How to Attend a Conference « Trevor McKendrick

This is post #5 of my 10 post series on my first year in the App Store. Previous posts:My First Year in the App StoreHow to Find a Profitable Niche – Part IHow to Find a Profitable Niche – Part IIWhat Everyone Should know about Contracting Developers

I recently attended Expolit, a conference focused on the Spanish Christian publishing industry. My goal was to get licensing rights to books and study guides to sell as in-app purchases inside our mobile apps.

By way of background, the conference is a place where publishers can pitch their newest and buid relationships with distributors. It’s a tight-knit community. While I do speak spanish, I’m completely new to the industry. I didn’t know a soul when I arrived to Miami. I just got my badge and started talking to people.

Since the conference ended May 5 I’ve closed one licensing deal and have multiple others in the works.

Know exactly what you want You need to have specific strategic goals for the conference, or else WTF are you attending?

For us, we wanted to meet the digital rights managers of every publisher in attendance. Our goal was to start the process of licensing digital content to sell inside our mobile apps.

Make them sell to you When I first arrived I walked in and immediately went to the publisher booths.

I energetically introduced myself and Salem Software. I told them our story, what we do (digital study software), etc. Some people were nice and opened up, others kind of just listened and then didn’t ask any questions of their own. Like a bad date.

Once I was more tired I found myself slowly walking by booths, gradually perusing all the booth had to offer. Sometimes I’d pick up an example book and thumb through it.

This changed everything.

Suddenly the publisher was coming up to me and selling me on their products. “We just released a new…” or “have you seen this…?” They were trying to convince me I should listen to them.

This was extremely powerful. I did in fact want to hear what they had to say, so I’d eagerly listen and ask questions. When they were done I’d ask if I could tell them what we do, and they’d also happily say yes. Boom, I had my audience.

This was the perfect introduction. Instead of me approaching them overenthusiatically and scaring them away, I could build a relationship by genuienly listening to them first. By the end of those conversations we were great friends, with specific followup steps agreed to.

Track your conversations Anyone who has been to a conference knows you talk to hundreds of people and collect way too many business cards. By the end you look back at all those cards and can’t remember the person’s face, let alone all the details of your conversation.

Instead, at the end of every night I’d go back to my hotel room and write down in my Google Doc the name of each person, their organization name, and details of what we talked about. This is huge!

Now when I email people to followup I can refer to specific details from our conversation. I can mention who introduced us, where we met, which products we talked about, etc.

I can practically guarantee they will not be doing the same tracking, so they’ll be reeling to remember who you are when they see your email. Helping them remember you as a human being who had a real conversation with them goes a long way torwards getting your email read.

Experiment with your message My initial story when I approached publishers was the something along the following:“We’re Salem Software and we make Bible study software for mobile devices. We focus 100% on native Spanish speakers because we believe they’re a neglected demographic. This is natural since most companies do English first, then Spanish as an afterthought. We also sell other Christian books and content in our mobile app store.”

About two sentences in I’d lost them. I thought they would care that we focused on Spanish speakers. I was wrong.

I started experimenting with the message, but ultimately it all came down to one line:

“We do digital distribution.”

Now they knew exactly how we could work together and what I was looking for. If they had more questions about our business and who we are, great, but first and foremost they had the context for what we do.

Stand out Again, people are not going to remember you, so you must do your best to stand out.

This is really hard though as you must balance a fine line. If you’re new and try to stand out too much you’ll look dumb and people won’t trust you.

Honestly for me all I had were really nice, simple business cards. That didn’t do a lot, but it at least made me proud and confident when I gave them out.

The best example of standing out I saw was from a little booth in the corner. Every person they had a decent conversation with, myself included, they’d take their picture with them.

When they followed up to me via email they attached the picture, and I immediately remembered who they were and the conversation we had. It worked really well.

Now, taking a picture with everyone might be weird in some settings. Be careful. Figure out something that works for your personality and your industry and do that.

Be humble I pride myself on speaking Spanish well. While I haven’t stayed as fluent as I’d like, I’m still pretty good and like to practice as much as I can. In some instances if I find the right person to talk to I can even “show off” by using idioms and expressions that most foreigners don’t know.

So when I arrived at the conference I really wanted to speak Spanish the entire time. Some conversations went really well, but others I struggled to effectively communicate. On top of that, nearly every digital licensing rep I spoke to was bilingual anyways, even if English was their second language.

About halfway through I bit the bullet. Any person who I absolutely needed to get to know I’d speak to in English. They understood me and Salem Software better, and I felt more confident.

This was hard because I love speaking Spanish. I love impressing native Speakers with all the expressions and slang that I know. But ultimately I had to eat some humble pie and stick to my mother tongue. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have built the relationships necessary to achieve our goals.

Break bread The two people I had dinner with are the two I feel closest to after the conference. There’s something about eating together outside of a typical “work” environment that helps people loosen up. You don’t even have to drink ( we didn’t).

After the Conferenece Once the conference is over there are other things to keep in mind:

Follow up As the small company doing the asking it falls upon us to do all the follow up. Duh.

You want to do this soon after the conference, but it doesn’t have to be immediately. Some people will still be recovering from the exhausting week away, or they’ll already be inundated with emails from other people they met.

I started emailing my new contacts 4 days after the conference. I don’t know if this was the perfect move vs emailing them right after the conference, but it’s worked so far.

Don’t worry if they’re slow After emailing folks I didn’t hear back from many of them and kind of started freaking out. What if the entire conference was a waste!

Lo and behold, people at big organizations have a lot to do, and so are a little slower to respond. No big deal.

For everyone that I hadn’t heard back from I sent another email a week later basically saying “Hey I wanted to check in since I hadn’t heard from you. I hope you’re recovering from Expolit.”

The next day I suddenly had a ton of emails waiting for me from all these big publishers. People’s answers all varied, between “I was still on vacation” to “I’ve still trying to get caught up from the conference.” Many even apologized!

The point is, don’t freak out if they don’t respond initially. And definitely don’t pester them with a bunch of emails asking what happened. Be emotionally mature and wait. You have to take their culture into consideration.

Track your emails For every contact I met I also have a field for where we are in the licensing process. Have I emailed them? Have they responded? Have they sent me a contract? Etc. This all goes in the same Google Doc.

Without it I’d have to reread every email chain to remember who the person is, where we are in the deal, what they need from me, etc. This is a huge pain and I’m surprised a product doesn’t exist to solve it, but it’s so worth tracking.

Conclusion The jury is still out on whether we’ll close all the licensing deals we like. But so far this conference has been a success for us.

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