Filling Your Event Calendar with Prospects using LinkedIn
If you've ever wondered how to fill your calendar with high-value meetings at trade shows, you're not alone. Here's a proven strategy to maximize your next trip for unbeatable ROI.
Events play a substantial role in growing almost any business.
But if you are expanding to a new market or covering a regional seat at some high-ticket sales organization, trade shows and conferences play an even greater role.
You planned that expensive trip and are determined to make it worth. But, how do you fill the calendar with meetings with potential clients and partners for your business?
You need to go outbound!
Preferably way before the event week. I would like to do it somewhere between 4 - 6 weeks before the event.
The speakers and the event agande are almost set, and you can have a glimpse at the participating companies and sponsors.
For the next few lines I am going to take Websummit’s chapter in Qatar as an example.
Tools
Browse.ai for scraping
Apollo.io for contact enrichment
LinkedIn (and email) for the outreach
💡Protip: Make sure your email reputation is good enough to land in that inbox, and not in the wasteland of the “Promotion Inbox” (or worse, in Spam). This is generally a complicated process, but you could at least run mail-tester.
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Now, let’s get to it.
Prospecting
The above screenshot is from my Chrome browser, where I am looking at the event’s homepage. I am helping Browse.ai to identify where to look for a “full name”, a “title” or a “company name”.
The reason I do this is to scrape the speakers list from the website. There are about 50 speakers with whom I could possibly book an appointment.
These could be 15-min coffee table discussions where you and them could exchange what is the agenda for the next couple of months and whatever your organization brings to table.
Save this list as a CSV, it will be handy when you upload them to Apollo.
In a very similar way, you can approach the sponsors - this time you would not be looking at a contact list, but a list of companies which you can later enrich with your relevant audience (aka your Ideal Customer Profile).
Data Enrichment
Apollo.io is one of the good-value-for-the-money prospecting tools out there. I am going to use it to enrich the previous CSV with prospects data.
This is what a data enrichment report looks like.
Out of my 49 records (of prospects) 27 got an email and, 31 a LinkedIn URL. This is pretty decent - given that I have not done any manual prospecting. With some extra LinkedIn search you can easily up the data to 75-80%.
Look for that trigger
You are attending the same event as the speakers are attending, obviously. But let us look for a trigger that is likely to stand you out from the crowd.
A trigger in prospecting terms is a digital print or an indication that your service (in this case, expertise) is needed.
Here are my two triggers ie. my value proposition for the speakers to meet me:
I am representing an organization that has previously partnered with several other companies from the very same vertical.
I can hear them say ”you are offering a partnership program that I am not aware of but my competitors are? Sign me up for that meeting.”
My organization is hosting targeted meetups where the target account and us can meet a shared audience. Speakers often represent private organization hence they are open for such visibility and PR opportunities.
The message
Whether a direct message, a short email or a LinkedIn comment below your prospect’s post, the message should be very simple and spark curiosity. Much like as a startup founder meeting investors on an Investor Speed Dating, all you initially look for is the investor’s time. That is all.
As long as the value is there, there is going to be a follow-up meeting after the dust of the trade show settles.
Conclusion
With a proper LinkedIn strategy, you are one step ahead of competition in building an effective event meeting planning.
The tools that I used offer paid plans but what I did for this article was all within their free plans.
Meeting event speakers is only one of the many funnels that you can build on LinkedIn purely.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of tactics you can deploy to bring the most out of your LinkedIn presence:
Connect with your clients who attend a competitor’s LinkedIn event
Use LinkedIn Groups to filter a large prospect fool to fit your persona
Use LinkedIn job alerts to pitch your small business to organizations
Post comment and mentions for sparking brand new conversations with your clients
Generate content in your field of expertise that resonates with decision makers in those industries… and many more.
My Journey in LinkedIn Outreach
In 2020, I paid for a training by Patrick Collins, Prospect Labs. A decision that would give me the push to later turn the outreach engine on.
2021: I hired a LinkedIn outreach agency with a 4.9 star rating on Trustpilot. After seeing what they were doing, I knew that what I have learned until now was better value.
This have gotten me to get my hands dirty, and start planning outreach myself…
After 2021, I started building outreach engines for companies like Cointelegraph Turkey and Sweephy.
For every company I consulted, I added outreach and LinkedIn content to the strategy in order to help increase results - what were those results? Completely new funnels that led to many opportunities and closed deals.
Around 2023, I have started a coaching program called LinkedIn Success Coach where we deep dive into campaign results and optimize messaging, prospect lists, and outreach sequences.
Now I serve solopreneurs and emerging companies to help them build outreach engines that convert to keep a steady flow of prospects.