A four-day conference does not cost you a week. It costs you three: the week before, when meetings pile up ahead of the trip; the week itself; and the week after, spent digging out. Add registration, flights, hotel, and whatever the sponsorship ran, and conferences end up the largest line in most business development budgets after salaries.
For a spend that size, almost nobody has a system. People show up, walk the expo hall, come home with a stack of cards, and have no way to say whether the show was worth repeating.
On Wednesday, August 26 at 12 pm ET, we are hosting a 90-minute tactical workshop on fixing that, taught by Thesis Driven partners Brad Hargreaves and Paul Stanton, who have roughly two decades between them on the circuit as attendees, sponsors, speakers, and organizers.
Which shows actually deserve the money. The most common mistake is chasing marquee events over local and vertical ones. For a proptech vendor, a regional multifamily conference often has more real buyers in the room than the national show that gets all the LinkedIn posts.
How to vet the room before you pay. One multifamily show publishes its own attendee breakdown: roughly 16% of attendees hold mid-level or senior titles, while two-thirds are property managers and maintenance staff. Great if you sell to users, a waste of a sponsorship if you need decision-makers.
Why the booth is usually the wrong buy. It is a premium to stand behind a table and hope the right person walks up, and to have a two-person team pinned there while the deals happen in hallways and hotel rooms upstairs. A dinner for fifteen costs about the same and returns more, especially co-hosted with a complementary firm that splits the check.
The editorial back door. Pitch the editorial side of a conference rather than the sales side, since they are usually separate teams. A panel slot often comes with free tickets.
An annual calendar built in tiers. Two or three shows a year where you go all in, a middle tier you attend with specific goals, and a bottom tier you send someone junior to or skip.
Prep that fills your calendar before you land. Getting the attendee list two to three weeks out, enriching it, running personalized outreach at volume, and where AI fits into the briefing you read each morning on site.
On-site execution. Owning the meeting invite and the location, running a home base, getting mobile numbers, and why walking the expo hall is close to worthless.
The 48-hour rule. Top follow-ups out within a day, the internal memo written on the plane home, and the scorecard that decides next year's calendar.
A few gray hat tactics, including the white paper one of us traded to a conference organizer in exchange for a panel, a private happy hour, and every email address on the download page.
Format and Access
One live 90-minute session: Wednesday, August 26, 12:00 to 1:30 pm ET, with questions throughout
Cost: $99
Recordings sent to all registered attendees, whether or not they attend live
Slides, case studies, and pre-conference, on-site, and follow-up templates included
Everything stays in your Thesis Driven account for future reference
Brad is the founder and editor of Thesis Driven (www.thesisdriven.com), a publication covering innovation in the built world. Over the past decade he has co-founded General Assembly and Common which generated a combined $500M+ in enterprise value.
Private wealth has passed the institutional market, and most sponsors have no idea how to reach it. A workshop on raising from family offices and RIAs.
