In 2022 Upflowy has been no stranger to conferences, with our staff having attended or going to attend conferences in Australia, Spain, France, England and the United States. We’ve attended with one representative, run with a skeleton crew and even sponsored a booth. We've tried to do it all!
With all this experience, and on the eve of Saastr San Mateo, we wanted to share with you Matthew Browne’s number one rule of conference networking:
No Sitting Down.
The upstanding Upflowy crew
While attending a networking event or conference, the only time you can sit down is during your break to eat or during 1:1 brain dates. If you’re on the conference floor, you should be walking around or manning your booth.
A confident and upright posture, open body language and a positive attitude are all required. These all combine to help you engage with attendees or approach booths with great energy. Sitting at the booth or lazing about the conference is the easiest way to convey disinterest and waste the money you’ve paid to attend.
To best maximize the event that you’re attending or sponsoring you need to engage. Each conversation and each interaction can be significant for your business. Attendees are there to learn, connect and help their business grow.
Your target customer could be walking past your booth at any moment. A new enterprise client could be in line in front of you getting lunch, or maybe who you sit next to at a keynote speech. They don’t know how much you can help them, so you need to smile, introduce yourself and earnestly inquire about them.
Technology companies are taking over, so don’t assume that the person wearing a hoodie isn’t a decision-maker. Be sure to treat every opportunity as if it were going to impact your ARR majorly.
Someone at the conference could be your next major client
Once you’re initiating conversations, once you’re speaking to every person that comes your way, you’ll need to be engaging. You’ll need to capture their attention and keep them wanting to speak to you. Asking the right questions helps you do just that, not only does it build rapport with the individual, but it also helps qualify the potential lead.
Ask open-ended questions that allow them to speak about their business, their why, their problems and their success. They’ll undoubtedly have questions for you, so be sure to be up to date on all the right data points, as well as the capabilities of your product or service.
At a conference you can be quite forward, you can ask who they’re currently subscribed with for your particular industry. It may not be a significant area of concern for them, but if you can save them money, offer better results or optimize a process their ears will certainly perk up. This is especially true regarding the non-sexy elements of running a business.
Questions to ask at conferences to connect with people:
Questions to ask at a networking event to qualify leads
It is all well and good to crush it on the conference floor, but that is just the first act. Taking hold of the information is the best way to ensure that the networking relationships legitimately last. So you need to be able to take the information of those that you connect with. Previously this was the role of the business card, but in the digital world we live in, the game has changed.
A lead generation form is a brilliant way for you to collect information from those that you network with. Many conferences will have badges with QR codes that you scan when meeting someone, but this creates more steps in restarting a conversation. Your lead generation form will be able to send the information that you want direct to a Google Sheet.
At Upflowy we created a lead gen flow using our platform for Saastr Barcelona and Saastr San Mateo to funnel in all our leads. The flow ensured we had a personalized experience for the attendee, we captured all the critical data and helped create our email outreach strategy to ensure those leads didn’t go cold.
Remember, be the last one standing!