Hijacking B2B Industry Events

Why startups shouldn't just follow the rules.

“Do you think Tommy Lee sat around and waited for the bus? Man, he hustled.”

If you’ve made the decision that attending industry events is a worthwhile initiative for your business, there’s some factors you should consider.

From a sales and marketing perspective, most playbooks for trade shows, conferences, and expos will tell you the exact same thing.

That is: they guide you to conform to the established rules of engagement.

If you’re exhibiting, that means all the fundamental stuff like defining what you want to get out of it, budgeting, planning, logistics, etc. Plus:

  • Developing an event ‘theme’

  • Promoting your presence to your prospects and customers

  • Organising the flashiest booth you can afford so you can ‘peacock’ alongside everybody else (don’t forget the gimmicky freebie)

  • Hosting “official” networking events (and attending them)

  • Announcing your latest product release or partnership

  • Optimising the MarOps and SalesOps shit out of it

  • Following up on leads like your life depends on it

If you’re attending the event, the established rules mean:

  • “Working the floor” — patrolling the event space to find prospects and stakeholders to build rapport with and deliver your message

  • Contacting prospects to lockdown 1:1 meetings

  • Flinging around business cards like confetti at a wedding

  • Attending key networking events

Plus, you know, maybe joining a panel or two.

The problem with all of this?

Playing by the rules puts you at a disadvantage.

To illustrate this point, let’s start with a provocative quote:

“Everything nowadays is done for the show management, not for the exhibitors. The only other ones to get anything out of trade shows are the hotels and the prostitutes.”

Burton Salomon, Harvard Business Review

Wanna take a guess when Burton Salomon said that? 1983. Eons ago.

There’s still truth to this.

Let’s think about it critically, for a moment.

Events are systems designed by their organisers and supporting ecosystem of vendors to extract the most money from exhibitors and attendees as possible.

This collective group are the consistent main benefactors of events. It’s not peanuts were talkin’ here — convention patrons spent $9.1 billion in Las Vegas alone last year.

It’s genius, really. Event organisers convince hordes of highly-competitive companies to ‘get in the ring’ and duke it out for attention in confined and crowded physical spaces. These companies gleefully fork over wads of cash for the intoxicating lure of unfettered access to a high-concentration of best-fit prospects.

It’s a very visual and intense physical manifestation of choice and competition that can dilute perceived differentiation, to an exhibitor’s disadvantage. Booths and sponsorships viscerally anchor competition closer together in the minds of prospects.

The suggested lever to get attention — funnily enough — is to spend more with the event organiser and supporting ecosystem of vendors. Particularly, through mechanisms that enable exhibitors to shout louder as oppose to talking smarter.

That means renting bigger exhibition space and hotel suites, levelling up booth displays, sponsoring a ton of stuff, hosting “official” networking events, and many, many, other upsells.

Guess where this ‘shout louder‘ incentivised system leads? Up and to the right.

Each year, to get noticed, exhibitors need to spend more to be ever noisier. Event organisers and vendors are more than happy to spoon-feed pricey options — that generally pit exhibitors against one another and accelerate the cycle — to achieve this.

The merry-go-round keeps on spinning one year to the next, with exhibitors mesmerised by the ride itself and not so much on whether there are other better rides to consider.

Now, if you are merely attending the event and are not exhibiting, you are still at a disadvantage by complying with these tacit rules.

You’re still on the merry-go-round, confined to operating on the terms dictated by the event organiser. Especially if you go into ‘conference mode’ and act similarly to everybody else.

The problem with this is that you’re much more likely to blend in and not make an enduring impact in the minds of your prospects.

You’re one of many faces wandering about a noisy venue with a name tag.

You’re one of thousands of visitors funnelled into highly-distracting, contrived environments setup and paid for by exhibitors who are desperate to get noticed.

You’re one of 100 people your prospect spoke to that day in the same physical space as everybody else. Conversation memories blur. Distinction withers.

Do you want to buy the standard ticket, the VIP ticket, or the super-duper ‘all access’ ticket to help overcome this?

