Conrey is for Closers

The Integrum team is at Rails Conference 2009 in Las Vegas this week so I’m posting from there through Thursday night:

Todays nugget: Valuable tips for salesmen at an industry conference:

• Enjoy yourself – have a good attitude about where you are and how many new opportunities you have to meet people
• Talk to people about themselves, and their project.   This is THE prime opportunity to build a real relationship with someone, which most people aren’t going to do at a conference.
• Don’t walk with your phone on your ear or your head in a laptop between sessions – you’re telling people that you’re too busy to talk to them.
• Be supportive of the speakers – even the bad ones – don’t be the guy bashing on the poor guy who stumbled through his panel
• Get as much sleep as you can – you’ll need to be on your game the minute you leave your room and until you step back into it – remember this may be your clients first impression of you
• Related to that one: don’t drink yourself to a stupor – it is easy to do at conferences as most people treat them as a vacation and party – but if you’re drunk you’re missing things
• Have fun – its worth saying twice – you can have fun and still be making contacts and leads
• Follow up
• Follow up
• Follow up
• FOLLOW UP – most people aren’t going to do anything with the stack of business cards they collect this week – including the people who took yours – but if you send a nice note/email/puppy along a few days later you’re working that relationship again – not just a person they met at the conference

There will be more observations from RailsConf09 later I’m sure – this all came from less than 70% of day 1.