Up to half your pipeline rides on 4 days

I'm Jeremy Hurst, VP of Autonomous GTM at Swan. I left a $450K VP Sales role to take a job with a made-up title. I did it because I got a glimpse of the 100x seller - it stopped being a thought experiment and became the actual playbook. This is a field journal for GTM and growth leaders who can feel the model changing under their feet and prefer changing with it to being left behind.

When 30-50% of the year's pipeline rests on 4 days, you can't afford a misfire. Here are 3 skills I wish I'd had for every conference I've worked.

If you're a VP of Sales/VP of Marketing and field marketing is a big part of your GTM, then you surely know this feeling:

Your biggest conference is two weeks out. Four days of exec suite, only 2 meetings booked, $0 in pipeline generated. And that eerie feeling creeping in that the shot clock's running out.. Pavilion GTM2026 wrapped up last week. I'd bet more than a few VPs of Sales & Marketing lived that exact scene in the weeks leading up to it.

I spent years building conference playbooks by hand. Spreadsheets. Midnight Slack briefs. Follow-up sequences written on the flight home.

It worked well enough. But there's no reason to do it that way anymore.

So here are 3 skills to help you up-level your events motion:

1 - Pre-conference outreach

Booth, meeting suite, dinner, hackathon. None of it fills itself. Takes the attendee list & researches every account first, so you never cold-email a customer or a deal someone's already working. Then it asks for a meeting, with a side door for anyone who won't take a 1:1: dinner for execs, a hands-on session for practitioners.

https://www.gtmskills.com/skill/pre-conference-outreach

2 - Post-conference outreach

The second the conference wraps, the real work starts. A badge scan isn't a relationship. Some leads get simple meeting confirmation pings, others get a full sequence aimed at turning a 2-min convo into a real understanding of what you do and the impact it’ll drive.

https://www.gtmskills.com/skill/post-conference-outreach

3 - Conference meeting cards

Your execs will read their brief in the 5 mins between sessions, in an Uber, or mid-sandwich. So they need phone-ready prep docs for each day: who's in front of you, what the deal's worth, the next step & the one thing not to get wrong.

https://www.gtmskills.com/skill/conference-meeting-cards

Most conferences last a few days. But the work to make them pay off starts months before & ends months after.

PS: If something important's missing, some part of your field marketing motion that should be "skill-ified," hit reply and let me know. I'll source something great & get it added.

We have an incredible community of customers, partners, & friends that are some of the best operators in the world. It's the whole reason we built the skills marketplace - to put these incredible resources in one place.

getswan.com

THE SIGNAL

Most conferences are won or lost before anyone lands, so I let agents research every account and fill the calendar early, and my people walk into four days of meetings instead of four days of hoping.

SIT WITH THIS

How many of your next conference's exec meetings are booked today? Every open slot is money you've already spent on a conversation that isn't happening.

The agents handle the prep so my people can give every conversation their full attention.

COMMUNITY NOTES

If you're building your own conference plays, I share what's working as I go on LinkedIn.

-Jeremy