While virtual meetings and digital collateral keep us connected, personal engagement remains our single most effective way to grow JMP's business, build deep trust, and expand our community.
To make in-person connections easier, more frequent, and highly effective across the globe, JMP Leadership, in coordination with Global Marketing, Global Sales, and Field Marketing launched the Discovery Seminar program in 2025.
Discovery Seminars are designed to be easy to host, consistent in quality, and high-impact for our pipeline. By keeping execution lean and focusing on authentic human connections, we can expand JMP’s reach across the scientific and engineering communities!
Why are we doing this?
JMP sales and technical teams need opportunities to sit in the same room as scientists, engineers, and decision-makers to discuss real-world challenges and outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have become increasingly hesitant or restricted about hosting external vendors on-site.
By hosting events anywhere in the world where scientists and engineers are concentrated, we can spread awareness, expand existing accounts, and acquire new logos.
What is (and isn't) a Discovery Seminar?
Discovery Seminars are lean, repeatable, and agile regional events designed to showcase the value and possibilities of JMP analytics in an enjoyable, collaborative atmosphere.
Discovery Seminars are:
- Bringing scientists and engineers together in local tech hubs or campuses.
- Built on standardized core topics to maximize reuse of marketing and presentation content.
- Demonstrating real-world ROI, expanding views, and instilling confidence.
- Enjoyable events that reflect JMP's unique, collaborative culture. These events give local JMP staff opportunities to connect and build relationships through a shared meal or social activity before or after the seminar.
Discovery Seminars are NOT:
- Deep, hands-on instructional sessions. Save those for User Enablement.
- Broad community user group meetings. We have dedicated forums and Discovery Summits for this purpose.
- Forums for external thought-leader speakers.
- Narrowly focused talks. These events should be broadly applicable to reach a wide analytics audience.
How to execute (hint: be lean, agile, and effective)
The primary risk of any event program is spending time and budget on efforts that don’t turn into meaningful customer conversations. To ensure high ROI and keep team workload manageable, Field Marketing selects smart, accessible, and budget-friendly locations such as science parks, technology hubs, university campuses, or local SAS offices. Events must also fit one of four standardized topics. Reusing promotional copy, event descriptions, and slides, as well as limiting customization, ensures brand quality and drastically reduces prep time.
Any non-standard format requires executive approval and evaluation against principles of efficiency, scalability, and impact.
Clear roles for big impact
Success comes from clear ownership before, during, and after each event:
- Field Marketing owns venue selection, logistics, promotional campaigns, registration, and administrative oversight.
- Sales Teams (AEs, ISRs, and SEs) drive event success by targeting the right audience, driving registrations, and ensuring target customers attend.
- Event host (usually an AE) sets the tone, facilitates discussion, encourages networking, and closes the event with a firm call to action to secure follow-up commitments.
- Systems Engineers (SEs) deliver brief, relevant, impactful presentations that focus on case studies, real-world value, and long-term partnership rather than complex feature overviews.
How we measure success
To wrap up these events, we track key engagement and conversion metrics like registrations, attendee mix, Salesforce sales interactions, follow-up meetings, and resulting pipeline to ensure every seminar delivers measurable business impact.
To ensure our time and energy investment pays off, we track event outcomes across every seminar. By monitoring total attendance, the mix of new vs. existing users, logged sales conversations in Salesforce, and follow-up site visits, we maintain clear visibility into our ROI and pipeline growth. Following each event, local teams conduct a quick debrief to log best practices, refine our strategy, and keep building momentum for future seminars worldwide.
If you have questions about Discovery Seminars, please contact Phil Kay (@Phil_Kay).
