Attending Your First Ever Conference? Nail It With These 4 Uncommon Tips
SaaStock Dublin, the flagship conference for SaaS businesses in Europe, is just around the corner. And the hype is real. We’re talking about sharing the same floor with 4000+ speakers, matchmaking with investors from over 300 VC funds, and a one day bootcamp full of workshops to accelerate you startup. I mean, what can you ask more?
This might sound terrifying if you’re attending a tech conference of these proportions for the first time.
So here are 4 uncommon tips for product marketers on how to prepare for attending (NOT exhibiting) one, derived from my experience at TNW 2019, my first ever conference.
1. Stress your deck, but not the logistics
Sure, prepare pitches for different audiences and “sing the same gospel” with your colleagues when it comes to presenting your brand. Time is short, so first impressions count. You can even go one step further and come up with conversation starters for several contexts — trust me, you’ll need them:
Badge line: Come to a lot of conferences like this?
Coffee line: Juicing up for the next session? Which one?
Seatmate: How are you liking today’s sessions?
But don’t stress the logistics. Thinking of how many business cards to print? Not too many. Major conferences offer badges with a QR code to scan someone’s contact and save it in the conference app, perfect for post-event reach out. Forgot your notebook and pen? The exhibitors will bombard you with tons of goodies from free coffee, to stickers, keychains, T-shirts, agendas, you name it. Piggyback on them and bring some home as prizes for internal contests (Slack stickers trend high among marketers 😁).
2. Hi5 your competition
Business is not war — at least not at this level. Know in advance where your competition’s booth is, grab a coffee, and go say hi. You’ll realize:
- They’re humans like you, who might follow and respect your work
- The latest updates they’re working on, not yet revealed to the masses, and how they position them — thought food for any product marketer who open their “Competitors.csv” file more than once a quarter
In our case, the guys at ZOHO recognized us by our T-shirts the moment we entered the exhibition tent and invited us to join. Just as if we were a bunch of homies at the same festival, got lost from each other, then reunited again via a miraculous thread of coincidences. We’re all active in the same market, after all. With Atalasian, I went to grab a coffee by their booth and ended up talking about where the project management industry is heading.
3. Stick around exhibitors more
Your place shouldn’t be at speaker events. With a few exceptions, 90% of what they say is already on the Internet in the form of a post or podcast. Instead, stick around exhibitors, the hustlers who came from God knows how many kilometers/miles and prepared themselves to captivate and answer you— the equivalent of a coffee overdosed kid, mazing through a tech playground.
I was like that, hopping from booth to booth and grasping their pitches at a surface level. Up until I met Jeroen Corthout, co-founder of Salesflare, who told me to slow down. Even if there isn’t any benefit to reap from the conversation with some of them, chances are there’s still place to nurture a long-term relationship who might pay off sometime in the future. The SaaS world is small thanks to LinkedIn and conferences of this type.
4. Abandon or pivot your goal
For a better one, of course. I went at the conference with the sole purpose of finding partners from established SaaS tools to integrate with (silly me 😅). Didn’t have too much luck, just some distant references to their hard-to-reach execs in the US.
But as me and my colleague were spending most of the day around exhibition booths, we realized that most of them were just like us: mid-growth software businesses with tools complementary to ours. Why not partner with them in such a way as to benefit both our customers and…well, our brands too?
It was time to change plans, or rather just the main pitch. That’s how we came up with the idea of a discounted marketplace, where our customers (marketing and creative agencies) could get access to limited offers for apps essential to their workflow besides a project management platform (CRMs, social media planners, graphic design sketchers, etc.). The effort on our partner’s end would be minimal, while we could also increase brand loyalty at the same time (it’s harder to churn on two products than one).
Three months later the marketplace is live, counting partners such as Adobe, Salesflare, and WordLift to name a few.
And yes, shameless plug, we’re accepting new partners. DM me for more details!
Have fun
It goes without saying that you should have fun — especially if you only talk with customers online and your tasks have become a bit of a routine lately. Do yoga with your clothes on, befriend people from industries other than yours at pub crawls, and fully immerse yourself in this fast, but thrilling experience. Who knows, you might even get front seats at Chivas Venture Finale presented by Richard Ayoade himself (this time I was lucky 😁).
Again, this is my uncommon advice for someone attending a tech conference for the first time. May the conference budget be abundant next year so I can write another post on uncommon advice for those exhibiting the first time!
