More than a Souvenir and a Suntan:
What Your Organization Expects You to BringBack from the Conference
by Lynne Waymon, co-author of Strategic Connections:
The New Face of Networking in a Collaborative World (AMACOM, 2015)
You spot an interesting looking conference, one that touts cutting edge tools and strategies and promises world renowned experts in your field. And it’s in Florida in January! What could be better?
But when your boss sees your request, she thinks, “Hmmmmm. Jake wants $4,568 and he’ll be gone for 4 days. What’s that gonna get me?”
The answer is BringBack. Valuable business intelligence. New contacts. Fresh insights. Big ideas. Unique perspectives. Hot information. The latest trends. Renewed relationships with clients, peers in other companies, and valued vendors.
But here’s the rub: How can you collect the best BringBack and then disseminate all that good information to the right people in your organization – the ones who can really use it?
Her are 3 tips for making your conference-going worth the time and money your boss spends on your January jaunt to Florida.
1. Design your own session. Before the conference, contact, a speaker, a leader, and expert, or a counterpart in a similar organization. Invite this person to a meal. Jake wrote to one of the speaker’s on the program and suggested lunch the day after Jake was slated to speak. Jake promised to bring 2 or 3 other “fans” – all people he thought the speaker would like to know to expand his network.
2. Volunteer for a job. Helping out makes it easy to meet people, gain professional visibility, mingle with the leaders, and build a vast network. Choose your job carefully so that it helps you, not hides you in a back room. Tim volunteers to peic up the general session keynoter at the airport. He had no idea that he’d be chauffeuring – and chatting with – Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo.
3. Agree to split up. If others from your organization are going, decide in advance not to attend the same sessions and hang out with each other constantly. Susan, Don, and Sumit covered as many sessions as they could, then planned how to present the best ideas to their colleagues when they got back home.
