Event follow-up is broken. 

For everyone involved.

It’s broken for attendees, who are bombarded with generic marketing emails after each conference: 

It’s broken for operations teams, who often have to go through lists and manually assign qualified leads to reps. 

And it’s broken for reps, who are tasked with following up with a huge list of people who stopped by the booth (even though they might not be in buying mode… yet). 

Everyone loses.

But do you know what’s not broken?

The actual events. Events are BACK! 🙌

So when we attended INBOUND, we didn’t prioritize badge scans. 

We prioritized booked meetings.

And we booked almost 100 meetings in just 3 days.

Here’s how we did it:

1. Ungate your swag

We had our swag at the front of our booth so people could see what we were giving up front. And then we could start a conversation from there. 

A lot of booths were holding their swag hostage, like they were guarding it for their real ICPs. 

That’s just not good business. 

Part of the reason you have swag at your conference is to start conversations. You give someone a present, and then they feel more inclined to stay and chat.

The second part of this is having cool swag that’s tied to your brand. People always line up to get our hot sauce and spicy margarita mix!

2. Book meetings on-site

Here's our 41-second marketing hot take on an escalator about why booked meetings > badge scans: 

If badge scans are your main KPI, you’re starting from square one after the conference. 

Marketing needs to be tied to revenue. Events especially are a key influencer for deals. Which means your main KPI should be booked demos. 

Of course, it was easy for us to book meetings on-site, because booking sales meetings is literally what Chili Piper does.

We even had reps booking meetings on their phones at our offsite events.

Chili Piper automatically checks to see if a lead is already owned when booking the meeting. Otherwise, we round-robin based on pre-determined criteria.

We also sweetened the pot for reps attending the events… 

If any booked meeting became a Qualified Held Meeting (i.e. a qualified prospect showed up for the meeting), they got a $200 bonus. 

3. Optimize your space

There should be multiple places for people to see demos. We had two iPads, a monitor where the laptop is mirrored, and laptops on standby for longer demos. 

And, of course, everyone’s phones. 😉

We also had a table set up where people could sit down for longer demos. 

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Another part of optimizing your space is branding yourself. 

All us Pipers were decked out in sweet gear: Black pants, Chili Piper bomber jacket, branded t-shirt. And to top it all of — bright, orange shoes. The orange shoes especially were a huge crowd pleaser.

So before even talking to us, people knew we worked at Chili Piper.

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4. Create a reason for people to come to your booth

Why do people even go up to booths when they know you’re just going to sell you? 

First — get your sweet swag (we mentioned this in the previous section). 

Second — to get something they can’t get anywhere else.

To address the second part of this, we brought in a professional photographer for headshots.

…and also advertise beforehand. 

Because a lot of y’all are using AI for your headshots and it shows 😬

5. Go offsite (and please make it fun)

There are a lot of people at these conferences that will be working the booth all day. 

…which means they won’t all be able to stop by your awesome booth. 

There are also plenty of people living in the cities where these conferences are hosted that don’t have tickets.

So we went off-site.

Over the course of INBOUND, Saastr, and Dreamforce we hosted the following events:

• Party Like It’s 90’s at SaaStr
• Hubolution After Party at INBOUND
• CMO Dinner at INBOUND
• CRO Dinner at Dreamforce

All of our off-site events exceeded attendance goals. And they were SO. MUCH. FUN. 

(If you didn’t get to go, sorry to bring it up again. FOMO is so real, I know.)

The key to a good offsite event? 

Good location. Great food. Lots of drinks. Networking. And something special — whether it’s drink tickets, bowling, bocce ball, or a comedy roast (people are still talking about it).

Bottom line: Don’t settle for basic.

We didn’t take too many pictures… because what happens after the spicy margaritas stays with the spicy margaritas 😉

6. Build your community: Partnerships, customers, influencers, and friends 

AKA: Nearbound

For us this means… 

Channel partnerships 

As of September 2023, we have 350 agencies working with us. 

A lot of them with this amazing human: 

This is Jenn Castillo. She’s on our partner ecosystem team. And is possibly one of the best people you’ll ever meet. 

Thanks to our robust partnership community, we got a shoutout the first day on the main stage. Another invited us to their event. Another invited us to sponsor their Hubolution event. (Hubolution means… well, just read this article).

Product partnerships

We have 100+ native integrations. One of those integrations is HubSpot (obvs). 

Thanks to this partnership, their team organized all kinds of connections that helped amplify our message.

Here's our CEO Alina with the CEO of HubSpot, Yamini.

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She and the HubSpot team did a beautiful job with INBOUND. Not as many attendees as Dreamforce (or as corporate), but a great example of diversity, joy, and community done right.

Influencer partnerships 

Like Becc Holland. This is her:

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She had a workshop at the event that handed out QR codes to book meetings with us. 

And almost immediately after the workshop, we saw demo requests coming through: 

After someone books a demo how they hear about us — this person apparently heard about us from Becc Holland 😉

Ecosystem partnerships 

Ecosystem partnerships are when you partner with companies who have a similar ICP as you. 

We sell into marketing and sales teams — so we are constantly on the look-out for co-marketing opportunities with other companies who also sell into marketing and sales teams.

Especially customers. 

For example, we organized our executive dinner at INBOUND with Sequel.io — a webinar platform that also markets to marketers. 

We have the same audience, so why not work together? 

^^ This is Alina, our Co-Founder and Co-CEO, with Gaurav Agarwal — the Chief Growth Officer at Clickup. Keep a look out for some co-marketing soon 😉

Customers

Most of the other sponsors were already Chili Piper customers.

Which makes it a lot easier to reference someone on the floor. 

In our case, it’s super easy — because lots of our customers were using Chili Piper at their booth to book meetings. 

So potential customers got to see the value of our product in action.

Film content on-site 

We had a few different content streams going… 

1. Interviewing CMOs

Alina’s MasterSaaS Live series is all about interviewing CMOs. As a first-time CMO, Alina has interviewed dozens of CMOs across the industry. Here’s an example of an in-person interview we did at SaaS Open last year with Mark Kilens, the CMO of AirMeet:

2. Trade Show Hot Takes with Arthur Castillo 

Like this one about how most companies get trade shows wrong…

…shot on the trade show floor.

Do something different

We left our mark on the streets of Boston, San Mateo, and San Francisco during INBOUND, SaaStr, and Dreamforce, respectively. 

We even got the attention of smart people like Alex Poulous, CMO of Crossbeam, and Ben Marks of shopware AG.

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What’s next?

If you’re attending any events in October, the big takeaway is to prioritize booked meetings, not badge scans.

Check out this video for more tips on how to do this: 

Or... make things even easier for yourself.

By scheduling a demo of Chili Piper to see how you can book meetings with prospects right at the booth. 

And kiss follow-up emails goodbye. 😘