I am a software professional and a serial entrepreneur focused on saas startups and scale-ups these days. That comes with a lot of business development before you begin the fine art of delivering large-scale programs and projects.
I like trade shows that work and I hate the boring ones. After working them for more than 30 years, I have some ideas on how to make conferences and business events work for you and your company.
These ideas have been learned at enterprise software and industry B2B conferences so I am not sure if things transport across to other business models. Overall, the idea is to move to use modern tools to be active and not passive at a show — it is not there to serve you, you are there to make things happen and help develop a network effect of your own with the rest of your company.
The work wants everything “on-demand” and “real-time” — that is what I try to do at conferences… it takes prep and after that, it’s all execution. I call it “real-time” business development.
If your job is Biz Dev and you are at a targeted conference… Some things I do and I think you should do too:
- Study the agenda and the sponsors & who will be speaking.
- Go see the keynote. Take notes and pics, live Tweet if you can or post pics and your impressions to Linked-in.
- Let people know on Linked-In that you are going to the show — before you get there.
- Meet some of the speakers you respect at the show because you studied the agenda.
- Go talk to people. Be curious & ask good questions. Mention what you do in short sentences.
- LISTEN ACTIVELY.
- Take selfies with people & a picture of their name tags. You meet a lot of people. This will help you remember
- Leave your cards at home — take pictures of their cards, and add them on linked-in while you chat.
- Bring QR Codes with you — Make your phone's screen saver your QR Code.
- Posts the pics and notes in real-time in your show-collab space. In Slack, MS Teams, and Discord et al. Where you & all sales & marketing teams can see them. Be observable. Take notes… you can just record your voice and use the auto transcription service on your google phone.
- Set up that Slack channel or whatever the whole team uses & preload it with all the edge tools the sales folk need. Decks, URLs etc.
And #12 IMHO, the most important part of “Real Time Selling” … Drum Roll
12. This is the show “scrapbook”. Use all the data and all posts to help summarize the 10 leads and the next steps you got. Yes. Get it down to a slide to brief the execs or team members that didn't come to the show. The summary will help you net things out and stay focused. If you spend 6 hrs at a show you should have 10 leads. You can have 5 but then they should be really qualified!!
PS — Bring a phone charger, a spare battery and a couple of wires. Bring a lite tablet and leave your laptop at home. Be ready to present at the drop of a hat, at the tabletop.
#soproserve
