We also contracted all infrastructure related services (water and drainage, electricity, Internet) and managed them on-site as well. In addition, we were the main point of contact with the event organizers ( Kenes exhibitions ) around areas like set up times, badges and registration, parking permits, special requests, etc.
When needed, we served as the liaison between the Netafim team and various relevant vendors, helping push innovative, out-of-the-box solutions for specific problems and challenges that came up. For example, we helped find a solution for on-site lead capture . The challenge was to provide the sales team with an easy to use, digital interface to fill in lead information on-site and avoid duplications by automatically bringing up already existing information in Marketo (Netafim’s CRM and marketing automation system). We also needed to address the technical issue of connectivity as we know from past experience that WiFi at events tends to be extremely unstable and unreliable. To solve this issue, we brought in tablets with data SIM cards. We also advised the lead management manager and the marketing automation implementation vendor on the structure of the form and the design of the on-site lead capture flow.
NetBeat launch event at the booth
As mentioned, the plan was to globally launch NetBeat , Netafim’s digital farming product and its flagship product for the next few years. G2M TEAM fully planned the event, from A to Z, including building the event timeline, writing the suggested texts for speakers on-stage, and looking for appropriate entertainment options that would creatively communicate the benefits and concept behind NetBeat. We decided to work with Lions of Zion for this purpose and they provided an extremely successful and to-the-point performance.
We also managed all production and logistics related to the event including text for invitations, setting up and managing the RSVP mechanism, catering, serving staff during the event, AV and stage requirements, general rehearsal schedule, fencing of booth during event time, etc.
On-site meetings
Such a complex and large event requires a lot of Netafim people from all over the world to attend, man the booth and manage pre-scheduled meetings to drive new business opportunities and cultivate existing ones. We researched options for meeting scheduling platforms that would help Netafim schedule meetings at the event. The platform needed to enable many people, from different locations, to schedule meetings with additional people, internal and external to Netafim, in one of the booth’s four meeting rooms, without double bookings. Eventually, we recommended going with the familiar outlook solution, but designed the desired flow, which was implemented by Netafim’s IT team.
Summary
The event was highly successful for Netafim, leaving no doubt in the industry who the market and innovation leader is. The buzz around the successful NetBeat launch event was enormous, getting the product launch off to a great start. Also, dozens of meetings held during the event show great promise of new business opportunities. G2M Team managed to successfully meet Netafim’s expectations and serve as the force multiplier and partner they were looking for in their work on this complex project.
