So what gets you more high-quality leads and ultimately business — smaller, more “intimate” industry events? Or massive ones like Dreamforce, Inbound, SaaStr, Shoptalk, RSA, Money 20/20 etc?
It’s a question especially a lot of marketers with slashed or limited budgets discuss a lot on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
🙅 But — it’s the wrong question.
👉 Here’s the right question: where are your customers? And your top prospects? Wherever they are, both digital and IRL — go there. Be there. Ideally, in force.
There is no question the ideal event in theory is just you and you alone … plus 50-100 of the very top prospects in the world. Just the 50-100 of you. No one else.
The problem is zero small events are like this — unless you create them yourself. And you should create them yourself. Do your own steak dinners and a mini-roadshow, do 6-8 of these a year. And invite all your top customers and prospects. This is great and always works.
But doing your own steak dinners and roadshows, while very valuable, has an inherent limitation. The only folks that show up are those in your own network. And only a subset even there. Too many folks somehow miss this.
Your own events and dinners just can’t attract leads and prospects that aren’t already in your network in some fashion.
Ones that aren’t in your network just aren’t going to come to your steak dinner. More on that here:
🛩️ But your top prospects out of your own network >do< go to the top events in their industry. And often just 1-2 a year.
If they are at smaller events, even better. Go there. But in general, they go to the biggest ones. They go to Reinvent and Dreamforce. And yes, Shoptalk for e-commerce and SaaStr Annual for SaaS, Money 20/20 for fintech, etc. Not everyone goes. But a critical mass goes to the biggest in the industry.
Our data shows it. We do small, smaller, medium and large events. The medium ones are probably the most fun. SaaStr APAC in Singapore was great at 1,200 attendees, and SaaStr Europa at 3,000 really is more fun in some ways than SaaStr Annual at 10,000 attendees. But the best leads, the best prospects, the most buyers … go to the flagship. Our sponsors at our flagship event just plain get the most deals,the most revenue, the most contacts, the highest quality and highest volume of leads:
Field marketing and events are a pain. They are a lot of work, a lot of travel, a lot of energy for leads that often take months or even years to close.
But the playbook does work. There’s a reason 40% of marketing budgets go to field and events. Because your buyers and customers go there.
And before you say Smaller is Better, or even Bigger is Better, think instead: where are my prospects and customers?
And just be there. That should be your field marketing strategy.
And even if you don’t believe in events, at least be at the 1 or 2 your customers all go to. At least be there. And go all-in. Don’t just send an SDR that started last year. Commit as deeply as you can. If you do, you’ll see.
And that’s why at the end of the day, as most B2B vendors scale and scale up their field marketing budgets, they tend to pursue one of two strategies. Either they are at everything, i.e. 40-300+ events a year, because their customers are at so many places. And because they do so many, they spread their budget wide. Or they go really, really big at 2-3 top industry events. And go all-in. Because their top prospects and customers are there.
