When COVID hit in early 2020, there was a period of time in which people thought that conventional human interactions involving physical proximity – handshakes with strangers, cheek-to-jowl networking events – would never again resurface. And then COVID ebbed, and as soon as possible people started high-fiving, hugging and scream-chatting with nearby strangers at bars, sporting events and yes, conferences.

We’re human! We like to be around other humans!

I bring this up in the context of a very important, and increasingly essential, channel for lead generation and awareness for startups: conferences. Whether it’s BSides, an intimate annual conference for information security professionals, or Money2020, an annual finance bacchanal in Vegas involving thirty thousand people, conferences are an essential ingredient in business building for the sheer truth that human beings like learning from, interacting with, dining and drinking with and yes, being sold to – at conferences.

But when a founder is thinking about their time, and the opportunity cost of (1) flying, (2) getting a rental car, (3) checking into a hotel and (4) standing around a giant room with poster boards and gimmicky booths, they can understandably hesitate at the prospect of doing so. But we are here to say: don’t think twice, book the flight, go to the conference. You will learn a lot, meet a lot of people, and develop a better sense of your market and how to break into it, from a conference than you will in almost any other setting. Conferences are an essential part of any early-stage founder’s commercial efforts.

The Importance of Learn Before Earn

Part of the reason some folks are hesitant to attend conferences is they don’t want to spin up a large amount of effort that can feel wasted – creating materials for a booth, lugging big signage and external monitors to demo a product to a conference floor. But during the early phase of your company-building journey, very little of that stuff is required in order to get value out of a conference.

Which begs the question: what are you looking to get out of attending a conference?

• P1 - Sales meetings (early design partners or commercial prospects)
• P2 - Market intelligence (competitive intel, brand positioning benchmarking); a deeper knowledge of the industry you exist in and the potential customers you sell into

I am tempted almost to flip the priorities of the above – for of course, without a good understanding of P2, you won’t be very effective at P1. For instance, the founder of Norm.ai, which sells into the marketing organizations of regulated financial institutions to (among other use cases leveraging their regulatory AI platform) utilize AI to enable scaled, compliant marketing, told me that it’s important their salespeople describe their end users on business teams at firms with institutional clients as “IR” (Investor Relations) rather than “marketing.” The use of the latter phrase in a sales context with an institutional firm immediately diminishes the legitimacy of the speaker in the eyes of the prospect.

That’s just one example of the dozens of micro-moments that build (or destroy) the credibility of a seller into an industry, and conferences are a great place to learn all the context required to seamlessly operate. To analogize with AI (of course!), conferences are the training data upon which the foundation model of the sales engine is built; the inference is the better output your salespeople use – specific words, phrases, proper nouns, acronyms and people – that improve their credibility to their prospects.

But the first priority is meeting prospects and building a pipeline; ABC, amirite?

Andrew Lockhart, CEO and co-founder of Fathom.ai, agrees that conferences are critical for early-stage founders to learn about their industries. “The thing about conferences is they’re filled with vendors, salespeople – and salespeople love to talk. Early on in the company, I was able to go to a conference, and in two days of conversations get a comprehensive picture of many of the incumbent vendors – an almost a bottoms-up analysis of how the industry is structured. And all I was doing was chatting, asking questions and people were happy to share information.”

Founders often correctly engage in voluminous amounts of cold outbound emailing, to land potential design partners or even early customer prospects. One of the hardest parts of this effort is justifying the “why now” of the email or LInkedIn message. Many people try to solve this by referencing something the prospect company announced recently (”Congratulations on your recent quarterly earnings update!”). But a simple and effective “way in” is simply asking to meet in person at an event the email recipient is likely to be attending – the next industry-appropriate conference.

Of course, you won’t know if someone is planning to attend an upcoming conference, so your email is an excuse to ask, and set up a meeting. “Attending StyrofoamCon in Key West in November” is a reasonable subject line – the person can answer yes, and then you have an in to set up a meeting.

Additionally, conferences often have attendee lists they’re willing to share to participants or sponsors. And even if they don’t have that, they have a programming schedule, which you can use to map out senior prospects and make sure you make a good impression.

As Mike, head of partnerships for Contextual says, “do your pre-work, use the conference app to pick a handful of sessions that have speakers from your prospect accounts. Attend the session, take notes and after the session approach them, introduce yourself and ask a few thoughtful questions. We were able to connect with EVPs and SVPs from the largest FinServ companies in the world using this strategy, and they all asked for follow-up meetings. Heck, it even worked for the Chair of the SEC.”

The Satellite Conference

Most conference organizers try to set things up so attendees must purchase passes to get the value of the conference. But the operative word is try – no one can stop an enterprising founder from booking the back half of a Chili’s a block away from the convention center and using that as their home base to rapid-fire meet with their prospects.

I just spent some time at Money2020, and in addition to never feeling more generic as the four-thousandth white guy with a blue button down shirt tucked into jeans, I was amazed by the orchestration of so many client meetings in every nook and cranny of available restaurant space adjacent to the conference floor. (I’m told M2020 is moving out of the Venetian in 2026, into the Las Vegas Convention Center, precisely to crack down on these sorts of satellite spaces.)

So, if you are trying to meet as many people as possible, rent a private room in a restaurant nearby, and tell all your prospects to come for the bloomin’ onion and stay for the innovative technology.

As Rishabh Jain, CEO of Fermat Commerce tells it, you want to “throw side events that are very cool…for example, at ShopTalk we held a Nobu happy hour that was incredible and lots of folks came through. The key is driving scarcity and awareness to the event so people prioritize it over other options - we had a 60 person cap in our case – and it was way oversubscribed.” A Chili’s this is not!

