What brings you by a conference booth?

I'm thinking about in-person events more and more these days, so I'm curious - what brings you by a conference booth?

What's a good experience or design you've seen? Or when do you avoid a booth (or booths!) entirely?

LMK 😊

Comments

[FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ]

I never went to a conference before, so I really don't have experience visiting booths there in general.

However, I do see clips of various booths and it tends to be unique. I like booths where they make it look like a "living room" type of format. Gives off relaxing vibes and makes you conformable.

[Jon Gottfried]

I'll preface this that I'm mostly referring to developer conferences (not more sales focused events like Dreamforce, etc). The biggest thing for me is friendly and inviting staff. Obviously, it's great if the booth looks eyecatching - but really I want to see someone who is excited to chat and tell me about what their company does (in a non-sales pitch-ey way). When people are sitting behind their desk, on their phone/laptop - it doesn't make me want to go over. If it's just sales people trying to collect my business card, it doesn't make me want to go over. There's lots of hooks to get people to come (raffles, swag, whatever) but really I want to have a conversation around genuine curiosity in their product.

[Ben Halpern]

I'm probably not the only introvert at the conference, so the following might appeal to other people too:

I think I'm more likely to come by if there's clearly something I can read or interact with besides just talking to the people at the booth. I'm happy to chat, but if that's the only think I can clearly do at the booth I might shy away from stopping by. I don't want to get roped into a conversation until I can sort of get a feel for what the product/etc is first.... If that makes sense.

[Harsh]

This resonates.

What makes me stop at a booth isn't the swag (though stickers are always welcome). It's when the person behind the table seems genuinely curious about what I'm working on not just ready to deliver a script.

The booths I remember are the ones where someone asked what's actually hard for you right now? instead of "can I tell you about our product?

What's your experience been from the other side? What makes you feel like a conversation was worth having?

Thanks for this reflection. 🙌