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Discussion on: What brings you by a conference booth?

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Archit Mittal

Three things pull me to a booth every time: a live, opinionated demo of a real problem being solved (not a landing page loop on a TV), an engineer I can ask detailed technical questions of without a pitch script, and stickers that don't feature the vendor logo as the main visual element. The inverse works too — the fastest way to lose me is anything with "transform your business" above the fold. Curious what the ratio looks like from the booth side: do tech-person booths outperform marketer-person booths in actual pipeline?

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Amara Graham

Curious what the ratio looks like from the booth side: do tech-person booths outperform marketer-person booths in actual pipeline?

This is a great question I'm not sure many companies actually bother to answer. Goals for booths and conferences range from broad, general awareness (that might literally end with the logo going up on the website) to converted or high quality leads that turn into sales engagements days or weeks later.

IMO, the most successful booths I've been a part of have a mix of marketing/events, eng/devrel, and sales. We can handle a wide variety of questions and discussions, can hand off people to each other gracefully. I'm always looking to get people hands on with a product in the booth, so even if we have looping visuals, I will track how many people do a hands-on demo.