Lockhart of Fathom echoes the ability for a founder to do this on the cheap, even before you’re in Nobu territory. “You don’t need a big booth, or even a hotel room on site. For Vegas conferences, just get an off-strip hotel room for $60, put on a nice suit with some branded swag (I have Fathom sneakers I like to wear), and you can get plenty far without spending much.”

During the Day: Many Quick Meetings

Humans trust other humans with whom they have met. So use the conference as the opportunity to meet and have an ‘intro’ conversation with as many people as possible. Schedule half-hour meetings back-to-back, in which you can cover a few basics with the prospect or design partner:

1. What they do within their organization. (Discovery.)
2. Why you’re building your company and product.
3. How your product could be useful for them.
4. Next steps to evaluate a potential joint future.

Thirty minutes, especially in person, is enough time to cover all four of these and assess whether there’s a reason to move forward with another commercial conversation. With an hour for lunch, and a thirty minute email / bathroom break in the morning and afternoon, that will allow you at least twelve meetings from 9-5 on the conference days.

And to quote the wellness gurus of today – be present. When you are meeting with these folks, look them in the eyes, put your phone away, and give them as much of your attention as you can muster. So many people at conferences develop “FOMO brain,” in which there is so much stimulation that they can feel like they are missing out on the next conversation, or email or slack from their own team. So they spend most of their in-person time checking their phone. Don’t do this! Be the founder ‘above’ with the presence of mind and zen to really embrace this in person moment with the person you’re meeting with. If you do so, you will stand out.

You should also empower your team, if attending a conference with you, to have the right talking points prepared, and consider even developing cheat sheets for them to make sure they are all saying the right things to the right people.

For example, Northflank’s COO, Chase Roberts, creates a doc for each conference, to make sure his evangelists (including both engineers and AEs) have the right spiel memorized so they can very quickly recite it, without meandering or editorial digressions, when a conversation requires it. The doc includes specific talking points based on the role of the audience, discovery questions (”conference openers”) and objection handling.

At Night: Go from Shoptalk to Real Talk

Be prepared to drink a lot of coffee, because the real networking at the conference starts in the evening. That’s when everyone who’s traveled from afar to see business partners and friends alike let their guard down, throw back the free pinot grigio and cut loose. Well, at least they gossip about the industry and tell you what they really think. You should consider five p.m. “halftime” for your day at the conference. Eat a big snack (or an early dinner), have some more coffee or a diet coke, and get ready to have another set of meetings, these far more “off the record” and valuable.

It can be tempting to have a lot of conversations at night, just as you did during the day, but I would advise trying to have 3-4 meaningful chats in which you really break down to the “second level” of interpersonal dynamic. That’s because most people don’t remember much about the quick, surface-level cocktail party conversation, but they will remember when you listen to their concerns about their recent reorg, or their kid’s struggles with third grade.

And don’t hesitate to meander around the conference area to see where the real conversations are happening. Allison Braley, marketing partner at BCV, shares her experience: “It was the night before ACOG [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists] and I stopped into the hotel pool area for a dip. About 12 OBGYNs, a key sales target for us, were in a hot tub. I sat there eavesdropping for a while and learned a ton of intel just from that, and then was able to talk about life more generally before sneaking in a question about how they thought about our product and the overall space. By the end I had several new leads and a better sense of how to market to that audience.”

Sponsor (Smartly)

You need not be a sponsor of a conference to get value out of it. But if you’re getting to be a larger company and have the marketing budget to spend, one good trick is to convince the organizers to let you sponsor the conference wifi. That way your homepage is opened by every single person going online there, and you can then retarget those folks to your heart’s content. Steer clear of being featured in the brochure, or the conference app – which many people don’t bother downloading anyway.

Brag with Swag (That They Can Drag Home)

In addition to enjoying the company of near strangers in air-conditioned conference halls, human beings like free stuff. Socks, water bottles, pens, notebooks, t-shirts, golf tees, beer coozies, all can be brightly colored with your company’s logo to create a positive brand association in the mind of the swag recipient.

But swag abounds. How can you be unique if everyone has socks?

First, think about your target audience. What sorts of things would they actually like? From your conversations with prospects and design partners, there are likely nuggets of cultural wisdom appropriate to your partners that you can utilize as you consider what to bulk order – spend some time really nailing the inside joke, or the meme of the industry, that will make your swag stand out.

Second, think small. Most people flew to get there, so things like glassware, or mugs, may not travel as easily.

For example, Sophia Goldberg, the CEO of Ansa, encourages thinking carefully about brand association, alongside convenience, when picking swag. “Socks are awesome, but everyone has socks. We do scrunchies, because they’re “closed loop” [Ansa is a closed-loop payments platform], and even if people don’t have long hair, most people have someone with long hair in their life. And they’re cheap!” Ansa also hosts a pop-up donut shop at conferences – again, closed loop – and Goldberg counsels that whimsy is often the way to go: “conferences are dull, we’re all tired, [we do this] to have an excuse to do something fun!”

Lastly, consider a two-pronged swag strategy: low volume, high quality and vice-versa. The former are for all the folks you have meetings with – delight them with a cashmere pullover with your brand name tastefully emblazoned, via Quince. For the hoi polloi, go with the beer coozies – but maybe a zip-up bottle coozie instead of a more generic can one.

Carpe Conference

While the opportunity cost of attending a conference may seem high for a founder given their myriad responsibilities, in fact conferences are among the time best spent in the early company building journey. No other opportunity offers a more concentrated group of prospects, who are ready to be sold to, as well as a wealth of nuanced information to help you craft your messaging and positioning in-market.

You don’t have to sponsor and send an army – just go with one other person from your company, line up a number of meetings, wear clothes and bring swag that is memorable – and definitely approach that conference as a concentrated learning and selling opportunity.