Conferences Attendance.md

Guide for conference attendees to guarantee a good performance

Preparation for the conference

• Products – be aware of the products you will be responsible for on the Progress booth

• Get familiar with products highlights

  • talk to the responsible people from your and other product lines - coordinate in advance with them about what is the latest and greatest in their offerings/portfolio, what is modern, trendy, important, ask them about what to brag, advertise and which apps and demos to present most so that you can get well prepared to the conference and be able to answer the questions like what’s new, what’s coming and what are our future plans.

    Points of contact: your direct manager, the Product Manager and the managers/senior staff of the respective products you represent

  • Review product, roadmap, and what’s new pages.

  • Review any new (still unreleased) demos available on the staging demos to find more information of the components we are about to release soon.

  • You must be able to talk about our brands and know what is behind them - behind Telerik and Kendo.

  • Learn what the prices of the bundles and what is included in each one. It is handy to have a bookmark of our bundles page. It can be used to present them to potential customers and/or use it as a cheat-sheet.

• Equipment: Equip yourself with a demonstrational device (laptop/tablet/phone). If you do not have a company one, request it from the admins.

  Tip 1: The laptop should be powerful enough to build code and run demo apps
  Tip 2: The device should have HDMI or Display video ports appropriate for connection to a presentation TV.

• Installations:

  • Install the demos of the products you represent.

  • Install a suitable IDE like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, NotePad++

  • Install the required frameworks to run the demos like .NET, SQL, other

  • Create bookmarks in the browser to the live demos, sample apps and documentations of:

    • Blazor (demo) (docs)
    • Kendo jQuery (demos) (docs)
    • MVC (demos) (docs)
    • Core (demos) (docs)
    • Kendo Angular (demos)
    • Kendo React (demos)
    • Vue (demos) (docs)
    • AJAX (demos) (docs)
    • For other product lines, for example, the Reporting, desktop and mobile, the Theme Builder visit the View All Products page.

  • Create shortcuts to the installed demos on the desktop

• Review Conference-related resources – check the conference’s website and the agenda, learn how to get to the venue, check what type of developers will attend it, what is the code of conduct, and when the opening and first session start.

  Once you review the agenda and pick up the sessions you’d like to attend, share your preferences with your colleagues, negotiate with them and prepare a booth attendance schedule that will secure that we have enough folks to cover the product lines and the visitors during the sessions and in the breaks.

  Make sure that the booth is:

  • Never empty and there are enough people from our side to cover it
  • Not overcrowded with Progressors especially during the coffee breaks when more visitors come by to ask questions.

• Business Cards - Consider with your Manager the need for Business Cards for the trip. Request it via Ask.Progress after approval.

At the booth

Engage with Event Attendees - the main goal of engaging with attendees is to understand their profile, the company they work for, short-term needs (pain) and budgets, and to promote awareness of our products.

In simple terms: create product awareness and determine whether the person has a need a UI library.

Be Proactive - don’t wait for them to approach you – be proactive and engage with them!

Be positive – reach out to the visitors with a smile.

Below you can find a set of questions, as a script, to go over when engaging with an attendee (keep in mind that you can improvise by following the direction and the idea in order to collect as much important information as you can by keeping the conversation in a professional and positive manner).

An attendee stops for a bit by the booth looking at the banners, swag, video, want to participate in the raffle, etc.

Scenario 1 – prospect is willing to chat with you

1. How do you like the conference? Any particular session you found interesting?
2. That sounds interesting. So what do you do? Does your company do application development?
3. What kind of applications do you usually develop? (web, mobile, desktop)? Do you develop the UI internally or use any third-party components?
   1. if yes, have you heard of us? Progress / Telerik / Kendo UI?
      1. If not, - explain that we provide UI components, Reporting and developer productivity tools for .NET and JavaScript developers
      2. If yes – oh really, that’s great! Which product are you using (have used)? Are you satisfied with them? Any feedback you might want to share?
         What is your experience with the products?
         What kind of technology / framework are you using?

Scenario 2 – prospect is not willing to talk (“I have to go”...”I’m just looking”...) or there is a crowd waiting

If at any point the prospect clearly does not want to talk anymore and is about to leave, jump right to the swag part.

1. Ask as many questions from Scenario 1 as you can before it is clear they do not want to talk.
2. O.k. - before you go, would you like some swag? We have t-shirts and some cool stuff (list and show it).
3. Give the swag along with a products flyer.

Badge scanning - everyone who visits the booth is scanned and their contact is kept, and marked as a cold, warm, hot lead. Usually for that purpose on the different events there are scanner apps.

Here is a question you can ask: Would you mind scanning your badge to register you for our raffle for the special gift. We will also send you more information about our products, services and pricing.

More Tips

• SMILE - this will ease any conversation or interaction.

• Make sure to take notes, ESPECIALLY on HOT leads since we can always forget something important.

• EVERY conversation is different, but you want to extract as much information as possible from the attendee to validate if he is in our target persona, interest, etc.

• Let the person speak more than you. Avoid being pushy.

• Listen to the visitors and try to navigate the conversation on per person basis.

• Try to handle all questions professionally even those for products you are not fully familiar with. If needed promise to discuss them with the dev team and follow-up the visitor.

• Avoid jokes - it's a risk for someone to get offended as well as to distract yourself and your colleagues.

• Setup the booth the day before the event and go early to it at least an hour before the opening session each day.

• The booth should be tidy and attractive - with arranged prizes, stickers, running demo and videos on the screens and TV(s). Avoid bringing any food or drinks.

• Keep an eye on competitors’ booths – whether they are more crowded, better looking and well-arranged and why. Visit the competitors booths too and take some swag and advertising materials, talk with their folks, and try to learn something interesting or new for their products, marketing, licensing, plans.

• Have fun – being chosen to represent the company, the team and the product on a live event is a huge honor so don’t be shy and enjoy it to the maximum.

On return from the trip

• Bring back the precious feedback and know-how collected during the event
• Write down a conference report for the event – follow the guidance from the Conference Report Wiki page.
• Share everything important with the team