Conferences and the Return to ROI
In the lead-up to the pandemic, conferences felt at times like expensive endeavors with modest ROI for founders building with capital efficiency in mind. There was a growing sense that the events were over-saturated and had become, in many cases, more social than productive.
Once COVID hit, the conference circuit went into hibernation. There was a two year reset on in-person prospecting. Conference and event budgets were largely converted into subscriptions to new outreach tools and prospecting went online, in the beginning with a lot of success. With the move of prospecting dollars online, however, the ROAS pendulum swung the other way and it became very challenging to stand above the noise in email, InMail, social media, etc. A lot of this inefficiency has been further exacerbated by the privacy changes in iOS making online targeting even more difficult.
The pendulum always comes back around, and as online channels saturate, we’re now seeing renewed excitement in conferences. Importantly, many of our founders are finding that conferences in 2022 were one of their highest performing prospecting channels.
Customers are ready to be sold to in-person again. That is not to say that all conferences are equally effective. We have found in our portfolio that some of the best conferences are those that are most targeted (and in some cases niche). The narrower and more focused the attendee base, the more attentive attendees will be to the painpoint your company solves (and the less likely your competitors will be to show up and sell against you — for example, everyone might go to Money20/20, but not everyone thinks of regional bank conferences).
The other important strategy we’ve seen our founders employ with conferences is being smart in terms of resource allocation. Depending on the size of the conference, buying a booth or sponsorship can be expensive, and it’s easy to get lost in a sea of sponsors. Depending on your product and sales motion, more effective tactics we’ve seen include sponsoring panel discussions or lightning talks or sending a sales team to walk the floor, particularly in areas where buyers might be perusing competitors’ booths. We’ve also seen some companies take advantage of current and prospective customers all being in one place by planning effective “sidecar” events alongside the conference, particularly drinks or a dinner, sometimes with a relevant industry host / speaker to entice attendance.
Conferences can also be a great place to connect with future potential senior talent. Many companies send their senior sellers or marketers to conferences, and it’s a good time to have casual catch-ups with potential future execs. It’s a much lower bar to get someone to grab a networking coffee at an event than asking them to sneak out of their office during the standard work week.
It’s important to diversify your customer prospecting, and we’ve been encouraging our founders to employ an in-person strategy to complement their online prospecting. The pendulum will inevitably swing back, but for now it appears conferences are back.
