Effective Cold Approaching and Follow Up After a Conference

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1. At conferences of this magnitude everyone is meeting a ton of people. Business cards are exchanged and sometimes you can meet 50 people in one day. “You have to assume that everyone you meet is getting 50-100 follow up emails from people asking for their time after the conference.” One strategy I like to employ is called callback humor. The idea is to find something funny or unique that you bonded over in a conversation and use that as an anchor in your follow up. A lot of times this happens naturally, but these situations can be engineered when you find someone you want to meet with whom you want to set aside time for a future date.

   In Events and field touches

2. The best way to get an in touch with someone like this is through an intro. But a lot of times this route isn’t available…and there can be value in getting some face time at an event like a conference. “If you find yourself in this situation, one move I like is to approach the person you want to talk to and say something like the following:” Hey John, I know you probably have to run right now, but I really want to talk to you about what we’re doing with my company X. I’m going to send you an email tomorrow and, if it makes sense, we can set up some time to chat about it over the phone.

   In Handling declined introduction requests

3. One challenge in these brief interactions is creating enough rapport that someone will want to hop on a call with you in the future. You have to assume that everyone you meet is getting 50-100 follow up emails from people asking for their time after the conference. “The idea is to find something funny or unique that you bonded over in a conversation and use that as an anchor in your follow up.” Here is an example of callback humor:

   In Post-event follow-up