As firms continue to prioritize in-person meetings and connections, attending conferences is a natural extension of that priority. Industry conferences are a great way to learn more about your trade, network with like-minded professionals, and make crucial connections that support your pipeline.
The challenge of conferences, however, is ensuring that everything is well documented. Conference attendance usually includes multiple sessions, networking events like happy hours and roundtables, and multiple meetings conducted in a short timeframe. With these packed schedules, it can be hard to find time to organize your notes and experiences of everything you’ve done and everyone you’ve met.
So how can firms help their professionals make sure that their conference time counts — both in notation and activation?
Rennae Hipple, Project Manager for Investment Banking, shares how her firm, Stout, uses Intapp DealCloud to build a strategy for tracking their time at conferences.
In addition to ensuring that notes are captured and tracked efficiently, Stout leverages DealCloud for a more holistic approach to conference planning and measurement. They use it not just for post-conference documentation, but to strategically plan, track, and measure the effectiveness of each event in real-time. Here’s how they put it all together:
Stout’s conference strategy
Page-level action items and custom dashboards
In the past, Stout managed its list of event invitees in Microsoft Excel. The firm soon realized this was unsustainable, since that software and those spreadsheets were stored outside the firm’s single source of truth — Intapp DealCloud — which made updates and transparency difficult to maintain.
To solve the problem, Stout built out an action item in DealCloud that allows bankers to recommend attendees on their own.
Investment bankers could now flag the connections they wanted to invite and seamlessly add them to a list for the selection committee to review. The forms also gather information such as why the contact should be invited, their firm, their industry, potential revenue, and more.
This information then feeds into a custom dashboard that makes it simple for the selection committee to review invites and ensure all key industries are represented at the event. The committee can then easily note a contact’s invitation status — accepted, pending invitation, rejected, declined, or still under consideration — helping the entire firm to understand where invites stand without the need for an external document.
Meeting objects
Stout also built out meeting objects to track meetings year-over-year. Objects allow Stout professionals to record who meets with whom at their events and what’s discussed. If a banker requests for a connection to continue being invited to Stout events, objects make it easy to revisit where the conversation left off and determine if it makes sense to invite them back to continue.
After building out these meeting objects, Stout then built meeting dashboards. These easy-to-read dashboards make it easier for Stout professionals to view and track their KPIs — such as the number of meetings different sectors of the business should target for completion at an event — as well as overall success of the event from a connection standpoint. They also implemented a meeting ranking system to help gauge the success of these meetings. This makes it simple to determine who seems engaged and ready for follow-up.
Tracking ROI
These strategies and tools now help Stout measure the most important metric of all: return on investment (ROI).
Now that the full journey and value of a conference can be tracked from invite to follow-up, Stout can also track pipeline progression and origin. For example, if a deal is signed in 2023 but the initial contact with Stout was made at an event in 2021, that information can be correctly attributed to the ROI of the event. This helps the Stout team justify future event spend and strategy.
Make your time at events count
Stout’s event strategy makes it easy for the firm to track success. When attendees know exactly how to find and share event information — such as attendees, contacts, and meetings — staying organized on the ground becomes effortless. But beyond just documenting event participation, the firm also uses DealCloud to strategically plan, measure KPIs, and assess ROI, ensuring that every conference is both productive and impactful.
By utilizing the right tools for planning, strategizing, and measuring, Stout has streamlined their entire conference process and gained more value from every event.
Ready to uplevel your firm’s relationship management and event tracking strategy?