First time at the Web Summit? Here are our tips and tricks.

It’s possible that you may not know that we as a team went to Lisbon for this years WebSummit.

It was a very unique experience for us, definitely a good and educational one but we wish we knew some things in advance that would alter the outcome by a lot.

We are writing and publishing this blog because we wish we had something like this before heading up to Lisbon.

Enjoy!

The preparation phase

This is both the most important and the least important phase of the entire experience. What do we mean by that? Let me explain.

Of course you need to prepare your traveling plan and your accommodation, but we are focusing more on WebSummit — specific preparations.

Well, we spent a lot of time preparing and we focused on many different things:

• Writing the possible pitches
• Writing and practicing all the questions that we may be asked
• Preparing Various presentations
• Designing business cards
• Writing NFC Cards
• Printing T-shirts
• Practicing our English
• Optimizing our LinkedIn profiles

And guess which ones were actually useful?

• Business cards
• Optimizing our LinkedIn profiles
• Preparing presentations

Let me tell you exactly why.

During our days in Lisbon, we got to pitch many people and answer a lot of questions, many of which were creative and new to us.

As for the pitches, we immediately noticed that our prospects are not engaged enough, so we altered the pitch for every person we talked to so much that on the last day you could barely tell it’s the same product.

And as for the presentations, you really don’t need to go out of your way to create some kind of fancy 19-slide presentation with all kinds of animations and what not. People are in a hurry and are looking for a brief explanation of what your product does.

The perfect presentation structure to follow is:

Opening slide — Problem — Solution — How it works — POC — Case Studies

It has to be visually attractive with a minimal amount of text, it should serve as more of a reminder to you than for your prospects to read out.

Our CMO showcasing our product

The action phase

Once you are there then the real action begins.

For the first day you arrive, you should just take it to destress, relax and get mentally prepared for the following couple of days since it will be very exhausting.

If you don’t have a booth the first day of the WebSummit, that could be very very beneficial to you if you act on it in the right way.

Our recommendations are:

Stay hydrated

WebSummit includes a lot of walking, talking and in general mingling which can quickly dehydrate you without you even noticing it. Not to mention that a huge arena filled with around 70,000 people can get very hot and suffocating.

So carry a bottle of water on you at all times.

Visit a lot of booths that resonate with your company

That way you can gain experience in talking, answering questions and pitching other people even before you’ve had your booth. You should get a lot of useful feedback as well, that you can later on use to modify your pitch and answers for better responses.

We know that it can be a hassle, but trust me once the day has come and you have a booth, you will be very glad that you did it.

Talk to your ICP

This has many obvious benefits and is pretty crystal clear generally. It’s the fact that it’s so easy to find them due to heavily organized sections that makes it so necessary.

By finding those companies and taking interest as well as actually listening to what they have to say you automatically stand out amongst the crowd.

That way you can find out their pain points first-hand and entice them to visit your booth.

But don’t forget to get their LinkedIn and follow up with them!

The Night Summit

You have to go to the Night Summit, you can miss it only in a case of an emergency. Why?

Everybody will be there and it’s overall a more casual type of event where people are more open to talking and mingling with complete strangers.

We could even argue that we made more quality connections at the Night Summit than at the regular summit.

Here are our tips for the night summit:

Get there early

As soon as the WebSummit day is over, which usually ends at about 6PM, everyone is going to be heading over to the night summit, and it can very quickly get overcrowded.

You will just get stuck in a waiting line and once you get the notification that the designated venue is at capacity you will need to make new plans.

Don’t worry if you don’t make it to the designated venue

You may think that if you don’t make it in time, your night is ruined, but don’t worry Lisbon has a lot to offer and you will find people from the WebSummit wherever you go.

We were in the same position where we didn’t make it, so we had to improvise. We went to the recommended place for partying and guess what there were many many people who thought the same as us.

It’s a professional event, but don’t forget to have fun

We know that you might be facing the pressure of networking and talking to people, but don’t worry about that, your main goal should be to have fun while there. After all there will be so many people there it’s almost impossible to not meet someone new even if you don’t try.

But don’t forget to bring your business cards and connect with people on LinkedIn so you can funnel even more attention to your booth.

The booth day

This is ultimately why you came to the WebSummit, to present your product to interested prospects and generate opportunities for your business after the WebSummit has ended.

Here are our recommendations:

• Make your stand look clean and minimalistic so people don’t get overwhelmed.

How our booth looked

• Always smile and avoid looking at your phone, look approachable.
• If you see anyone walking past and looking at your sign, approach them with a friendly “Sorry can I help you, are you looking for something?”. In 95% of cases, people will come to your booth.
• Hold eye contact and have a solid handshake.
• Speak with confidence and believe in your product/service.

Don’t forget to take breaks to recuperate with your team.

Don’t forget to eat something while you are there.

Don’t forget to take water breaks.

Here are a few additional tips that we couldn’t classify in these three phases:

Post on all your social media accounts while you are there across all three days of the summit, so you can get a healthy boost in engagement as well as bring more people to your booth.

Look at all the events that are happening while you are there and mark those that you want to attend. Lectures and speeches held there are very insightful and worth a listen, just make sure that they resonate with you so you don’t waste any precious time.

Don’t stay up too long after the night summit, just because you are having a good time. Remember that the day after is always very important and you don’t want to miss any of it.

We slept through our Mentor Hours, so we are speaking from experience.

If you take action on all these tips, your WebSummit experience will be a success no matter how small or big your business is.

Here’s briefly how the WebSummit went for us

As we are trying to remember every single detail from this wonderful experience, we would like to share some stand out stats about it:

🚶🏻‍♂️ We walked all over Lisbon accumulating 600k+ steps

📈 We experienced a 100% growth in our LinkedIn connections

📇 Gave out 200+ business cards to key industry professionals.

💬 Saw a significant 457% increase in our social media engagement.

💻 Presented over 60 product demos at our dedicated booth.

Taking into account that this was the first conference we attended, we are very satisfied with the outcome.

We are definitely looking forward to attending more conferences in the near future!

See you next year! 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣

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