How to maximize your SaaStr (and other conferences!) ROI with Boast Capital’s Lloyed Lobo

Turning conference attendance into leads

A photo booth is just one example of a team trying to catch the eye of conference attendees. At Predictable Revenue, we’ve tried our fair share of similar tactics as well: we’ve hired fortune tellers for our SaaStr booths and had one lucky attendee smash a photocopier, Office Space style.

Although hilarious, those tactics didn’t yield much in the way of opportunities either. It wasn’t until we started treating our booth as an inbound funnel, with SDRs qualifying passersby, and Account Executives building relationships with those prospects that were a good fit, did we start to see the great results.

The trick, we found, was designing cue cards that our SDR team would have interested guests fill out. On those cue cards were simple questions that helped us gauge whether or not we felt that person was a good fit for Predictable Revenue’s services.

For context: the year before we implemented our cue card system, we had about 300 badge scans from SaaStr. The year we started using our cue cards, we had 37 people fill one out and we closed 7 deals with 90 days of the conference. Sure, we did way less volume at the conference, but the impact to our business was huge.

(Editor’s note: we wrote extensively about our success at recent SaaStr events. Read about our experience in this in-depth article here)

Lloyed and his team at Boast benefited from taking a similar tailored approach to their conference lead gen.

“The big difference for us was when we started going through the event’s app (every event has its own app). That allowed us to go through everyone that was attending. Then, based on our ICP, we started building a list of who we wanted to connect with,” says Lloyed.

“And based on that list, we would do curated events for them — inviting them to an exclusive event like a founder’s dinner, or co-hosting parties. People go to events to meet like minded people. So, decide who the right people are, and make sure you invite the right people. Co-hosting parties as well helpsto align with other companies and, collectively, invite people. That collective nature really helps.”

That curated, tailored approach also helps you stand out in your pre-conference reach outs. All of you have surely executed on (or been on the receiving end of) pre-conference prospecting. Lloyed says he’s received more than 30 different companies prospect to him this week alone. But all of those emails are standard “let’s meet at the conference” requests — offering little more than a value prop, and a promise of meeting for a chat or a demo.

But a curated event offers the chance to connect, discuss, and build a relationship. That’s different, and whether it is done sent via email or LinkedIn, that stands out.

“It’s like dating — you don’t go to a bar and just say ‘let’s get married.’ You just want to connect, and see if it’s right to proceed to the next meeting,” says Lloyed.

“With these tactics, we generated a couple million dollars in pipeline.”

Originally published at predictablerevenue.com on February 7, 2019.