Testing your positioning at conferences

There’s just nothing like a face-to-face conversation for testing your positioning. And the advantage of conferences, if you’ve selected them right, is that you’ll get to have a high volume of conversations with people in your target market, one right after the other.

Which is why conferences are an excellent place to test your positioning, and make adjustments when things aren’t working. You can easily tell when someone doesn’t get it when you talk about your project/product — and likewise, you can easily tell when the lightbulb goes off and you have a productive conversation.

In fact, I’ve had a fair number of clients who reached out either right after a conference or right before a conference, because either they’d noticed people not understanding the project/product or not understanding its value, or because they realized they had no idea what they should talk about during the upcoming conference.

If you’re trying to A/B test some ideas, though, you should know what they are before the conference starts. Because while theoretically you can make adjustments on the fly, in practice you’ll likely be too busy to think through how you should be changing things. So prepare, and know ahead of time the hypothesis you’re testing.

Ideally, you’ll be able to connect both your positioning and your conference attendance to specific revenue — someone who came to talk to you, got it immediately and then ultimately became a paying customer. This happens, and you obviously want to track it. But especially for larger deals, the revenue is a lagging indicator that you’re doing something right. So track not just the revenue, but how conversations go, whether or not you get blank stares, how many people seem like legitimate leads.

And if you’re looking for a general formula for measuring the ROI of going to tech conferences, Matt Yonkovit has an excellent video on the subject.