Stand Out at Your Next Conference

Event season is here. After hanging out with family and friends over the summer, many of us have the opportunity or commitment to go to the string of great sales, marketing, and go-to-market events that recur in the fall. 

SaaStr, Inbound, and Dreamforce are among the better known. But there are many other niche or up and coming conferences on the calendar that you should check out. Comment on your favorite here. 

In the crush of people, it can be tough to stand out. You might have a budget for a pyrotechnic-filled booth or a spectacular social event. But, these days, there’s an awfully good chance that you won’t. So, how to stand out? Here are some ideas that I’ve picked up over the years:

• Partner with a Big Friend: Shortly after Jon Miller had left Marketo and started Engagio, my company at the time – KnowledgeTree – was looking to sponsor Marketo’s big user conference. But we couldn’t afford to pay for a booth in the big exhibit hall in Las Vegas. Well, it turns out that to get to the exhibits from the main hotel, you need to walk down a hallway filled with stores and restaurants. So, we partnered with Engagio (thanks to the amazing Sandra Freeman) and rented out a cupcake shop on the way to the hall. Everyone had to walk past our big roll-up advertising that Jon Miller was inside the shop (with free cupcakes). We never had so many meetings. 

• Message Passionately: I once attended a conference in Monaco of all places – I forgot my non-existent tux for the casino-night party. It was just before the dot-com bust and everyone was in full energy mode. On the final evening of the event, there was a dinner with all of the attendees in a massive ballroom. The MC invited any founder to stand-up at their table and pitch their offer. There was a parade of generic “we are the eBay of this…” and “we are changing the world with that…” pitches. Until the final person to stand up. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was filled with so much energy and emotion that people instantly gathered around him to hear more. 

• There’s More Real Estate than You Think: You might have heard how Dreamforce has long since grown so big that there isn’t enough hotel space to accommodate the attendees. The solution: dock cruise ships nearby to add more rooms for visitors. The same rule can apply to your event strategy. Instead of relying on the hubbub of the main conference area, consider thinking like the Dutch and making more land. Give attendees a welcome reprieve from the main area. Before it became de rigeur, we rented a restaurant beside the Moscone center and held a parallel mini-conference focused just on sales enablement leaders, our target customer. I’ve heard of others that park seminar buses – yes, buses – outside of conference areas.

At SetSail, we’re teaming up with the OpsStars team from LeanData to do exactly that. We’re sponsoring a satellite event to Dreamforce that focuses on sales operations and revenue operations pros. It’s a great way to concentrate on meeting exactly the right kinds of experts that we love to talk to. If you’re in town, let’s meet up!

• Get Ahead of Schedule: This is the most obvious advice, so I won’t dwell on it. Book meetings ahead of time. Post about attending on LinkedIn. Partner with your teams to get the word out. Fill your schedule before you get there (with gaps, of course).

• Make Your Own Event: While you’re at the conference, you might spot a gap in what’s being served to your target audience. Maybe the content isn’t right. Or, the event is in a geographically remote spot. Or, the vibe just isn’t right. At Spreedly, the founders felt that the Fintech conference circuit didn’t cater enough for technical payments developers. So, we built our own conference and had 2,500 people at the COVID virtual conference – with speakers from Disney, Netflix, Zillow, and more. And we were able to curate the content to help support Spreedly’s mission. 

• Have Your Oreo Dunking Moment: You might remember a few Super Bowls back there was a lengthy power outage. During the lights-out, Oreo was able to write, photograph, assemble, and publish a tweet about dunking cookies in the dark. Are there things like that you can use to catch the zeitgeist? Even a simple one will work. At one conference I was at, there was one day filled with downpouring rain. So, a security company gave away umbrellas to attendees as they waited in the hotel. “We’ve got you covered.”

• Be A Little Quirky: I’m sure my kids will think this is terribly cringey, but try wearing something different than your standard jeans, dress shoes, and ordinary top. Whether it’s a company like Pendo that rocks the pink shirts, or maybe my own preference for bringing brightly colored running shoes – there’s lots of ways to stand out with your own look. I often tell people to look for me with the shoes. 

I hope to see you this week at OpsStars in parallel to Dreamforce. In fact, the first person at Dreamforce to see me wearing one green and one orange shoe and say the code phrase “apples and oranges”, I’ll send you a secret swag pack.