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You Got Booth Duty — Now What


If you’ve ever attended a tech conference and walked through the expo center, you’ve probably come across the hundreds of different tech booths where 3–4 sales people stand out front, give away fun prizes, perform 5 minute demos or capture your attention with flashy spin-the-wheel give aways. If you haven’t experience this yet, check it out! (More on this later).


If you’ve worked in tech, you probably have had to do booth duty at these conferences.


Rather than dread it, here is a quick guide to understanding how to master booth duty and walk away with a pipeline that your sales leaders will be proud of.


What is the Purpose?

Tech conferences can be a lot of fun, you get to network with a ton of people, catch up with old colleagues, see what is innovative in your space and travel to exciting locations(yay Vegas!).


But its not just about the fun. There is a business purpose to all of this. Your company has spent thousands of dollars to be there or possibly hundreds of thousands to be a premier sponsor and has put trust in you to go.


It’s an opportunity to showcase your technology and show that your organization is a great partner to the host. There will never be a better time to build pipeline.


Think about it — hundreds of people walking up to see your demo in the course of an hour. If you have a 3 hour booth duty, thats 300 people in less than half a day!


AWS re:Invent 2023
AWS re:Invent 2023

What to Do and What to Avoid

Dos:

  • Capture leads: names, titles, organizations. That’s about all you’ll remember. Try to write it down, or better yet — have some sort of automated lead generation report that gets created when prospects visit the booth.

  • Keep conversations short, to the point and high level: by the end of the day you will have talked to hundreds of people, by the end of three days, thousands. Time is money. Know how to capture their attention, understand why they stopped by and give an elevator pitch on your product.

  • Spend time branching out of your comfort zone: during conferences, it’s easy to drain your social battery. Try to find a way to use that valuable energy talking to new people, understanding new products and learning about what trends others are seeing. This will pay off in the long run.


Avoid:

  • End to end deep dives: sometimes individuals will come to your booth with a very specific use case they want to see your product do. Instead of taking them through an end-to-end demo, focus on what their pains are and treat the conversation more like a discovery call.

  • Spending too much time with one person: you’ll find yourself in situations where there may be current customers that come up to your booth with very specific problems and expect you to solve them on the spot without any context. Avoid this at all costs. Find a way to set up a follow up conversation without completely disregarding their question. Its a delicate balance.

  • Skip your obligation: whatever you do, do not skip your time that you should be at the booth. This is a career-killer and will get you put on the naughty list, if not fired. Again, your company has trusted you to be there. Show up.


Learn from the Best

The more conferences you go to, the more chances you’ll have to practice these skills. But if it’s your first one, it might be intimidating and that’s okay. Take an opportunity to walk the floor yourself and check out other vendors. See how other sales engineers pitch their products and put yourself in a prospects shoes by asking thought provoking, intriguing


Do you understand their product? Did you conceptualize what the technology does? Are there integrations that your familiar with?


Talk with other sales engineers and ask questions.

What do they like about booth duty? How do they handle certain situations?


Attend more conferences. Find a way to attend more conferences throughout the year, see if your company will pay for it. Some tech organizations offer a “learning and development” stipend where this money can be allocated to conferences. Here’s a short list of annual conferences to check out:


~Pro Tip~

Pay attention to what breakout sessions are happening just before and just after your booth duty starts. Pick 1–2 relevant sessions to strategically place in your elevator pitch or conversation with prospects. Even better if these breakout sessions are being led by your company!


Conclusion:

Booth duty should be something you look forward to, not something that you hate. Be patient, find your stride and work with the other sales team members there to find how to maximize your time for an optimal result.


There are hundreds of conferences throughout the year for you to practice, get the lay of land and learn from others. Make the most of it, and as always — happy prospecting!

 
 
 

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