How to Make the Most Out of Social Networking Events

Today we're going to talk about how you can maximize ROI with conferences.

But before we do, don't forget to subscribe, whatever platform you are coming from, if you want to grow faster, both professionally and personally. I was just at a conference last week in Dublin called SaaS Stock, and it was amazing. So the key thing when you go to conferences is this: you want to go to a conference that has the right gathering of people. So for me, I'm interested in SaaS. I speak at SaaS conferences, so a SaaS conference makes a lot of sense. And that's how I maximize ROI. And people actually listen, that listen to my podcast are SaaS people. And also they're, you know, different entrepreneurs, they're e-commerce entrepreneurs. When I go to these conferences, people, people will notice me. It's kind of like an inbound thing, right? Um, where I get to talk to people too. Um, but you can see where I'm hovering around. It's the first thing is people. You are going to a conference cause you're interested in a subject and there's going to be other people that are also interested too, right? So the way I maximize it, cause I'm naturally an introvert, so what I do is I make sure That I throw a dinner every time, right? Or you can do a happy hour or something like that. You can tie it with people and you might say, I don't know that many people. You know, Eric, it's easy for you to say because you kind of have a little bit of an audience. I know a guy in Toronto used to do this all the time. He would just get a bunch of entrepreneurs together. He himself, he wasn't an entrepreneur quite yet. He might be entrepreneurial, but everyone else had businesses. Everyone else, you know, kind of super successful, but he was the guy for connecting them, right?

That's how you throw these dinners.

Maybe you do it like 6 to 10 people or so. I make sure I do a dinner every single time and I can connect with people on a more personal level. And also I just make sure I get more touchpoints with people. When I went to this conference, they had a podcast stage. I happen to have a podcast, so I made sure I could do as many podcasts as possible even though I was sick. You know, I nailed in a bunch of podcasts and then, you know, 2 other people approached me too to, you know, do a quick interview with them. And, um, you know, I also, you know, pinged a bunch of people that were there. Uh, I said, hey, you know, want to meet up? Want to meet up? Like my friend David Hensel, like we just messaged each other on Facebook Messenger. And that's how we communicate. We didn't even text each other. It's like, hey, I'm at breakfast at this place. He just shows up at breakfast, right? That's how you maximize ROI. You make sure that you don't just get lost in the sea of people, but you are very intentional about who you want to meet up with. And you put events together where maybe you pay for drinks or you pay for dinner and basically you get people together. And then afterwards, if you want, you know, I think about the, the event that we did afterwards where, you know, we did ax throwing and things like that. That was an opportunity to connect with more people on a different level because you're not in a business environment anymore and you're just kind of messing around, but you're talking with each other, you're joking around with each other, you're building relationships. That's how you maximize ROI. What you don't want to do, which is negative ROI, is you go to a conference and you spend time watching all the talks. Maybe you do that in the beginning, but as your goal is to get more customers, you figure out like spend some downtime and just go chat with people. Just go network with people. I don't really like walking into a group of people that I don't know, But what I would do is I'm always, I'll always make sure that I'm with someone else. And, um, you know, from there, you know, we're kind of confident. I'm more confident to kind of approach other people and just talk to them. Right. And oftentimes I'll see people that I know and I, they'll be really far away. I'll just email them later and we'll end up getting coffee later. Even if you haven't seen someone for a couple of years, you've seen them for 5, 10 minutes or so, that goes a long way and that might lead to something else because they're in a different, you know, they might be in the market for a maybe what you offer at the time. Your job when you go to conferences is not to say, how many leads can I get?

How many cards can I get?

It's more so, how many true relationships can I build? How can I truly help people? And that's how you maximize the ROI of conferences, right? And I actually shot some videos in Dublin talking a little more about conferences and what you should and you shouldn't be doing. I'm gonna throw them into this, into this clip as well. So if you're watching on YouTube, enjoy it. There's a lot of visual stimulation. If not, you know, you're still gonna get a lot of good tips from this piece of content as well.

I'm right now, I am at SaaS Stock 2019 in Dublin, and you can see it's beautiful, right? You have a lot of different companies here. You have Salesforce behind me, you have G2 over there who's on our customer advisory board. They spoke at our conference before. You have Google next to us, we have Intercom, we have Stripe, ProfitWell, all these great companies, right? So they're all sponsoring, and what happens is a company like SaaS Stock, it's very niche, right? You have a lot of people in the space coming together to Well, learn from each other and to network, right?

