The Feel Good Conference Mirage

Early-stage startups build exciting new products and then seek to launch them into the marketplace successfully. This commercialization process often involves attending conferences to raise awareness of the innovation. The energy and enthusiasm of conference attendees are intoxicating until follow-up time.

Bringing a new product to market is challenging. A key priority is raising awareness about your innovation amongst those you target – and the convening mechanism of conferences is enticing when trying to get your messages out. This is true even when some of the conferences are now held virtually.

So many times, I have experienced and observed teams investing time, energy, and money into attending conferences their target customers attend. This can take the form of attending to learn about emerging trends and who else might be in your competitive landscape. With more investment, conference organizers will likely be happy to sell you space on their exhibit floor and exhibitor tickets to the conference. In some ways, this is an excellent opportunity to capture attention in a target-rich environment, right?

Putting together all of the necessary elements of a professional booth – a backdrop, custom tablecloth, electrical service, handouts, crystal-clear high-impact messaging, and shipping — costs time and money. Sending a team with custom shirts and travel expenses costs more money. Paying for the conference costs still more money. 

The conference finally arrives, and you and your team set up your booth and prepare to greet potential prospects. The doors open and trinket-hunting conference attendees stream through the doors to see what there is to be seen. They stroll the aisles and sometimes stop to politely ask questions about what you are doing if your booth messaging intrigues them. They are curious about whatever is new. Often, they will let you scan their badge to get their contact information, fill out a contact form, or share a business card for follow-up. A euphoria comes with talking to people who care about the problem you are trying to solve – and listening to their expressions of enthusiasm. By the end of the conference, you feel a sense of impact and potential – and are often approached by conference organizers who know that this is the moment to strike with a deal for you to attend next year because they have learned that the end of this year’s conference is the moment of highest hopes for the exhibitors.

Then you pack up and head home, back to the day-to-day grind of trying to build your startup and sell your new product. You reach out to those whose contact information you collected. Maybe a precious few reply, but most do not. As the following weeks drag on, your good feelings at the end of the conference dissipate under the weight of the lack of follow-through and response that unfolds. You wonder if all the costs were worth it. You wonder if you should have signed that contract to attend next year. You wonder if you will ever be able to break through. I call this effect the “feel-good conference mirage.”

I have seen so many versions of it:

• Booths whose headline caused passersby to experience a bit of whiplash as the message registered and whip their head around to read it again – and then walk over to figure out if it could possibly be true. This is the best case – and even as we built a backlog of orders, it was still stunning how few of those leads converted.
  
  
• Booths where those who stopped to talk came back with their friends to introduce them to the concept and tell us how amazing this is. Then we learn that many of those folks, while excited, do not actually control enough budget to act on their enthusiasm.
  
  
• Booths where the silence is deafening as only a tiny trickle of interested folks stop by – and you wonder if they just paused to see if they could get a free pen as they expressed polite interest.

So, does this mean that conferences are worthless? No, it does not. However, consider these tips:

• Going in, refine your goal for the conference – and focus your preparation, investment, and materials based on those goal(s). It might be to build your email marketing list or have lots of customer discovery conversations (although you need to be really smart to avoid interpreting polite interest as actionable enthusiasm) or to identify potential partners who are often trolling around looking.

• To make the most of the conference, it is important to be realistic about how many active purchases will actually result and to make sure your follow-up is swift, strong, and as customized as possible. Do not get swept up in the excitement.
  
  
• Be careful not to make big commitments to future resources in the euphoria of the feel-good conference mirage. Often, you can delay making a commitment – and the conference organizers will still take you, and with the right argument about getting someone else’s approval to commit to next year’s marketing budget, will often extend the window for getting the “right now” deal on offer. Also, significant business plan changes should probably wait a few weeks while you assess the follow-through and validate what you heard.
  
  
• Consider whether you might take advantage of other marketing mechanisms such as social media, email marketing, website improvements, and networking to leverage the conference investment and follow-up to maximize the value you get.

Perhaps my most important point is to manage your expectations for what a conference can mean and to encourage you to recognize this pattern that repeats over and over and over so you will not be disheartened if and when it happens to you. Hopefully, you will snag a few sales. Hopefully, you will catch the attention of a worthwhile potential partner and start a dialog. Hopefully, you will learn something about your space. And, hopefully, the benefits will outweigh the costs.