My Personal Guide To Navigating Events & Conferences
The GTM Newsletter
It’s been a rough week for start-up land.
My heart goes out to anyone affected by the news out of Silicon Valley Bank.
SVB has been a great partner to the tech ecosystem for many years and I feel optimistic that they will find a resolution.
From what I’m hearing, there is likely two paths forward:
Apparently SVB is still trying to pull off a transaction: selling $1.3 billion in common stock, plus a $500 million stock sale to PE firm General Atlantic to take advantage of higher short-term interest rates, lock in funding costs, and enhance profitability.
Others are speculating that it more likely will get bought by Bank of America or JPMorgan by early next week.
+ all funds will be locked until at least Monday (according to regulators).
I’m not your best resource to talk about the ins and outs of this catastrophe or the cascading effects this will have (and it will have a lot unfortunately) but I will share some articles on this below.
👋 *distraction hands* 👋
Now flawlessly transitioning to some more positive news…
It’ll be conference season before we know it and hopefully this bank run is a distant memory by then.
Now, I’ve been to way too many events.
Name a SaaS conference and I’ve probably been there.
Likely twice, maybe three times.
I’ve been fortunate to always be the guy who people would send to events starting very early in my career.
The first event I ever went to was Content Marketing World in good ole Cleveland…I don’t think anyone has ever been so excited about going to Cleveland as I was back in the day.
That initial excitement of work travel wore off pretty quickly though.
As the Airmiles racked up, my patience for travel delays went down at an equally fast pace.
As the years progressed I not only attended lots of events but also helped plan multiple conferences, hosted 101 different executive dinners, generated millions in sponsorship revenue and was able to turn a lot of these event connections into cold hard ARR.
I’ve picked up a couple tips and tricks that I’ll share with you below.
Let’s get into it.
My Personal Guide For Navigating Conferences
Alright, let’s fly back in time to when I came up with two of my event hacks that have served me well over the years.
First one was back in 2016.
At that point I had only gone to a handful of events and I was still fairly junior in my career.
I started getting frustrated at a single point of failure.
I kept having really good conversation with a prospect, I’d make (what felt like) a strong connection, figure out they had a pain, they’d agree that they need a solution and then fast forward to post-event they would completely ghost my follow-up email.
Ugh, sound familiar?
Maybe I had bad breath or something but I tried not to take it personally and I decided to put myself in their shoes.
Most of them were busy execs and they likely had 367 different conversations with different people, vendors, colleagues, etc so why were they going to remember me?
I’m not the center of the universe, they all have ten different competing priorities going on in their head at any given time.
This wasn’t a “them” problem, it was a “me” problem and I needed to change my approach.
Here’s what I came up with that changed my post-event response rate from sub 40% to over 90%.
It’s shockingly simple and was inspired by the quote:
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
So right at the time where we seemed to be really vibing and they were nodding that they definitely needed a solution to their problem, one that I could provide, I would stop them and say:
“Sorry, can I just stop you there for a second? It sounds like there’s a great fit here. Now this is going to sound weird but you’re going to get a thousand follow ups after this conference and I want to make sure we don’t get lost in the shuffle.
So when I send my follow-up email, I’m going to put something weird like “BLUE MONKEY” in all caps in the subject line and then when you see that “BLUE MONKEY” in your inbox, it’s going to transport you right back to this conversation, this feeling and you’ll remember this.
I know it’s strange but I think it’ll make sure that we find the time to reconnect on this - that work?”
*tone is important here*
Usually they would laugh, give me a bit of a funny look and then agree that it sounded like a reasonable plan.
And then when I got back to my hotel room that night, I would send out that email right away with BLUE MONKEY in the subject line and beat most of the other folks who wait until after the conference to follow-up.
Nine times out of ten they would respond back right away with their calendar link or loop in their EA.
Now I’m not giving you permission to use BLUE MONKEY, that’s still mine.
But I am giving you permission to make up your own weird pattern disrupt word for your next conference - I hope it works as well for you as it has for me.
🔵🐒
Alright, now we’re flying forward a few years to 2019. I’m now much more comfortable at conferences and events. I’ve already gone to too many to count over the last 3 years.
But there was a problem..
There was still always these invite-only parties at Dreamforce, SaaStr, etc that were tough to get into.
Sometimes I’d get an invite, sometimes I wouldn’t.
But typically all of the people that I really wanted to talk to were at these invite-only events so I needed to find a way to get in.
So I pulled out something from my bag of tricks that I had used when I was younger to get me into sold out DJ shows.
Warning: the ethics here are a little questionable, use at your own risk. I also don’t think I have the confidence to pull this off anymore but I was a younger, slightly dumber, bolder man back then.
The approach was pretty simple.
Google and find out who was the sponsoring company of the event.
Google who the CEO was (or slightly lower C-suite exec if the company was too big for it to be believable).
Change my friend’s phone number to that person’s name.
Have them send me a note that says “Hey man - I’m tied up right now so I won’t be able to come grab you but just show them this text and they should let you in. Cya soon.”
Walk to the front of the line (extremely confidently) and say you were added late to the guest list late and show them the text.
Keep eye contact, they’ll usually show a colleague, the colleague will look confused but then nod and wave you in.
Now you’re in - go build your network.
Again, I’m not condoning this approach but when times are tough, you gotta do what you gotta do to hit those revenue goals.
