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A week ago I spent two weeks at two different conferences: ‘VERGE’, in San Jose, and the ‘Web summit’ in Lisbon. I was disappointed by both of them. They were very different in terms of size, type of attendee, and in purpose, and they were similar in that Verge is a climate conference with a heaped side of tech, and the Web summit is a tech conference with a side of climate. But I didn’t see an awful lot of real value in either. I had fun, and there was some good conversations, and hopefully some people found value. But it was buried beneath a lot of stuff. Read this and tell me what you think.

Signal to noise ratio

In essence, everyone at these kinds of conferences think they are the most important participant. Attendees will go to as many booths as they find interesting to chat, companies with booths will talk to anyone who comes their way to show off their thing, (but really they’re looking for their next customer) and speakers will broadcast their message to anyone who turns up hoping they land on the right ears. As they should, this is how it’s designed to be.

So let’s look at a couple of high level examples to illustrate what I saw. Probably the most abundant job title at these kinds of conferences are ‘sales people’ (business development, key account managers, sales development representatives, etc).

Sales at a conference

Sales people should be going around talking to as many people as they can from their ‘target market’ (hopefully), and try to sell.

But the targets they’re after didn’t just send one decision maker to make an orderly queue behind, no, they sent their own sales people, probably some marketing people to handle the logistical stuff, maybe some product people who are there to ‘gain insights’, and the odd decision maker or two if they’re in the market for something.

Of course if they’re not in the market then their decision makers aren’t there, they’re (should be) working, and if they are in the market for something, and they’re good, they’re setting up meetings not waiting for sales people to approach them in the queue.

This means if you’re a sales person talking to a target company without doing the right research, you’re probably wasting your time. And probably the time of the target too since they’re just trying to sell you something too.

If you see they’re trying to sell to you you’re thinking ‘if they want to sell to your company they should be talking to your decision maker, not you’, but your decision maker is back at the booth (maybe), or in meetings with serious people (hopefully).

Of course if your goal is to bring in as many ‘leads’ as you can then embrace the noise. If anyone with a QR code is a lead, start asking people if your lead-gen app is broken, scan everyone, collect your bonus from your idiot head of sales, and put your feet up.

If a lead is someone who might be interested, great, get chatting and scan anyone who fits your target market, don’t worry if they’re also a sales person or have no decision making capabilities. Who knows, if their company might be interested, they’ll pass it up the chain, right? Someone’s going to forward your email to their boss right? They’ll assess whether what you’re peddling is good for them, right? Without the context of your conversation or your considerable charm? No.

This is what it felt like. An awful lot of sales people spinning their wheels in the wrong place. This isn’t a slight against sales people, I was at these conference with some really valuable sales people. This is a slight against the format of these conferences and the ‘heads of sales’ that send their people out like drones. On my own team I heard people boasting about leads from big name brands in our target industry but when I searched my attendee list their lead was another sales person. I’m sure that ‘lead’ is worth zero dollars.

I can apply the same kind of criticism to most kinds of attendees. To be fair and self-effacing, let’s look at what I saw product managers doing at these conferences.

Product at a conference

One definition that I think would be widely accepted of a product managers is ‘the voice of the users for their product’. They should guide the development, design, and commercialisation of their products using the understanding they have of their users needs. So more than anything else they should use conferences like this to either better understand their target users, or to get feedback from their target users on what they’re working on. Fair? Well let’s assume this for a moment anyway.

Unfortunately every single attendee isn’t profiled when they come into the conference, and this information isn’t handed out to every product person looking to learn about their users. And unless you ask an idiot, you shouldn’t care about everyone’s opinion, you should care about as specific a type of user as possible. So the product managers trade off between standing at the booth, gauging the people who come and say hi, and walking around seeing if they can find their users by the colour of their t-shirt?

