The Gov & Edu Conference Playbook

Hey! I’m Justin 👋 

I founded Starbridge to help businesses win more government and education deals.

Welcome to the SLED Sales Brief — a newsletter for gov & edu sales leaders.

We headed out to our first conference of the season last week (AASA)

Today, I’m sharing all the tips I picked up during my time at conferences.

Let’s dive in.

1.) Do the prep work

A successful conference starts way before the conference actually begins.

Here’s what our motion at Starbridge looks like:

3 weeks pre-conference: secure an attendee list

• If there’s no official list, we’ll check LinkedIn for last year’s hashtag or scrape the previous event app.

2 weeks pre-conference: run targeted outbound campaigns

• We use our own data—board minutes, strategic plans, and more—to craft hyper-relevant outreach.

• The goal is always to book a meeting during the conference.

1 week pre-conference: lock in meetings & prep demos

• We do final research on our booked prospects and set up custom demo environments for each one.

By preparing in advance, you know you’ll get value out of the conference even if the exhibit hall is slow one day. Plus, we see ~10-15% higher response rates to our outbound campaigns when we mention we’ll be there in person.

2.) Create a process to keep track of conversations

When I first started going to conferences, I’d have great conversations—but by the end of the day, I’d forget who was actually interested.

In a perfect world, every booth visitor books a demo. But we know that’s not reality.

If someone says they’re not interested right now, don’t just scan their badge and move on.

At Starbridge, we’ve started doing this instead:

• Set up a custom HubSpot form on your laptop or iPad to capture their info plus an open text field for quick notes. That way, it syncs straight to your CRM and you can use the information to follow up after the conference.

If that sounds a little too complicated for you, another great option is to record a quick voice memo after each conversation. That way you can transcribe it when you get back to your hotel.

3.) Don’t be afraid to get scrappy

Everyone agrees on what an exhibit hall is for. Folks are there to buy.

Yet, some sellers shy away from this principle. They don’t want to seem ‘too pushy’ or fear being ‘gimmicky.’

At Starbridge, we’ve been ‘suit-casing’ conferences e.g., no booth, just hustle. It’s forced us to work for every conversation.

We’ve learned some of the best conversations happen in the most casual settings - folks milling outside of the hall, the breakfast buffet, mid-presentation.

Some fun additional hacks:

• If you don’t have the money for a booth, just show up and walk up to people - we do this at Starbridge.

• Consider hitting the bar late at night, believe it or not a lot of folks are most friendly then.

• Wear something unconventional. I had a weird amount of success dressing strangely. I think Magma Math and Pathify do this exceptionally well.

• At Coursedog, our stuffed animal dogs were always a hit. And we (tried) to follow a rule that folks could only get one if they at least listened to our pitch.

From my experience, Crumbl cookies, coffee machines, and live performers also work wonders.

What’s New at Starbridge

We recently launched signal-based outbound campaigns!

You can now build outbound campaigns using enriched contact information for state, local government & education economic buyers integrating signals such as:

• Economic buyer job changes

• New grants that have been received

• New legislative changes/DOGE impacts

• AI pilot program mentions

• Curriculum adoption schedules

• SIS, ERP, CAD, RMS, LMS & more modernization initiatives

• Competitor contract expirations

With the export capability to run campaigns in Hubspot, Salesloft, Apollo & Outreach.

We are already seeing partners triple their email response rates.

Major kudos to our product & eng team for awesome work on this!

Thank you for reading!

Next week, I’m sharing our buyer insights compilation—real takeaways from interviews with SLED leaders on what makes a great buying experience.

If you have any questions, reach out via Linkedin. My inbox is always open.

See you next week,

— Justin