Going to a Conference? Start Here.

Aug 14

A recipe for making “What do you do?” more useful before you walk into the room.

There is no perfect answer to the question “What do you do?” There shouldn’t be.

The answer you give standing in line for coffee at a conference should probably be different from the answer you give someone who has specifically sought you out. The person, the room, the amount of attention you have, and what you want to make possible all matter.

So this is not a recipe for writing your elevator pitch.

It is a recipe for preparing the ingredients you’ll need to introduce yourself well once you’re actually there.

The goal is simple: Help the right people discover enough about you that they want to discover more.

And ideally, give them something useful enough that they can remember you, repeat you, connect you to someone else, or imagine you inside a future opportunity.

How to use this recipe

Do this a few days before the event, not while putting on your name badge in the Uber. You do not need to complete every item perfectly. Some will matter more for one event than another.

What you are trying to avoid is arriving with only your title, company name, and one painfully rehearsed “I help X do Y” sentence. Work through the list. Write things down. Say some of them out loud. Test your answers on another human if you can. Then go to the event and see what happens.

1. Decide what would make this conference useful

Pick one.

I can finish this sentence: “I’ll be glad I went if…”
I know what I want more of after this conference: people, ideas, invitations, customers, collaborators, visibility, learning, something else.
I know which future I am trying to create more possibility around.
I know what I do not want the conference to produce more of.

You are not trying to engineer every conversation toward an outcome. You are deciding what kind of outcome would make the room worth entering in the first place.

2. Understand the room

I know why people are gathering.
I know what is changing, difficult, exciting, or unresolved in this world right now.
I have looked at the agenda closely enough to know which conversations are likely to already be happening.
I know which sessions, dinners, receptions, hallways, or side events are likely to contain my people.
I have identified a few people I am genuinely curious about, not just people I want something from.

A conference already has a conversation happening before you arrive. Knowing what it is gives you something much more useful to work with than, “So, what brings you here?”

3. Know what future you want people to imagine for you

After meeting me, I know what I’d love someone to think: “You should talk to [my name] about…”
I know what I really do not want them saying: “You should talk to [my name] about…”
The way I describe myself points toward the work, people, problems, and rooms I want next.
I am not accidentally introducing myself as the person I am trying to stop being.

This is especially important when you are changing roles, changing industries, growing into something bigger, or simply tired of being invited to do the thing you did five years ago.

People can only imagine futures from the evidence you give them. Give them useful evidence.

4. Get your ingredients together

You want to know these before you go, not invent them while someone is waiting for you to finish your sentence.

I have usable language for:

The recognizable world I work in.
What is changing in that world.
What is stuck.
What I notice that others often miss.
Why my particular experience makes me useful there.
The future I want to be invited into.
One piece of evidence that makes that future believable.
One phrase with enough grip to survive retelling.

You will almost certainly not use all of these in one answer. These are pantry ingredients, not a seven-course meal.

5. Prepare several sizes, not one pitch

I have a 10-second version for the buffet-line encounter.
I have a 30-second version if someone is actually curious.
I have one good example that makes what I do concrete.
I have one piece of evidence that makes what I do believable.
I have one useful story that shows what my work looks like in practice.

The ten-second version is not the opening paragraph of the thirty-second version. It is enough information for someone to place you and find one thing interesting.

If they want more, they will usually tell you by asking. ;)

6. Check to see if your answers are portable

Ask yourself. Better yet, test them on someone before you go.

Could someone I just met answer “Who was that?” with something more useful than my job title?
Would they remember the interesting part of what I do, not just the category I work in?
If they repeated my answer to someone else, would the part I most want associated with me survive?
Would their version of me point toward the kind of opportunities I actually want?
If my name showed up in their inbox three days later, would they know why they remember me?

Here is the slightly annoying part:

They are not going to repeat your beautiful sentence perfectly. They are going to shorten it, mutate it, stick you into categories they already understand, and tell someone else their version of what you do.

That is not failure. The question is whether the useful bit survives.

7. Prepare questions that help you discover where the conversation could go

I have an easy question for starting a conversation with someone I don’t know.
I have 2–3 better questions for when the conversation gets interesting.
I have one question connected to my work that lets someone experience how I think.
I have one question about this particular conference that I genuinely want to hear different people answer.

The person in front of you is not merely an audience for your introduction. They have ambitions, problems, curiosities, useful people in their world, and futures they are trying to create too.

Find out what is interesting about them. That is usually where the better conversation begins.

8. Bring things you can give, not just things you want to get

I have 3–5 people I could thoughtfully introduce to someone I meet.
I have 2–3 articles, tools, resources, or ideas I could share with participants.
I know what kinds of problems or questions I’m especially useful for thinking through.
I have thought about who in this room I could help get what they came for.
I have an easy way to capture promises I make, so “I’ll send you that” actually turns into something.

Networking gets dramatically more interesting when you stop treating every new person as a possible source of value and start noticing where you could create some.

Sometimes the most valuable thing that happens at a conference has absolutely nothing to do with you. Yet.

9. Make follow-up ridiculously easy

I have a simple way to capture who I met and what we talked about.
I know how I’ll note any promise I made, introduction I offered, or thing I said I’d send.
I have time blocked after the conference for follow-up.
I have a few useful things I can send quickly without having to create them from scratch.
I know what I want someone to remember when my name appears in their inbox.

Your follow-up should not require the other person to reconstruct the encounter. “Great meeting you at the conference!” is technically true and almost entirely useless.

Give them the thread back.

10. Capture the event ROI

This will make deciding whether you want to go next year much easier. And probably easier to justify to the person paying for it if it’s not you. ;)

Not: How many people did I meet?

Instead, ask:

Who became curious?
Who remembered something?
Who connected my work to their world?
Who repeated my language back?
Who thought of another person I should meet?
Who did I become useful to?
What second conversations became easier?
What moved after I left the room?

A stack of business cards is inventory. Conversation momentum is ROI.

One last thing

I am going in expecting to run experiments, not perform perfectly.

Try one answer. Notice what they ask next. Try a slightly different version. Notice what survives.

Pay attention to which people immediately see a useful version of your potential and which people put you back into an old category. You are gathering information, not auditioning for universal approval.

I’ve been to some amazing conferences, and often it’s just one magical conversation that changes the whole thing, and it started when I wasn’t trying to be awesome; I was just trying to be me.

The Whole Idea

Your answer to “What do you do?” is not supposed to make everyone in the room want you.

It should make it easier for the right people to see a possibility, carry it, and do something with it.

Because every conference is full of tiny predictions:

“You should meet…”

“She’d be interesting to talk to about…”

“I wonder if they could…”

That is where networking starts getting interesting.

You are not there to collect people like stickers. You are there to generate potential.

And sometimes one very ordinary hello is all it takes to get something moving.

Joanna Bloor