The users your looking for obviously depends on the product your building so it’s hard for me to generalise but let me see if I can illustrate the problem. Let’s say I’m a PM at Slack leading the product stuff behind a feature that allows businesses to estimate the carbon footprint of all of their employees through slack. Neat, okay, who is my target audience? It could be sustainability people at various organisations, it could be developers or slack admins who would have to implement this feature, it could be office managers, managers, operations people … it could be a lot of people.

But if I got to a conference with this in mind I get nowhere. So let’s say I’m looking for the sustainability people within a business to champion my product since they’re the ones who are going to use the data that my slack app generates. So how do I find them? If it’s written on the attendee’s conference badge do I just keep my eyes peeled for key words and try to ignore as many other people as possible? That’s a lot of people to scan and ignore.

What are the odds that the sustainability come to my booth for anything other than cool merch? Doesn’t seem likely. But a PMs job at these things is maybe easier than a sales person because I can go and find the ‘sustainability companies’ at the event and ask them about their issues and for feedback on my app, right? Well then you run into the same problem as the sales people, are you really talking to the right people? A good sustainability company isn’t going to be full of sustainability people, unless it’s a tiny consultancy. And the sustainability person is hardly likely to be there anyway, they should be working on something somewhere else, there’s lots to do if you want to be sustainable.

So you can’t find that person without doing a lot of very targeted research, who else? What about Slack Admins? That’s definitely not going to be on the conference badge, and the same issues persist. Don’t worry though, you can still go to conferences, just call it ‘insight gathering’ and market research, you’re gathering insights from talks that are probably trying to sell you on something, and you’re doing research in a market full of noise, good luck.

PMs could kid themselves into thinking that going and gauging the reaction to their product from the masses is worthwhile, but I wouldn’t believe them. The best reason I can see for a PM going to one of these things without very clear intentions is to help sales people with their pitches and learn from the talks but more on that later.

I’m looking for a not only measurable but relevant return on investment in going to a conference, but without a very clear and targeted plan I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult because of all the noise.

Really, if you ask me, conferences like this are only valuable to students looking for a job, people just looking to enjoy a few days of neat talks, marketing teams trying to build brand awareness, people who need to scope the people their competition have hired because everyone’s online now, and people who have done serious research to attack real opportunities.

Otherwise if you’re lucky someone you sent will hear something inspiring, communicate it to a decision maker, and something will happen.

Superficial by design

Thousands of people and an agenda intentionally crammed full of talks, workshops, and events needs to run smoothly. The people who organise these things have super powers. Things take as long as they’re planned to take, lunch has to happen at a certain time, and you better believe there has to be hundreds of volunteers or staff ready for the drinks event afterwards.

Zooming in, if you’re an organiser and you have to fill an hour before lunch in several different places you look at your proposed talks list, look at how long their talk takes, and fit them in. 45 minutes max. In reality a lot of the time this turns into 3 twenty minute talks that might run over or under. It doesn’t matter to you, get them in. The more the merrier, bigger is better, right?

From the attendees perspective you have a long list of 'things’ happening throughout the day(s), on parallel tracks, at the same time. If you’re good you plan which ones you can attend that are the most interesting to you and you walk with a purpose dodging and weaving between everyone else to get to your next thing on time. Maybe you duck out early if it’s not what you expected. Or if it’s not that good anyway you can check the app to make sure you know where your next one is anyway. If there’s nothing for you there maybe peruse some of the booths in between, whatever works.

Can you see the problem?

Most people are listening to you because they read the title of your talk or the sentences on the app about your company. You don’t know anything about them other than that. Something in those handful of words (hopefully) got their attention enough that they’re there. With this attention I would argue you have two options. Keep them on the hook by saying or doing things to keep their interest until you understand them a bit more and can talk to what they care about (at least until they inevitably have to go to something else). Dance monkey.

