The prospectus always arrives in a PDF.
It has a floor map with the best corners already shaded in as sold, and a grid of tiers with names like Gold and Platinum, each one bundling a booth size, a few full-conference passes, a logo somewhere on the lanyard and, near the very top, a speaking session. Somebody forwards it to the event marketer with one line in the email: which one should we buy? I’ve gotten that email. My answer has almost nothing to do with the names of the tiers.
The guides that rank for this compare formats by cost per conversation, and the math is worth reading. One of them puts a hosted dinner at $3,500 to $8,000 for five to twelve senior buyers, and a full conference sponsorship at $50,000 to well past $300,000 for a much bigger crowd and somewhere between 15 and 50 meetings, if it’s run well. One closes on the line that most mature programs run both, which is true! What they all leave out is the question I’d ask before I opened the price sheet at all: who on your team is going to work the thing you bought, and are you coming back next year?
The Grid I’d Rebuild From the Prospectus
The tiers sort by price. I sort by who has to show up.
| Package | Best for | What it costs besides the fee | Who has to work it | When I’d skip it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Booth on the expo floor | A show you’ll be at three years running, where your buyers actually walk the floor | Fabrication, freight, drayage, the booth internet nobody budgeted, and travel for every rep | Reps who can hold a 90-second technical conversation without a card, and someone making sure every scan gets tagged | Year One at a show nobody on your team has walked, with no plan to return |
| Speaking session | A company with one person who can teach a room something true in thirty minutes | Weeks of a senior person’s time on slides and rehearsal, usually bundled into the top tiers | The speaker, plus somebody looking after them for the forty minutes before they walk on | When the only available speaker plans to read the product deck out loud |
| Hosted dinner during conference week | A short list of accounts you already know will be in town | The restaurant’s minimum, a private room, and invites that go out from a real person | An executive host who stays for dessert, and whoever is keeping the guest notes | When you can’t name twelve guests yet |
| Logo and lanyard package | A brand the room has never heard of, with a budget that won’t stretch to a booth | Close to nothing | Nobody | Almost always, if the same money would cover a dinner |
Where Each Package Fits (and Where It Doesn’t)
A disclosure. There’s a reason “Concierge” is in my title, and I lean toward the dinner. Weigh what follows accordingly.
The booth wins when you’re coming back. I ran Arxan’s presence at RSA Conference for three consecutive years, wedged between Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike on a floor of forty thousand people, and pipeline contribution grew every one of those years. Year Three was the highest, with a booth we had barely changed, because by then the CISOs walking that aisle expected to find us there. A dinner can’t introduce you to strangers. The expo floor can. Where the booth loses is the single year. Buy one booth at one show and judge it by June, and you’ll probably cancel it right before it starts working (I wrote about that in how I measure trade show ROI).
The speaking session wins when you have the speaker.Some buyers never set foot on the expo floor, and a good talk is one of the few ways to get in front of them during the show. It loses the moment it turns into a pitch, because a room full of security architects can smell a product demo wearing a lanyard. It also needs care. The story I tell most often is about a breakout speaker who walked on to a full room with no screen, because the sales rep had forgotten the TV, and that’s why I wrote down everything I’d do in the forty minutes before a speaker goes on.
The dinner wins per dollar, once you have names. A customer dinner during conference week rides on a trip you’re already paying for, since the team is in town and the accounts you want are walking the same hall. It often isn’t on the prospectus at all. It loses at a show where nobody knows you yet, because twelve empty chairs in a private room cost the same as twelve full ones.
The Lanyard
A logo on the lanyard is the only line on the prospectus that nobody has to staff, and I think that’s exactly why it starts so few conversations.
What I’d Buy, Year by Year
Put the show on your event calendar with its year next to it, then buy for the year.
Year One, I’d buy passes and a dinner. Walk the floor as an attendee and write down where the buyers actually go between sessions. Then spend the evening with the handful of accounts you already have. Year Two is when I’d buy the booth, the smallest one that holds one message readable from thirty feet, which is most of what I said about designing a trade show booth. Keep the dinner. Add the speaking session in whichever year you have someone with something true to say, and not a year before.
If a prospectus is sitting in your inbox right now and somebody wants an answer by Friday, let’s talk! I’m looking for an in-house team, and I’d read that PDF with you the way I always do, starting with who has to show up.