Morgan Ingram can attest to this working, he’s been there in the past when I’ve pulled this off successfully.
📈 How to take action/learnings:
Use pattern disrupts to make sure that people remember you at events.
Most of the good networking happens at invite-only events that happen around the conference, not at the conference itself. Find ways to get an invite or use the ‘third door’ to get in if you have to.
Bonus: always go to conferences/events with a buddy/colleague, early in my career I found it much less daunting when I had someone with me.
Right after Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach, we had Outreach’s big Unleash conference coming up in just a few months.
And being the Sales Hacker guys who were known for throwing events, we were tasked with planning it as soon as possible.
First we needed to figure out a budget.
We looked at the last year’s budget and the conference was a big cost center (hundreds of thousands) that ate up a lot of the overall marketing budget.
Hmmm.
Well we used to run conferences for a profit in the SH days so why couldn’t we use the same principles and apply them here?
I put a stake in the ground and said that I thought I could make it profitable (or at the very least break even).
We were going to work super hard to get 2500 GTM professionals down in San Diego for 3 days. And these were super valuable connections, not only for us but also for our ecosystem partners.
Back then, the sales tech ecosystem was much more fragmented and most vendors were focused on 1-2 specific problems that their solution could fix.
In other words, everyone was still playing nicely together in the sandbox. Why not approach 20-30 other sales tech vendors and let them sponsor a booth? Dreamforce had been doing it for years.
That way we could spread out the event costs, help our ecosystem partner hit their pipeline goals and have them help promote the events. Everybody wins.
We ended up pulling in 1.4M in sponsorship revenue, doubled the size of the event and spared no expense. This event ended up being one of our biggest pipeline drivers of the year and with sponsorship revenue, it didn’t end up costing us a cent.
Oh, and all our partners were super happy with how it turned out.
Lesson: If you’re going to go to all the trouble of planning an event and driving attendance, make sure you loop in partners. It’s an easy way to offset costs and when done well, it can be a big win-win for all.
💰
Alright, let’s look at this from another angle as well.
As someone who has sold close to 10M in sponsorship sales over the course of my career - I’ll let you in on some secrets.
Event sponsorships always end up eating up a big portion of marketing budgets. They aren’t cheap.
Here are a few ways you can get the best price/value on event sponsorship:
There is wiggle room to negotiate. It’s a simple game of supply/demand. The actual cost for the seller is fairly minimal, the cost is based on how much value (pipeline) they know that this event will drive for you. But if demand for sponsorship is low then the cost will start to drop fairly dramatically.
Ask for an early bird discount. Whoever is selling sponsorships wants to flaunt the fact that a lot of great orgs are already signed up so if you agree to sign early and let them use your logo - you should be able to ask for a healthy 25% discount.
Customize your booth and experience. If demand is high and they won’t budge on pricing, you still have room to tack on more value. Asking for extra activations (photo booth, happy hour, swag, etc) is usually an easy give for the seller. They should have suppliers that are fairly cheap that they use that they will throw in to keep the list price.
Wait until the last minute. Now, of course, this one is risky. You run the risk of missing out on the event so don’t use this one if it’s a Marquee event for you BUT if you wait until the last few weeks before an event is going to launch, you can usually get a steep discount. Either they have extra inventory (booth space) that will go unused in which case even $1 is better than $0. Or they can add extra booth space which is a fairly nominal cost for them and any money above and beyond cost is just pure profit that they wouldn’t have captured so why not give a discount? Use this to your advantage.
A little behind the scenes action for you from both sides of the sponsorship aisle.
📈 How to take action/learnings:
Loop in partners for any size of event to offset marketing costs through sponsorship and make it a win-win for all.
Make sure you negotiate your event sponsorships. Go for an early bird discount, ask for extra custom experiences or wait until the last minute to sign the agreement.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
You can read the latest on what’s going on at SVB in this article…or just flip open Twitter.
A couple more plays that we ran successfully at Outreach:
I worked with Andrew Mewborn for 4 years and he’s one of the kindest, sharpest guys you’ll ever meet. Oh, and he’s built and incredible brand on LinkedIn and now shares that knowledge with others. If you’re interested in growing your digital presence, I’d recommend you check out his Brand30 digital course (not affiliated in any way).
👂 More for your eardrums:
Mark Stephenson, former COO at Evisort and I chat about getting cross-functional alignment within your team, the leading metrics every revenue leader should focus on and the 5 layers of a modern rev. org.
Max Altschuler and I riff on generational evolution in the workplace, if alcohol should be banned from work events, the importance of writing/creativity and our hot takes on the wider VC and GTM landscape.
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
Huge congrats to the team at Arrows. Arrows provides easy to adopt onboarding plans with shared tasks, work flows and reminders. This helps your customers take action on the tasks you need them to complete during the most critical time in their journey.
Houseware gives functional teams access to cross-functional data for themselves, rather than having to rely on data teams to generate reports/insights. Lead with data, win more deals and protect your customer base. Keep an eye on them!
🔥Hottest GTM job of the week:
Senior Enterprise Growth Marketing Manager at Crossbeam, more details here.
See more top GTM jobs here.
Diversify your banking and stay safe out there my friends.
And thank you for the support every week, at this rate we’re going to hit 10k subscribers in no time.
Appreciate all of you who are sharing this with your friends/colleagues or on social. It doesn’t go unnoticed.
Have a great weekend.
Barker✌️