99% of business cards end up in the trash.

Is playing by the rules a complete waste of time?

No. But, that’s not the right question to ask.

Playing by the rules can deliver results, for sure (it can also bomb).

Let’s be clear. Events do provide meaningful net value gain in certain contexts. Particularly if the company’s value proposition is differentiated and those peddling it are f**king on it.

But, as I said before, such results come from a disadvantaged position.

This disadvantage has an outsized impact on B2B startups who aren’t yet known in the marketplace. Their tendency to be ignored subconsciously or otherwise is much higher. It’s an uphill fight, particularly if you don’t have the resources or capacity to utilise playing by the rules effectively.

The leaders of established categories have the largest centre of attention gravity, propped up by the whopping ($hundreds-of-thousands to $multi-million dollar) budgets they plough into their presence. Money creates noise.

The right question to ask, therefore, is how as a B2B startup do you maximise the event opportunity? How do you tip the scales in your favour? So results increase and costs decrease. So you’re not leaving mind equity and pipeline on the table. So you punch through.

You do that by breaking out of the “official channels” and premium-priced pathways that event organisers present to you.

Doing your own thing. Being creative.

Hijacking

Being creative in this context means figuring out how to hijack the event.

What do I mean by “hijacking”? Finding novel methods to anchor against the attention focus and equity of the event in the minds of prospects through guerrilla tactics — via unofficial channels that cost a fraction of official channels and deliver more impact.

It is hijacking in the sense you are ‘stealing’ part of the event’s value without buying a ticket to do so. Think of it as event interaction arbitrage.

Principles of hijacking

  1. 🌟It must be novel

  2. 😮 It must be impactful

  3. 🧠It must be memorable

  4. 💡It must mirror your Positioning

  5. 💵It must be low-cost (if it doesn’t work out it doesn’t hurt)

This first principle is the hardest to pull off. You generally need to find a novel tactic for each event (next time your competitors will copy what you did). But, there are some tricks to get around this. For example, by making yourself the novel element so the tactic isn’t commoditised.

What I generally look for are tactics to engage prospects through methods that create a differentiated mental distance, separating the perceived execution of the tactic with the general noise of the event.

Sponsorship and advertising can be a part of the mix, but only if it is inexpensive, has PR value, and/or flexes the Positioning in a uniquely impactful way. If it doesn’t have these traits, it’s not a hijack.

So, what are some example tactics?

Unofficial events

For sometime, it’s been a popular tactic to host “off-site” private events adjacent to the main venue. These come in all flavours — lunches, dinners, parties, excursions — with various kinds of tempting bait to get people there.

This is a pretty obvious tactic, but I am often surprised how many B2B startups don’t do something similar but on a much more scaled down and lean basis.

Whereas the big players can hire out a hot new club and handover their credit card to the bartender, a startup can find strength in the opposite: by hosting a close, intimate, event.

It’s a controlled space, with no competition or distractions, and an opportunity to be more authentic and dial down the elevator pitch.

At my second B2B startup (an adtech business called Yavli) one tactic we utilised in this regard was hosting dinners or drinks. This was usually just a handful of people (less than 10). The beauty of this approach means you can be hyper-focussed with who you choose to invite.

This size also means you can make a massive impact on the minds of guests, by having meaningful conversations with everyone.

To bait people there, you can pick somewhere exciting to eat or drink. It doesn’t have to be crazy expensive — it could be somewhere novel or personal to you in some way. A story behind it makes it interesting.

The main techniques we used were:

  • The ‘hub and spoke’ technique — we’d initially invite one prospect or customer who was a reliable “yes” to the RSVP and then asked them to invite their colleagues at other companies (also our prospects). This was supported by a lil’ bit of cheeky name dropping on our behalf.

  • The ‘prestigious private club’ technique — we got access to a membership at the Harvard Club in NY and invited prospects to join us for drinks. Prospects remembered this, years after the fact.

  • The ‘themed-event’ technique — we gave our event a conversational purpose connected to our value proposition. That legitimised the event and filtered out prospects who weren’t super engaged. It helps attract interest if the theme is controversial, for example if it’s an opposite theme to a core topic at the main event.