Or, get into it, tell them the story you’re at the conference to tell. Talk about the problems that you’ve seen, that you care about, and lay out why you’re worth buying into. They may not be interested but at least then you know you’re talking to the wrong person and can move on. But remember, this is a conference, so you can’t talk sell your product in a talk. Wait. Ah. Never mind. (This is a rule at many tech conferences for good reason, who wants to be sat in an auditorium to listen to an unsolicited sales pitch? Well, is it unsolicited? You choose to sit there? But there are thousands of people here, we want to entertain them as well, make sure they come back and buy the beer. So no pitches. Just talk about blockchain or something. No pitches. :rolling-eyes-emoji:).

With near constant context switching, tiny time slots, and no idea who’s listening to you it’s no surprise the vast majority of talks at these conferences are blankets. They’re so generic and full of buzzwords that they use their entire slot talking, but not saying anything of any real value. If you’re really interested in the topic you have to follow up, and go to their booth. Which is fine, except for the noise. Or more likely you open your browser, search their website, and decide you’ll look them up later. (Sure you will).

I listened to too many people coming away from a talk saying ‘wow that was a good one, really interesting’ and then when I asked them about it later they couldn’t say one thing about it that wasn’t either the title of the talk or an empty sentence about ‘innovation’ or ‘impact’. No. I want to know what was interesting, not that they’ve hired a good public speaker.

Not all talks are like this of course. I found the best talks to be the ones where you just had experts talking about interesting things. Not selling anything, not representing a company (or if they are they’re so big they don’t really care about some random in the crowd), just talking about an issue. Thought provoking. Of course, these are unusual because conferences are for companies to reach users and sell stuff so why would they save slots for discussion about issues.

How to get the most out of a conference

Originally the outline for this article had three more sub-headings before this one but they were getting even more rant-y than the first two so I dropped them. If you want to bitch about conferences though, let me know. So what’s the solution?

Well, you could start your own conference and focus on quality. Focus the scope, give the presenters a real amount of time for their talks, and properly profile attendees and presenters (within reason) so they can get some real connecting done. But that’s a lot of effort. So how can you as an attendee, or a company get the most out of a conference as they are today? Well I think it comes down to focus; a clear goal, a clear strategy, research, and a winning smile.

Whoever wants to go to the conference needs to give a reason, preferably someone who’s responsible or accountable for the success of something related to the conference. They need to present a clear, measurable goal. ‘Get the contact details or talk directly to the decision makers at x kind of company’. Or better yet ‘(…) at companies x, y, z, a, b, c or d.’ Maybe it’s ‘get your decision maker a meeting with decision maker at x, y, z, …’ You can have a few of these, the more specific the better. Then people can go, and get their hustle on. Once you’ve achieve this goal that warrants the investment in the company, sure, put your feet up, get some free stuff, and enjoy.

But you have to have a strategy. Whoever’s going should split up into teams and work out how they’re going to co-ordinate and work together to achieve the goals. Points should be given for creativity. But you get no points for just talking to people or listening to a bunch of random talks.

Do the research, calve out time before the conference to research the attendees, who’s going that might actually be worth talking to? Who are the key speakers that if you see walking around you should talk to? Are there any talks on the schedule that could either be really insightful or a good laugh?

And finally, a winning smile. These things have thousands of people buzzing around, most of whom have burnt real money to be there. But they’re there and if they’re listening to you it means they’re at least vaguely interested in what you’re talking about.

The biggest successes I’ve seen coming out of conferences are by pure chance. At the coffee breaks, during the drinks events, or the ‘we bumped into eachother and got to chatting’ annecdote. You can’t rely on these but you can increase the odds of all chance encounters by enjoying it. It’s not every day there are potentially thousands of people willing to let you jabber on now is it?

This one’s very cynical and quite rant-y, I almost didn’t publish it because I doubt many people agree with me, and I wonder if someone who makes conference attendee decisions see this and decides Rhys doesn’t get to go to any more conferences again. But, I think I’m right, with a good amount of prep and focus you can get something out of a conference, without it, you’re better of pissing into the wind.

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