Build relationships with each other.

And I hosted a dinner on Monday, right when I landed. I had a dinner that happened at 6 PM. We got to the dinner and a couple people at dinner, like, people were starting to talk to each other.

Oh, we should do something.

Oh, we should do something, right? It's the little touchpoints that happen. This is why I do podcasts in the first place. It's that one touchpoint because after you talk to them, it's like, oh, by the way, what do you do? Oh, by the way, we should do something, right? Literally yesterday, I did 6 podcast interviews on the podcast stage over there. And we did the podcast interviews and then afterwards we were like, dude, we should do something. We're trying to do this right now. Hey, who do you know? Who do you know? Right? And so it's all about helping each other. It's about the touchpoints. And you cannot beat the in-person effect of being at a conference. This is why I travel all the way to places like Dublin, to Ukraine, to— yeah, even Ukraine. Like there's people that gather together from all over Europe and we get together and we talk, we become friends. And next year we meet again. It's like, oh, by the way, you should speak at my conference. We should do something, right? So that's why I'm like, okay, even if you've never spoken before, you go speak at a small local event, and then what happens is you speak at a bigger event, bigger, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you get experience, you can do that. Or you can piggyback on other people's events too. You can, let's say it's a really big conference, you can say, oh, you know what, I want to do a happy hour that's tied to the event. Or I wanna do a conference the day before the main event, right? And that's how you build a bigger and bigger audience. But the key thing here is the in-person touchpoints. Just 'cause you were online, just 'cause you're watching this video online right now, doesn't mean that in-person goes away, because we're human. We are, well, we're social creatures by nature, all right?

So I want to share a story behind last year's SaaS Talks.

So last year, what happened was I landed and I hosted a dinner. That was the first thing, right? I had 12 SaaS founders there. We got to— there's a guy I didn't meet for— I knew him online for many years, Steli Efti from Close.com. A lot of other people there, some investors there too. Just a lot of people I normally wouldn't connect with, right? And we became friends afterwards. So that was good. That was a good touchpoint.

I covered the dinner.

And then the next thing is I spoke at the conference, right? So I did the podcast, that was more touchpoints with people, co-founder of Zendesk. And in addition to that, I spoke, right? So I spoke for about 20 minutes. Today I'm speaking at about 3:40 PM in a couple hours. But that's going on too. That's more touchpoints, more people that haven't seen me before, and then they come up to me and talk to me afterwards.

Yeah.

And then after the event, they had another event called SaaS Society. And SaaS Society, we went to this posh kind of castle And then we, you know, we went shooting, clay pigeon shooting in the morning. You know, people did whiskey tasting, we did golfing, we did a lot of different events, right? During those times, those touchpoints, I got to interact with— I became good friends with a guy named Satish and Saravana, right, who are based in London. That was quality time I wouldn't have gotten with them otherwise. On the bus ride there, we talked about— you talk about amazing things that you normally wouldn't talk about. He talked about his wife, he talked about his kids, he talked about his parents. Yesterday at dinner, I was with 2 VCs and one guy, like, you know, they're revealing all these— one guy has a yacht, right? One guy flies planes upside down and takes selfies, right? And one guy flies or drives a little mini cart. These are personal touchpoints where you are no longer— you don't have a business wall up anymore. You are interacting with them. It's a human being and humans like to do business with humans at the end of the day. And that's how you get the big deals because you have an in with these people, right? High-level executives, high-level CEOs, founders. These are people you normally wouldn't have access to, but because you do things like this, because you host the event, because you talk with them in a podcast one-on-one, and we all start from zero, right? Don't just think, oh, because I have somewhat of an audience, I have an advantage. It takes time to build there, but the best time to start is now if you have no audience at all, and then just get it going. Even if you host a happy hour or you host a dinner, it doesn't require much interaction from you, but you can be the star of it because you were the one that paid for drinks in the first place, right? So that's what we want to do. You want to get as many touchpoints as you can, open up as many opportunities for touchpoints, and then that's how you get the business at the end of the day.

All right, so I hope you enjoyed this one. Let me know of, of the different tips that I gave you, which one you enjoyed the most or what you think I missed out in terms of maximizing ROI with conferences. And, uh, don't forget to check out the next video over there. If you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe because it helps us grow and it helps you grow. And we'll see you tomorrow.