How to hustle your way into any industry event

Over the years I've organized hundreds of events, attended by more than 70.000 people. I attended tons of conferences, summits, and expos. Sometimes as a participant, sometimes as speaker. When I organized my first industry event back in 2006, I had never been to a conference, summit or expo myself. TNW Conference is awarded as Best European Conference. Basically you could say that I know a bit about bringing people together and how to organize small and large events.

Based on that experience I'm going to list tips here on how to hustle yourself into any conference or industry event. If you like it, like it, share it, send it to your comms / marketing team, pocket it, memorize it, whatever you want as long as you take an action.

Specific tips on how to hustle yourself into Europe’s leading digital technology festival (May 18,19 in Amsterdam) can be found on TNW.

Any conference that is charging money has a price listed on the website and discounted or even free passes available through several programs, marketing stunts etc. It is your duty to find those and use them to your advantage. This can save you hundreds of dollars per event.

Tip 1: register early

In our case a ticket to TNW Conference is 595 euro ex VAT and every week the price is rising. The general rule with our event is: the earlier you buy the cheaper it is. This goes for many conferences, but not many conferences really stick to their pricing strategy like we do. In June you'd pay 800 euros ex VAT for 2 tickets, now you can buy 1 for 595 and the price will go up exponentially in the last week (800 - 1200 range depending on availability).

Tip 2: Work for it

Almost all conferences rely on volunteers and often you can find how to sign up as a volunteer on the website. If not, just shoot over a super short enthusiastic email to the organizer and they'll tell you where to sign up. As volunteer you have to work during the event, but often you also get the chance to see something of the event (if it's run by people instead of 'slave drivers'). At TNW conference we work with a crew of over 250 volunteers who work 1 day of the event and the other day they can actively take part of the conference. BTW, this is also a great way to land a job. We have hired many people who previously volunteered at the conference.

Tip 3: Check out the programs

A good event functions as a marketplace where you have buyers and sellers. Sometimes event organizers want to help certain groups that are important to other participants. For instance in tech you often see highly reduced tickets or packages for startups, young companies, students, talents etc. At TNW we have several programs ranging from kids in tech, to highly reduced startup packages through one of our startup programs or co-founder packs (you still need to be selected to get into a startup program though).

Tip 4: Be an influencer

Event organizers like it if influencers attend their event. If you are a (real) influencer you basically have a free entry pass to any event. The problem here is that there is a difference in definition of what you think an influencer is (I mean, without a doubt you are one) might differ from what an organizer thinks an influencer is. The golden rule here is that the bigger the event, the harder it is to claim you are THE influencer. Over the years we went from inbound approval of influencers (people emailing us to tell us how important they are) to outbound invitations of influencers (nowadays we track over a million influencers in tech, build a profile, identify fields of expertise and give an internal score. This is useful to find speakers, jury members, panelists, mentors, experts etc. and is also used to invite influencers). So no need to tell us that you're an influencer and need a free ticket, we'll find you instead. That said, 99.99% of the events are not this advanced when it comes to scoring influencers and they can be swayed / convinced fairly easy, so give it a try.

Tip 5: The gift of presenting

If you got the gift of being a great presenter, of delivering a talk in a smooth and self confident way, of moving a crowd, chances are there is a stage for you. Of course most conferences take an outbound approach here and send invitations to speakers so they can control the program, topics etc., but most of the time event also have a way to submit speakers. For smaller events it's perfectly fine to take that route, but when an event is popular and/or large another approach is more efficient.

Take TNW conference, in our first year nobody submitted a speaker, we would have been jumping on our couch if we would have gotten one. Now we receive over a thousand submissions and we only have a hundred (or so) speaker spots (of which we select at least 80% ourselves via outbound). So how to stand out from the crowd here...? (note: a lot of organizers will hate me for telling this as this means a lot more emails in their already overfull inbox :), but hey, it should lead to better content). The trick is to figure out who you know that knows the organizers well (think previous speakers, investors in the company, advisors, or highly trusted / influential people in the scene in general) and ask them to send the organizer a short note to recommend you as a speaker. Please go a bit deeper then looking at mutual linkedin connections (not all 6453 connection I have on Linkedin will make me open their email right away). When the intro is made make sure to follow up with an email right away, elaborate a bit on who you are and why you'd be a good fit to speak at the event and include a link to a video of a previous presentation. I guarantee you that the organizer looks into it and comes back to you with an answer. Often they need more info, ask you to fill out the submission form after all so they have all submissions in one place and follow up with a call and before you know it you get stage time (that is if you're born with the gift of presenting and have a great story to tell that fits the audience etc etc.)

Tip 6: Check the sponsors and exhibitors

Sponsors and exhibitors often get a couple of tickets to extend to their team and their (potential) clients. Do you know anybody personally at these companies? Reach out to them and ask if they have a spare ticket. In case you are a (good) client it might even make sense for the sponsor or exhibitor to buy an extra ticket so they can spend time with you at the event and build out the relationship. Sponsors and exhibitor often get a discounted rate (stated in the contract) in case they want to buy extra tickets for clients or team members.

Tip 7: Know any of the speakers?

Sift through the list of speakers and see if your buddies are on the list. Speakers often get a +1 and often don't use the extra ticket. Another chance for you to hustle your way in!

The downside of hustling

One thing you want to ask yourself before trying to hustle a cheaper or in some cases free ticket is: is it worth my time? Hustling as described above always cost at least a few hours of your valuable time and without guarantee you'll succeed. My rule of thumb on this is that if the ticket price seems fair to me, I'll just buy a ticket.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that when you're asking for a free ticket while your presence at the event is not detrimental to the organizer it might backfire. Organizers often have a big network and tend to make a lot of intros and invite people to other cool invite only events throughout the year. I personally rather send business to people and companies who respect and value what I do (and I'm pretty damn good at it) than to the ones that ask me to provide them with a free ticket, for no good reason, without anything in return. Organizing an event like TNW Conference costs million of euros, it's a business. Keep that in mind when hustling.

If you like these tactics, share it on linkedin, connect with me here as well and message me me every time it worked successfully for you. Hope to see you at #TNW2017 in Amsterdam.