How to generate leads at Web Summit
Hi folks, hope you’re enjoying your days. So do we. Our Uptech team decided to visit #Websummit 2017. I believe that your news feed is full of posts about this event.
We decided to support the trend and make one more post for those who wants to generate leads and attract customers and partners. We’ll cover some preparation tips. I guess you’ve already known some of them and some would be new. So please share your thoughts in comments.
Let’s begin the adventure. First, you need to understand what goals will the visit to WebSummit help to achieve. Discuss them with your team and if you see any value, don’t hesitate and buy a ticket or, extra tip* find an Facebook group with participants and ask for extra tickets. It could work and btw it would be your first networking step.
Your next destination is booking flight tickets and apartment. Go to the event page and find out its location. Then book the nearest apartment. After a long day at the event you surely won’t be excited about long distance trips.
Decide what marketing materials you’ll take. We advise to create memorable eye-catching business cards and some extras like sweets or stickers.
Find the Summit agenda, schedules and all events. With one ticket, you get access to 24 conferences: Surf Summit, Pub Summit, Sunset Summit, Night Summit, etc.
Create an alert or filters in social networks and find out who will visit any of these events. Ping them and offer to meet. Web Summit kindly provided a short-list of attendees on their main page. As we know who’s going to the event, let’s start gathering their contact information. We at Uptech start with parsing this list. We’ll share our script in the next article so you could use it too.
As a Business Developer I can tell that parsing saves you half of the time.
Create a filter for your target audience. For example, we are interested in talking with drone developers from the US. That’s why I filter all attendees according to location in the US.
You’ll receive a list of 100 names, titles, companies. Then move to Google and LinkedIn to find out company area. So you select 50 matches. Go to a person’s LinkedIn profile, twitter and Fb page. Find out what his/her interests and position are and make a note in a table(spreadsheets). It will be your first stand point for a talk. Try to find personal contacts. Use Hunter.io, Lusha, Prophet or any similar tools. Fill your table with this contacts as well.
When you end up with collecting data create invitation letters and follow-ups for various communication channels. We at Uptech use a short one for LinkedIn, short but chitchat-like for Fb and a little bit longer for emails. In a letter mention a topic for discussion. Don’t be too general, your lead has to understand the topic and agenda, and be interested in the discussion.
When you receive the first confirmation don’t be too happy: it’s only half of a way.
Find out all possible contact details (phone number he/she will use in Lisbon, Skype/slack, email). Agree on a meeting place and time slot. Choose a easy to find place or boost, so you could find each other in an easy way. Add new contact details and time to your table(spreadsheets). Create a calendar invitation so if meeting app has any bugs you’ll be sure you won’t miss this appointment.
Repeat all these steps and appoint as many meeting as possible. Remember that 20% of confirmed meetings will probably be cancelled (it always happens).
Thanks for your time and hope our article is useful. We’d be grateful for your thoughts and comments. Btw, we are open to new meetings, just drop us a line and we could talk at Websummit or gather in another time, another place.
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P.S. See you at Web Summit!
