If you've ever been in that role, you know the highs and lows of repping your company at a conference.
Highs:
Lows:
When SaaS company Median (which does simple co-browsing for support teams) sponsored the SupportDriven Expo conference, they used YouCanBook.me to solve these problems.
One of the first problems Median faced was making sure they got important conversations on their calendar, in the right time zone.
Because the conference was in Portland, and Median is based out of Omaha, they needed YouCanBook.me to properly work across multiple time zones: Central (Median HQ), Pacific (Portland, where Median would actually meet with attendees), and, potentially, the time zone their booker was in if they booked before they flew out for the conference.
Derek Homann, Median's co-founder, described it like this: “My time zone was Central, theirs was something else, and we were potentially meeting in PDT. It could have been really confusing!”
💡 P.S. With YCBM, you can make conference-specific schedules that will keep you and your attendee meeting in the right time zone.
There are a million distractions at conferences and showroom floors are difficult to navigate. This makes actually meeting the people who schedule with you pretty challenging.
Median ran into this, too. “One person we met with was not looking at their calendar, so the timing was off – but we did finally meet,” Derek said.
Don't expect the people you're meeting with to be checking for email reminders – instead, when you enable SMS reminders, you can stay top-of-mind with your attendees, sending texts right when they need them.
Because so many of the conversations at the Median table were booked with YouCanBook.me, there's no challenge in finding the business card or contact info of the person. Contact info is right in their booking export and all the data they collected on the booking form is there, too.
For Median, although they spoke with leads, their most valuable conversations were with other support tools.
“We helped all kinds of attendees with tangential things to what our core product is,” Derek said. “Regardless of what we talked about, all of the conversations we had are going to have follow ups.”
Median's most valuable conversations, though, were with other support tools. Here's why:
Because Median is a tool that support agents use to see what is on their customer's screen, the most powerful use is in the help desk that agent is using. This requires a deep integration between Median and help desk tools.
Getting conversations with potential integration partners was vital to Median. And at the conference, Derek was able to foster relationships with partners that will build more growth channels.
Median manually enters their contacts from YCBM appointments into their CRM (Hubspot). If they had a huge volume of leads to enter, this could be done with a CSV bulk import into any CRM saving hours of work.
Instead of digging at the bottom of a suitcase for dusty business cards from the people you meet, a CSV export of all conversations booked through YouCanBook.me will give you the contact details for your leads, plus any questions they answer before they meet with you. This extra context can be a real help for reminding you of conversations and can be used for lead qualification.
The sheer amount of conversations you have at a conference can be overwhelming. If you're ready to try scheduling for conferences, congrats! You'll find you'll get higher-value conversations, meetings that actually happen, and easier follow ups.
As you get started, consider these tips to make your conversations more valuable:
If you want more than just lookie-loos at your booth, you'll need to attract the right kind of conversations. If you clearly state what you have to offer on your booking page, and frame it in terms of what benefits the attendee, you'll find attendees who want what you have to offer will book with you.
If you've got a team with you, add your colleagues to your scheduling page. Using YouCanBook.me's team and round robin features, attendees can either choose to speak with the team member of their choice or can be assigned the best available at the time chosen.
Instead of booking just one person from your team, attendees can book with the best person on your team based on their availability.
Email, calendar event reminders, and SMS are your friends when you're ensuring people show up to chat at your booth. With YouCanBook.me, you can create the right kind of reminders. Attendees will know where to meet with you, when, and what they should prepare for. And they'll get these reminders in the right context.
Instead of just sending email reminders, consider adding information about how to find your booth on the confirmation page after someone books.
Once the conference is over, make sure you follow up with your leads you spoke with.
Exporting your leads and their answers from the booking form is just a few clicks. From there, you can import the CSV into your CRM, an email marketing or marketing automation tool, or you can go old school and send one-off emails (with the assurance of knowing you're not losing anyone's contact info).
Ready to use YouCanBook.me for your next conference? Start a trial here.
If you're looking for a tool that lets you co-browse with your customers, Median offers a generous 14-day trial.