The right way to sell at a conference

How to make the most of your time without being too pushy or salesy

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Most people don’t know how to sell at a conference. Some of them attend sessions, meet a handful of people, and then go home with a few business cards. Others take things too far in the other direction, getting in potential clients’ faces to pitch them something, and in doing so, completely piss them off. It’s really hard to strike the right balance. No wonder most people don’t think conferences work!

Today I’d like to shed some advice on how I’ve been able to make conferences work for me. I’ve been doing this for years, and I just got back from CLOC last week (see my recap here) so a lot of this is fresh in my mind. I don’t do all of these things perfectly, but I did see other savvy business development professionals deploy some of these strategies really well. Which inspired this post.

In short, some key themes among the most successful sellers include: (1) connecting on LinkedIn right away; (2) being aware of potential clients’ limited time; (3) going broad not deep; and (4) engaging in conversations, and not pitching. I know I’m only scratching the surface here, but hopefully you get an idea or two that will be useful for your next conference.