When Sam talks about founders spending all of their time at conferences, I assume he means attending conferences rather than speaking/moderating, because these have totally different dynamics. We have an investment marketplace for agriculture & agtech (AgFunder) and so our success is measured by having thousands of investors rather than millions of users. For these kind of high-touch clients, speaking/moderating at conferences is the best way we've found to source new deal flow, investors (our customers), and potential channel partners outside of having major media coverage. Our deal team gets crushed when I return from a run of back-to-back conferences. I could imagine it would be the same thing for enterprise sales and healthcare IT.
In cases like ours, if you can speak/moderate at a conference you have the social proof to pitch to your customers horizontally rather than pitching up. Moreover, once you get one or two speaking/moderating gigs under your belt it's really easy to get more (Point to previous track record) as conference organizers are typically sourcing speakers/moderators from previous conferences. I also watch for new conferences like a hawk, and fire off emails offering to speak/moderate for anything that looks like it will have our audience. And the best thing about it is that you won't have to pay. Final tip, if you have a content marketing channel (We created AgFunderNews.com) you can offer to promote the conference in exchange for some media placement of your own. Again, a big $$ saver.
When Sam talks about founders spending all of their time at conferences, I assume he means attending conferences rather than speaking/moderating, because these have totally different dynamics. We have an investment marketplace for agriculture & agtech (AgFunder) and so our success is measured by having thousands of investors rather than millions of users. For these kind of high-touch clients, speaking/moderating at conferences is the best way we've found to source new deal flow, investors (our customers), and potential channel partners outside of having major media coverage. Our deal team gets crushed when I return from a run of back-to-back conferences. I could imagine it would be the same thing for enterprise sales and healthcare IT.
In cases like ours, if you can speak/moderate at a conference you have the social proof to pitch to your customers horizontally rather than pitching up. Moreover, once you get one or two speaking/moderating gigs under your belt it's really easy to get more (Point to previous track record) as conference organizers are typically sourcing speakers/moderators from previous conferences. I also watch for new conferences like a hawk, and fire off emails offering to speak/moderate for anything that looks like it will have our audience. And the best thing about it is that you won't have to pay. Final tip, if you have a content marketing channel (We created AgFunderNews.com) you can offer to promote the conference in exchange for some media placement of your own. Again, a big $$ saver.