To find clients at local meetups and events, choose two events a month where your buyers are in the room, go to talk to four or five people instead of everyone, ask each what they are working on, and send an email to every real conversation within 24 hours. In the example below, six events a quarter cost about $1,560 including your time and produce six meetings at about $260 each. Those numbers are assumptions, and the page shows the arithmetic so you can use yours.
Events are slow and cheap compared with a cold list, and they work best when your clients are local, your service needs trust before a purchase, or the buyer is someone who answers few cold emails. They work poorly when your buyers are scattered across the country, or when what you sell is a quick purchase online.
Pick events by who is in the room
The title of an event says little. The attendees decide whether it is worth the evening. Before you register, find out who went last time: a past attendee list, the photos, the sponsors, the organizer's page. Then choose from types like these.
| Event type | Who tends to be there | Good for | Weak for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chamber of commerce mixer or breakfast | Local owners and managers of every kind, many with no sales role | Local services: cleaning, accounting, insurance, signage, printing | Specialist B2B software |
| Trade or industry association chapter meeting | People in one trade, often owners | Anything sold to that trade | Services for other trades |
| Interest-group meetup (startups, marketing, a software tool) | Peers, freelancers and job seekers more than buyers | Learning and referrals from peers | Direct sales to buyers |
| Lunch-and-learn or workshop you attend | Buyers with a specific problem | Services that solve that problem | General introductions |
| Startup demo night | Founders, investors, advisers | Services for early-stage companies | Services for established ones |
| Supplier or customer open house | Buyers of one product category | Related products and services | Unrelated ones |
Our page on chamber of commerce leads covers the first row in detail. Events organized around a hobby or skill tend to attract peers, so read the description with that in mind.
What to prepare before you go
- A 15-second answer to "what do you do?" It names who you help and the problem, without a job title. For a bookkeeper: "I clean up the books for restaurants that are behind on their sales tax filings."
- Three questions. "What are you working on this quarter?" "What takes more of your week than it should?" "Who do you use for [your thing] now?" They keep the other person talking, and their answers tell you whether to follow up.
- One way to keep in touch that is not a card. A short URL, a phone contact you can send from a QR code on your phone, or your own email address that you read aloud. Cards still work in many rooms, but you want the other person's address even more than they want yours.
In the room: four or five conversations, not thirty
Arrive in the first twenty minutes. Rooms are easiest to enter before they fill. Aim for four or five real conversations of five to eight minutes. A real conversation is one where you learned something about the other person's work that you could mention in an email. Write it on your phone as soon as you walk away: name, company, one detail, what you promised.
The promise matters. "I'll send you that article" or "I'll introduce you to a friend who does permitting" is worth more than a card, because it gives you a reason to write that you both expect. Do not pitch in the room unless they ask. If they ask, answer in two sentences and offer to send details.
The email within 24 hours
Subject: the permitting contact from Thursday
Hi Jonah, we talked at the chamber breakfast about your second location slipping a month on permits. As promised, here is the contact at the city office: [name and address]. Separately: you mentioned that you do your own books. If it would help, I can look at one month of statements and tell you in a short note whether it is worth handing off. No cost for that. Does next Tuesday suit?
Hollis Grant, 555-0147, example.com, 400 Main St, Suite 2, Springfield OR 97477. If you'd rather I didn't follow up, just say so and I won't.
It starts with what you promised, which makes it welcome. The offer is small and the question is easy to answer. Follow up once more after about a week if you hear nothing, then stop. How to follow up after a networking event has the wording for that second message.
This is a commercial email, and the law applies to it even though you met the person. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide for businesses lists accurate sender and subject lines, your valid postal address, and a clear opt-out that you honor within 10 business days, and says the law "makes no exception for business-to-business email." Having a conversation is a good reason to write, but it is not a reason to skip the footer. If you want to text someone, ask them in the room whether it is OK, and keep the first one short.
Counting the return
Here is one quarter for a fictional accounting firm in a mid-sized city. Every figure is an assumption.
| Line | Assumption | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Events | 2 a month for 3 months | 6 |
| Ticket or dues | $35 an event | $210 |
| Your time | 3 hours an event including travel, valued at $75 an hour | $1,350 |
| Real conversations | 4 per event | 24 |
| Follow-up emails | One for every conversation | 24 |
| Replies | Half of those | 12 |
| Meetings held | Half of the replies | 6 |
| Customers | 1 in 3 meetings, at $4,000 in the first year | 2 customers, $8,000 |
Cost: $210 + $1,350 = $1,560. Cost per meeting: $1,560 / 6 = $260. Cost per customer: $1,560 / 2 = $780. A 33 percent meeting-to-customer rate and a reply to half your emails are generous for a new attendee. At half the conversations and half the close rate, a quarter yields half a customer, so the cost per customer is $1,560 / 0.5 = $3,120, against $4,000 of first-year revenue. The point of the table is to find which row you can move. If your conversations are too few, go earlier and stay longer. If the emails get no replies, the promise was weak. Compare the result with other channels in small business lead generation ideas.
Hosting a small event of your own
After a few months as a guest, you may want to host: a 12-person breakfast for owners in one trade, with one topic and a short talk from someone else, usually a customer. Hosting gives you a reason to invite people you want to meet, and a list of attendees. Keep it small, keep the topic about the guests' problem, and send the invitation to a person you have already met. An invitation to a stranger is a cold email, so the CAN-SPAM rules above apply to it.
When events are the wrong move
Skip them if your buyers are in another city, if you dislike rooms enough that you will not go twice, or if you cannot follow up the next day. Events without follow-up are only dinners. If you want a pipeline that does not depend on your evenings, use events for the relationships and a steady outbound routine for volume.
Rocketship, which we make, handles the volume side of that pairing. Tell it who you want in plain words and it finds the people, reads each one's website, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up and books the meeting on your calendar, so your evenings go to the events where you are better than software. Try the 7-day trial (card required) or see the plans.