7 steps to book more meetings at tech conferences
Want to generate more leads from conferences? The work has to start before you get on the plane.
Tech conferences can be an opportunity to fill your pipeline for a full year - but they can also be a massive waste of time. There’s nothing worse than spending your week chasing down giveaway-seekers and tire kickers on the event floor.
The companies that are doing the best at tech events are the ones that treat in-person meetings as part of a larger effort to find, engage, and create relationships with technical buyers. That relationship needs to start before the event, and continue afterwards.
To make it work, you need to get there with a clear idea of who you want to meet - and ideally, a calendar full of meetings that are already locked in.
The blueprint for event success
Size (of your booth) doesn’t matter. You don’t need a 20x20 booth, expensive swag, or big experiential activations. There’s nothing wrong with these things - they can be great for long-term branding - but at the end of the day, your pipeline comes from people who actually have a problem you can solve. Identifying and engaging these folks beforehand is going to have a much bigger impact than whatever you’re doing at the booth. Our team has seen great results even with ‘zero booth’ events.
You have to start before the event. Conferences like re:Invent are extremely noisy with venues, talks, and thousands of attendees. Trying to grab the right person on the main floor, qualify them right there and then, and keeping them engaged long enough to actually remember what you’re selling is pretty much mission impossible. Instead, you want to:
- Identify the attendees you want to talk to in advance
- Start outreach days or weeks before the event date
- Arrive at the event with meetings already booked
This isn’t exactly a new insight, but most companies get it wrong (e.g., they post “we’ll be at Booth 57” on their socials and call it a day.) Here’s how to get it right:
Our 7 steps playbook
The timeline: Ideally you would want to start a few weeks before the event, but this can be compressed to a week or less. Here’s what you’ll want to do in each stage, and the tools you’ll need to get it done (more detailed version is below):
1. Find real attendees by tapping into industry discussions
The people going to re:Invent are most often technical folks who are there to hear about cloud infrastructure, data, or security solutions. To figure out who’s going to attend and what they’re after, you’ll need to tap into the channels where technical conversations are happening. This typically isn’t your LinkedIn newsfeed - it’s Slack communities, Reddit threads, Discord servers, GitHub discussions, and technical forums. By monitoring these conversations, you'll get an inside look at who’s going to attend, what problems they're trying to solve, and whether they're actively evaluating solutions.
This can be done manually, but you'll get far more coverage by automating your research. Onfire monitors 50 million engineers, 5 million daily events, and over 100,000 data sources across developer communities to surface buying intent in real time. Using the Chrome extension, you can identify re:Invent attendees and push prioritized accounts directly into LinkedIn Sales Navigator or your CRM — giving you a list of relevant technical prospects who are actually going to be there, and initial intelligence that helps start a conversation.
(Whatever you do, don’t buy a list from one of the hundred people who will email you about it. These are semi-random extracts from data enrichment tools and not based on any kind of insider knowledge.)
2. Prioritize your lists based on ICP fit and intent signals
Now that you have a list of prospects actively discussing re:Invent attendance, narrow down to accounts that match your ICP. Re:Invent only lasts five days, so you’ll want to be ruthlessly selective. Focus on accounts where you have the highest chance of advancing a deal - whether that's based on stack compatibility, company stage, or recent buying signals.
Onfire's revenue intelligence features let you filter by the criteria that matter for technical buyers: technology stack, team size, engineering org structure, and more. You can further prioritize by intent signals on the account or prospect level: have they been asking about solutions in your space? Are they adopting related open source tools?
3. Build soft familiarity through online engagement
You've selected accounts that match your ICP, so you want your outreach to land. Start by warming your list with comments on their LinkedIn posts about the event - either manually or with a tool like Extrovert. This guarantees that your prospects will see your name before you reach out. Early visibility = meaningful conversations.
4. Use direct gifting for high-value prospects
For your highest-priority prospects- those with the largest deal potential or strategic value, consider sending a personalized gift or direct mail piece using a tool like Sendoso. Stepping out of digital channels creates a memorable experience that stands out from the hundreds of LinkedIn messages your prospects are receiving.
It also triggers reciprocity: when someone receives a thoughtful gift, they're more likely to feel that tiny bit more obligated to give you the time of day. Just be selective about who gets this treatment; you want to reserve it for accounts and prospects worth the investment.
5. Personalize LinkedIn flows + emails
Now it's time to take the next step and actually reach out to prospects. You can use the information you've discovered from dev communities to make your outreach relevant by crafting highly personalized messages that relate to the prospect’s current pain point - or ask the Onfire Agent to do it for you.
In some cases you might want to do this on a prospect-by-prospect basis, but you also use the data and personalization to create automated sequences using tools like Outreach (email) or HeyReach (LinkedIn).
A few examples we’ve had success with:
1. A LinkedIn connection request referencing a specific GitHub contribution:
"Hey [Name] - saw you're heading to re:Invent and noticed your recent work on [specific GitHub project]. Would love to connect and potentially grab coffee on Day 2 if you're around."
2. A follow-up message mentioning a tool they're evaluating (discovered via Onfire):
"Thanks for connecting! I saw you've been evaluating [tool they mentioned in Slack/Discord]. We work with teams making similar decisions - any chance you have 20 min on Tuesday morning at re:Invent to chat?"
3. Email subject line:
"Quick chat at re:Invent? (saw your interest in [specific session/topic])"
6. Hit the phones
Sometimes even the most relevant messages don't get responses by email or on LinkedIn. When that happens, it's time to go old school and hit the phones. Using Nooks or a similar tool, call the prospects you haven't reached yet and see if a live conversation will get the fish to bite.
7. Day-of execution tips
A day or two before your meeting starts, send a brief text with your cell number that confirms the meeting spot — remember, the venue is huge, so be specific about the location. Then, make sure you reference your pre-work in conversations. An opening like, "I saw you mentioned struggling with [specific problem] in the [community name] Slack - is that still a pain point?" will get the ball rolling.
Note that some of your prospects will probably cancel at the last minute, so have a backup list of 5–10 prospects you couldn't schedule. Reach out immediately to let them know you've had a meeting open up and you may be able to work something out.
Turn revenue intelligence into your event growth hack
Following the steps above should give you a solid foundation for success at your next B2B tech conference. The key is to not throw your BDRs into the deep end and hope for the best - but to build systems that allow them to come to the event with a clear game plan and warmed-up prospects already lined up. Onfire gives you the tools to do this at scale, with data that’s actually relevant for technical buying journeys.
Get in touch today to discover how Onfire can completely change your approach to events and drive repeatable, provable ROI from every conference. Start here
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