B2B in-person conference events are getting back into the sales and marketing initiative mix, so it’s time for a best practices refresher on conference follow-ups.
Conference attendance is a blur of activity — flights, multiple days of networking, tackling an overflowing email inbox when you return, and back-to-back virtual meetings that you postponed during the conference.
Naturally, most of us are challenged with contact follow-up as we switch to full-on office mode.
There are three steps I apply after a conference that enables me to maximize the ROI of my time and money investment:
Three Best Practices For Conference Follow-Up
Three Best Practices For Conference Follow-Up
B2B in-person conference events are getting back into the sales and marketing initiative mix, so it’s time for a best practices refresher on conference follow-ups.
Conference attendance is a blur of activity — flights, multiple days of networking, tackling an overflowing email inbox when you return, and back-to-back virtual meetings that you postponed during the conference.
Naturally, most of us are challenged with contact follow-up as we switch to full-on office mode.
There are three steps I apply after a conference that enables me to maximize the ROI of my time and money investment:
Three Best Practices For Conference Follow-Up
1. Block Calendar Time For Follow-Up
Setting time to focus on follow-up is the essential first step to ROI for the time invested in conference attendance. My rule of thumb is to block at least two to three hours per day of conference attendance. So yes, I schedule four to six hours for follow-up after attending a two-day conference.
Importantly, conference attendance is not all about lead follow-up. Most of us meet a broad set of contacts at conferences that aren’t prospective customers. Instead, they are people that can be valuable to our personal and professional network. For example, if your firm sells telecommunications or software, it might be beneficial to nurture a relationship with an academic specializing in large organization digital transformation. Or, you might have met someone that shares similar personal experiences or areas of interest that match yours.
2. Get Organized
You’ll want to sweep business cards, marketing material, and conference programs in a briefcase, jacket pocket, and suitcase.
Some contact information will need to make it into your CRM, while others into your personal contact manager. Then it would help if you decided who deserves a LinkedIn connection invitation.
There’s always a group of people I did not meet but want to connect with them for professional or personal reasons. Developing an approach to communicate with them often involves more than making a LinkedIn connection, which takes time.
I then build a prioritized list of all the contacts and tackle the highest priority within a few business days after the conference. The rest I tackle the second week after the conference. Whatever I don’t get done by the second week, I know the contact is not a priority, or I have other things to do that are more important.
3. Outline And Execute Follow-Up Options
Not all conference contacts are created equal. For some, I will send a personalized email within a week in a bid to strengthen our connection via a follow-up meeting. For others, a LinkedIn invitation and a brief note suffice. I have weekly communication with my network (you are reading it), so I may add some of the contacts to the mailing list.
Depending on your business and networking goals, there may be additional options to connect with contacts.