The Conference-Commando Field Manual

Stage I: Planning the Mission

Which conferences are worth going to? In an era of off-site overload, that's the obvious question to consider first. The answer: Worry less about the return on your financial investment than about the return on your time. "Forget about the registration cost," urges Samir Arora, cofounder and CEO of NetObjects Inc., a company based in Redwood City, California that sells tools for building Web sites. "The real investment at a conference is in your time. Do your due diligence, and determine if it makes sense for you to go."

Arora introduced his company's first product at PC Forum in the spring of 1996, and partly as a result, he landed partnerships and distribution deals with companies like Sun Microsystems and Netscape. "You need to be clear about your reason for going," says Arora. "Is it to debut a product, or find a distribution partner, or learn about a new subject, or schmooze with analysts? If you want publicity, you don't want to go to a conference that excludes the press. If you're going to learn, you want to make sure that there will be top-notch speakers who are giving substantive talks, not sales pitches. Review the materials, visit the conference Web site, call the organizers. And plug into your word-of-mouth network: Do people who have been to this conference before speak well of it?"

The next obvious question: Who should go? Some commandos work alone; others believe that there's power in numbers. For Susan D. Goodman, bringing colleagues to a conference accelerates learning within her company, an interactive-services firm called Think New Ideas Inc. "If you send a few people, you can cover more than one track," says Goodman, one of Think's cofounders. "You deploy your people strategically and then meet up later to talk about what you heard." Goodman also believes that for mid- and entry-level employees, conferences can serve as a condensed training program. "One of the ways we nurture younger people is by sending them to conferences. It's tough to ask people to attend a night class, but sending them to one or two conferences a year is a great reward, a great perk, and a great way to develop them. Everybody wants to learn."

Indeed, when Think New Ideas acquired Herring/Newman, a marketing agency in Seattle, Goodman found that the best way to get the agency's employees up to speed with Internet technology was to dispatch them to conferences: "They learned the language in a snap. It was a quick ramp-up for everybody there."

Even if you don't bring colleagues with you, it's a good idea to touch base with them before you leave. Circulate a copy of both the conference agenda and the exhibitor list. Someone who can't attend the conference might want a copy of your notes from a session. Someone else might want you to track down a vendor and ask a few questions, or to do follow-up work with a potential partner or customer. "You don't want to go to a conference without talking to other people in your company," says Dawn Whaley, a vice president at Alexander Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. "Are there companies that they'd like to get an update on? Potential clients to whom you should introduce yourself?"

No conference commando should leave base camp without packing the proper tools. For note taking, veterans avoid paper and rely on laptops, which allow them to file their notes in a readily accessible place and to email those notes to colleagues with ease. Similarly, a cell-phone eliminates the need to wait in pay-phone lines during breaks, or to retreat to your hotel room to check voice mail -- both of which limit networking opportunities.

Until everyone owns the latest version of the PalmPilot, it's still crucial to pack business cards. But whenever possible, IBM's John Patrick exchanges coordinates by beaming his business card from his Pilot to his recipient's PDA. And scanning their cards into his Pilot lets him avoid the task of entering their contact information into a database.

For working a big trade-show floor, some hard-core attendees bring a digital camera to take pictures of products that are not yet featured in brochures. Others, like entrepreneur Dan Bricklin, bring a compact video camera. Bricklin -- co-creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, and founder of Trellix Corp. -- uses a JVC camera to capture product demos. "I bring the tapes home to my development team, and we analyze them to understand our competitors' products better," he explains.

Finally, on the flight out to the conference, be sure to review your goals. "List the questions that you hope the conference will answer, the problems that you're trying to solve," suggests Steve Miller, a Seattle-based trade-show consultant who attends as many as 50 conferences and trade shows a year, and the author of "How to Get the Most Out of Trade Shows" (NTC Business Books, 1990). "It gets you focused on why you're going. Then you can begin working to get answers and solutions in the sessions, on the show floor, or in casual encounters with other attendees. The biggest mistake you can make is to arrive at a conference without a list of objectives: You'll spend three days just floating."