Maximize Commerce Conferences: Merchant Strategies
After a few challenging years, commerce conferences are back in full swing! From Meet Magento events around the world to Adobe Summit and IRCE, which is now part of the Retail Innovation Conference & Expo, the conference calendar is full this year.
Depending on your personality, conferences may be a fun trip or a bothersome chore. However, no matter what your personality, attending a commerce conference as a merchant can be intense - you’re surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people whose companies often paid tens of thousands of dollars to put those people in touch with their target market - you! This can turn your conference experience into a week-long sales pitch from hundreds of vendors if you’re not careful. One developer I know that was working for a rather large, well known brand, brought stickers to each conference to cover up the name of his employer simply because he knew it made him a target for high pressure sales conversations even though he had no ability to make purchasing decisions.
So, how do you make the most out of a commerce conference as a merchant? With a little bit of planning, some healthy boundaries and a few suggestions I’ll provide later on, conferences can greatly further both your own knowledge & career as well as the projects you’re undertaking at work.
Pre-Conference Planning
Before you attend a conference, it’s important to define your goals and those of your employer. This sounds basic, but sitting down and making a list of the specific things that need to happen for you to consider the conference trip a personal success and clarifying with your manager what they want to see to consider the trip a success can make a huge difference in the results from the conference - and these steps can help ensure you continue to receive a budget for conference attendance in the future!
Are you considering a new ecommerce platform? Will you be selecting a major piece of technology or changing service providers? One of your goals for the conference ought to be to learn more about your options and make connections with individuals at that platform or at key potential service providers.
Are there no major technology changes in your roadmap? In that case, one of your goals could be to connect with colleagues at similarly sized brands and learn what they are doing and get a general sense of the trends that you may want to add to your roadmap.
For your personal goals for the conference, are you considering a job change? These conferences can be a great place to meet and get to know colleagues at other merchant brands that may be the very hiring manager you’ll be interviewing with in the future. If you’re happy where you are, then you may want to consider connecting with experts working for different platforms, technology providers and agencies to broaden your portfolio of experts you can reach out to whenever you’re struggling with a challenging problem at work.
Once you’ve written down your goals for the conference, start planning your schedule. If there’s key people or companies you want to meet with at the conference, reach out and put a meeting on the calendar now, in advance of the conference. With so many people to speak with, schedules can become full even before the conference begins. Once you’ve blocked out key meetings, look at the agenda and find which sessions and topics align with the goals you’ve set for the conference and add those to your schedule. But don’t schedule every minute of every day - leave some time for the hallway track. The hallway track is what frequent conference attendees call that unofficial track of ‘sessions’ that take place when different conference attendees run into each other randomly in the hallway between sessions and spark a conversation that can oftentimes deliver as much or more knowledge than any of the official sessions.
Finally, even if you’re not a heavy social media user, know that every conference has a specific social media platform that tends to be where attendees of the conference are sharing what they’ve learned and making connections. See if you can identify that that platform is for the conference you’re attending in advance - for instance, for many Magento conferences that has tended to be Twitter, with the conversation taking place around the official event hashtag on Twitter. If you can identify that platform, make sure your profile is up to date and see if you can find some of the speakers as well as key people you would like to connect with at the event and follow or connect with them on that platform.
At The Conference
With the pre-conference planning done, your experience at the conference becomes much simpler - follow your plan and pursue the goals you’ve set for the conference. Don’t be so focused on your plan, though, that you miss out on a key connection. For instance, one of the best connections I ever made at a conference that has led to nearly a decade of work together happened because of a conversation with a complete stranger over a beer at an evening event at a conference. I had other connections I planned to make that evening, but leaving some room and flexibility to allow the serendipity that can only occur from a large in-person event to happen proved to be incredibly beneficial.
Conferences are incredibly complex, expensive, risky ventures for the organizers. That expense and risk typically is offset by a large number of sponsors. Without sponsors, these conferences wouldn’t happen. However, as a merchant you also need to realize that typically the sponsors are paying for the conference for one reason - to connect with you with the goal of closing some sort of sale with you in the months following the conference. Because of this, many conferences will label, color-code or otherwise key the conference badge of merchants so that sponsors can recognize that you are a prospect even if they don’t recognize your brand or company name. If you find yourself being approached by a sponsor for a sales pitch and you aren’t interested in their product or service, simply let them know that you aren’t interested or that you have another session or meeting you need to get to and don’t have the time to talk at the moment. I used to recommend using the need to visit the restroom as a way to disengage from especially intense sales conversations — until one very hungry salesperson said “me too” and attempted to continue their sales pitch in the restroom! However, most sponsors will recognize when you aren’t interested and will appreciate a polite “no thanks” so that they can focus their efforts on other attendees that are interested in their services.
As you learn about key topics, make important connections and hear feedback from other merchants about potential platforms or providers it’s important to take notes. Even if you aren’t typically a notetaker, given how much information, how many connections and how exhausting conferences can be, without notes it’s going to be challenging to meet your goals for the conference. Notetaking and personal knowledge management would be its own article, but my recommendation is find a simple tool that works for you. Don’t try to learn a cool new knowledge management app during the intensity of a conference - stick to what you know, or something simple like the Apple Notes app that’s on every iPhone, iPad and Mac. I typically take short notes during the day and then each night or the following morning go through and expand on anything I need to expand on and make notes about next steps to take, information to share with my team back in the office, etc.
Finally, while you’re at the conference, don’t forget about social media and that one social media platform you identified during your pre-conference planning. Depending on your goals, you can use that platform during the conference to learn what’s being said in other sessions, make virtual connections that lead to an in-person meeting at the conference or even share what you’re learning in the sessions you attend to grow your reach on that platform to assist in future job hunting efforts.
Post-Conference Followup
Once you’ve returned home from a conference, it’s easy to immediately begin catching up on tasks, emails and messages that built up while you were away and quickly forget about the conference. However, the most successful ecommerce managers I know are the ones that spend a few hours after the conference completing a few steps to maximize the value they received from the conference.
First up, review your notes. I like to prepare a brief summary of the conference and key things I learned and especially any surprising new technologies, providers or trends and share it with my coworkers. This helps reinforce what you learned, helps your team learn from your experience and can help your manager see why there’s great value in continuing to send you to conferences.
Take a look at the notes you made in your pre-conference planning. Write down the progress you made towards each of the personal goals and company goals for the conference, and share those with your manager so they again see the value to the company from you attending the conference.
Then take a moment and write down any notes you’d like to use in your pre-conference planning for the next conference or the same conference next year. What worked well? What didn’t work? What do you wish you had known before attending the conference?
Don’t forget to connect on LinkedIn or any other social media platforms you’d like to use with the individuals you met at the conference so that you can stay in touch between events.
Finally, if you’re looking to expand your reach on LinkedIn, turning these items - your summary of your notes and what you learned for next year - into a post or article on LinkedIn tagged with the conference and industry related tags can not only provide value to your connections who couldn’t attend the conference, it will help you build connections that can serve you throughout your career.
If you write something like this up, please reach out to me at joshuaw@creatuity.com or contact us to share it - I’d love to read it and amplify it out to my network as well. If you’d like to connect at a conference you’re attending, reach out and let me know what conferences are on your plans for the next year and I’d love to meet up with you at one of them!