Getting the ear of journalists

Engaging with the press is something that bigger companies do a lot at events. Again, I am often surprised to the degree B2B founders and senior execs under-utilise events to build relationships with journalists.

There aren’t many contexts in which having some real, rapport building face time like this is possible (journalists tend to live out of their inboxes and most emails are very transactional in nature).

Having their ear is a way for you to publicly shape the conversation about the event in terms of how it is reported. Do you have a unique perspective to add to the conversation? This costs nothing, except time.

Guerilla ads

This year AdTechGod, a B2B media brand, got a ton of high-signal exposure from running DOOH (digital out of home advertising) placements around major adtech events such as POSSIBLE and AdExchanger.

Not only did the ad appear in an engaging context (e.g. a cab ride on the way to the event) in front of thousands of attendees, it also generated a bunch of mentions from ‘influencer’ adtech execs on social media due to its timeliness and novelty. Endorsed exposure like this is invaluable to building a brand.

Here’s one example:

You can run a campaign like this with AdLib easily. You don’t need to be a media buying expert or have a massive budget to pull it off.

They do all the heavy lifting in terms of setting it up (flighting, building the creative). You just need to provide them with the appropriate copy, images (from your website will do), and the event you want to target. You’ll need a budget of at least $500.

Guerilla stunts

Through PRovoke, Marc Benioff — CEO and co-founder of Salesforce — hired a bunch of actors to accompany him outside a Siebel User Conference and campaign for the “End of Software”.

“Software” in this context meaning you had to physically install it (the old fashioned way!) The purpose of this was to position legacy CRM leader Siebel as outdated. Their software was hard-install versus Salesforce’s cloud CRM.

Everything was staged . Not a single person was really there to protest. The 25 hired protesters shouted “death to software” and passed out invitations to Salesforce’s launch party in an adjacent venue that evening (perfect timing for the hijack).

The party and protest made Salesforce not only the talking point of the Siebel User Conference but also of national media. The story was covered in over 100 articles, including the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and The New York Times. Within two weeks Salesforce had over 1,000 sign ups.

This PR campaign is straight out of the Edward Bernays playbook.

Guerilla sponsorship

At Saastr Annual, B2B FinTech startup Brex sponsored the key cards for hotel rooms. The key cards were designed to look like Brex cards.

What was smart about this:

  1. They keycards weren’t an official option to be sponsored, so Brex pitched it as an idea and got a cheap deal.

  2. The hotel card mirrored the physical experience of owning a Brex card. When an attendee got their key card and slotted it into their wallet, it looked and felt like a Brex credit card. It mirrors the Positioning and conditions the prospect to the idea of owning it.

These are just a few examples. There’s plenty of things you can do. Be creative!

BONUS

Think strategically about the types of events you are attending.

Are there any you could attend that would make you more visible to best-fit prospects, simply by showing up and engaging with them?

Many startups start off with a narrow view of the types of events they should attend; i.e. those that are exactly within the industry in which they operate, or, for which it’s generally accepted that most industry vendors should attend.

At the various B2B companies I have been involved with, we’ve often discovered events in which we could show up and be more visible because other vendors — particularly competitors — had a low presence.

For example: When I was building Yavli there was an event called AdOps, which at the time was exclusively for professionals in advertising operations (our target prospects). Adtech vendors, like us, were not allowed to buy tickets.

We were able to attend because if you sponsored the event in some way, you automatically got tickets. It was like backdoor access. We bought the cheapest sponsorship available and stretched the limit of the ticket allocation that came with it, meaning it cost the same as simply buying the tickets.

We jokingly called this the “fox in the hen house” play.

Another example: Again, when I was building Yavli, we didn’t just limit ourselves to adtech events. Our prospects would attend other types of events — such as Gamescom, a gaming event — where adtech vendor penetration was low. From the perception of prospects, it was novel that we were there and made us look bigger.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back in your inbox soon. 🤘

Martin

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