I joined DataBlend at the end of 2022 to start growing our EMEA presence, and most of my time I’ve been doing that by building up our partner network and engaging with customers through that route.
But by the end of 2023 we knew we were ready to start a bit more direct outreach to the market, and when my CEO, David Furth, asked me what show I thought was the best place for us to make our debut, there was only really one answer: Accountex in London!
We booked our stand and immediately the work began. I’ve manned many stands at shows in my time, but this is the first one that I’ve been fully involved in the organising. Turns out there’s a lot to do, and a huge thanks to our Marketing Director, Kate Johnson, for her infinite talent for designing our stand, materials, and social posts – and her infinite patience for my continued revisions to those (mostly resulting from my mistakes!).
And before we knew it, the week arrived. I headed in the day before opening to sign off our stand (a huge thanks to Mercer Exhibitions for a fantastic job!) and meet up with David who flew in from New York City that morning. If you’ve never been around during set up of an event like Accountex, it’s certainly something! The amount of people and goods moving in and out in such a short space of time is a huge challenge and the Accountex team do a great job coordinating.
And then the big day arrived. It is massive! Even David, who has a long and storied history attending huge conferences in Las Vegas, couldn’t believe the scale of Accountex. “Does it ever stop?” he asked. And the answer is: absolutely not!
We had a fantastic time meeting finance and accounting professionals, lots of those in practice of course, plenty in industry, and a good few from other software companies. And handing out DataBlend mints and Kate’s secret weapon: accounting pun badges.
It was also fantastic for me personally to meet in real life so many people that I’ve only had the chance to speak to over Teams or Zoom in my time at DataBlend.
The show is a brilliant opportunity for us exhibitors to network with each other too. Lots of DataBlend partners were in attendance for us to catch up with, but we also met with a lot of new potential partners that we’ll enjoy speaking with in the coming weeks.
We were privileged throughout the conference to have many attendees actively seek us out, having read about what we do in the show guide. And I’m looking forward to all those conversations to come, and lots of use cases where DataBlend might help:
- Lots of people are struggling with an old on-premise system that they’re staying with for a while, but have issue connecting to their other systems in the cloud.
Practice management systems needing to speak to other systems came up constantly, no surprise there! - So many acquisitions in the accounting firm space mean a lot of conversations about: how can we get all these different GLs to give us the consistent data that we need?
- Reporting came up many times – I need the data from all these systems in one place, and it’s taking too long!
Overall DataBlend had a great time at Accountex – but after two days standing on the show floor, we were definitely glad to sit down. Thanks to all who came to see us!
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