When the show opened, rather than a Cerner logo, the booth was headlined with client logos arranged in simple letters spelling the word “Cerner.” The traditional blue Cerner shirts that staff usually wore to shows were not to be found. In fact, clients were encouraged to wear their own company shirts or lab coats, displaying their logos instead of Cerner’s.
Graphics in the booth tied in with a Cerner ad campaign in the show newsletter. The ad on the first day asked, “Who is Running Booth 2813?” with client logos surrounding the text in the ad. On the second and third days, Cerner ran ads with large text reading “All Together, Booth 2813,” again with the clients’ logos. On the fourth day of the show, the ad read, “How Cerner Works,” with the clients’ logos making up the word “Cerner,” similar to the
in-booth signage.
While Cerner tried to create an air of mystery around booth 2813, it also took steps to fill its booth with potential converts. To make sure each of its evangelists had an audience, Cerner hired staff to stand near the bus stop outside the convention center, where attendees disembarked to enter the venue, wearing T-shirts with one letter on each shirt that spelled out “All Together.” Neither the shirts nor the staff mentioned Cerner; rather, staff told attendees to visit booth 2813 as they handed out buttons with the “All Together” tagline.
Once in the booth, attendees found four 12-by-13-foot presentation theaters along the front of the exhibit, where client groups were given space to present their demonstrations.
The large theaters were so popular, Carlew says, that visitors grabbed benches from the aisles to create more seating at one of the demonstrations.
Beyond the four large theaters, 36 stations offered individual client demonstrations. Physically and literally reinforcing the let’s-put-our-clients-front-and-center strategy, Cerner’s sales staff was limited to the back third of the booth.
The client evangelists typically gave presentations of 25 to 40 minutes, followed by a question-and-answer session that rounded out each hour before the litany began again. Each evangelist devoted a whole day to his or her station as part of the agreement with Cerner.
“We wanted this to be from the heart, so we didn’t script them,” Wilder says. “If they got questions about Cerner they couldn’t answer, then they’d send the question to one of our staff.”
Converting the Masses
“To subjugate your own brand and place customers above yourself must have required some incredible sell-in internally,” notes one All-Star Awards judge. “This demonstrates outstanding creativity and understanding of the target audience and the brand’s place within the market.”
While Carlew admits that the strategy was a leap of faith, she says the key was having faith in Cerner’s offerings. “Clients will tell visitors the good and the bad — what they like and what they don’t like. So you have to be confident that the good will outweigh the bad.”
Letting the evangelists spread Cerner’s gospel may have started as a leap of faith, but it turned into a godsend. With a goal of increasing its leads by 15 percent, Cerner saw a 22-percent jump over the 2005 HIMSS show. But the real boon came in the quality of those leads.
“We measured our success not by the type of visitor, but the quality of the conversation,” Carlew says. “Attendees spoke to someone like them. The peer-to-peer interaction — doctors talking shop — meant they spent more time discussing details than they had with our staff in past exhibits. As a result, the sales process was farther along than before. That’s the value of putting a prospective client with an existing client.”
In the end, Cerner’s customer-centric strategy sent a powerful message that couldn’t be matched by its competitors, proving the value of evangelism, and the potential payoff of a leap of faith. e
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estify! Give witness! Tell your brothers and sisters how you have been saved!
their own products.
