Which regional events put us in front of buyers without Vegas or SF prices?

You will plan the year around the security industry's own calendar, and your buyer does not live on it. The better question is which room your buyer has to be in for reasons that have nothing to do with you. In our portfolio those rooms produced better-qualified leads than the big-name events, and the gap was widest in the years the big events were weakest.

Go where your buyer is required to be.

You go to the conference your buyer is professionally obliged to attend, not the one your category is named after. Sector information-sharing groups, the certification bodies' regional days, and the small working summits for operators are where a security leader goes to satisfy an obligation, keep a credential, or hear what peers in the same sector are doing. Nobody there is walking a show floor. They are in the room because their job requires it, which is exactly why a conversation there converts and a badge scan does not.

Three kinds of room, two worth your day.

You will be invited to three kinds of room. The first is the sector room, where your buyer goes to discharge an obligation and vendors are tolerated as a member's guest. The second is the practitioner room, a city's BSides, the local chapter meeting, or the university's security day, where opinions form and vendors are tolerated as engineers. The third is the sponsored regional summit, one of the touring circuits under a local name, where the vendor pays and the executive is seated for free. The third kind is a booth with a smaller carpet. Ask it the same questions you would ask any paid room, who pays whom, whether the buyer chose it, and what the ratio of vendors to executives is, and expect the same answers.

Go to BSides as a practitioner.

You go to a BSides with a talk or a tool, never with a table to stand behind. These events are cheap, run by volunteers, and built to frustrate lead generation, and that is the point. The people there will run your product themselves and tell a security leader months later that it works, which is worth more than any scan. Bring an engineer, answer questions, and leave the slides at home.

Work one city until the referrals run out.

You build relationships with senior buyers in person, and they accumulate inside a city. A dense run of meetings in one metro area produces referrals inside that metro, because the security leaders at a city's large employers know each other and hire each other's deputies. A scattered tour produces nothing but miles and follow-ups that go cold, and the follow-up is where the value was. Pick the city where your buyers cluster, attend its sector and practitioner rooms all year, host one dinner there, and go back until the referrals stop coming.

It should cost a badge and a drive.

You pay a badge, a day, and a drive. That is the whole budget for the rooms that work. If a regional event asks for sponsorship money in exchange for access to buyers, it is the touring circuit whatever city is on the banner, and it should be priced as a brand purchase, not as pipeline.

Count it like any other room.

You measure a regional event by the same number as any room: pipeline it produced that is still alive a quarter later, in its own column. Expect fewer names than the big weeks produce and better ones, and set next year's calendar from that count.

The Atlanta pick is still open.

You are reading this from a firm whose own city is Atlanta, and the honest answer about our city is that the rooms change hands. The historic regional forum changed owners, the touring circuits run here on their own calendars, and the practitioner rooms are alive. Which one we would send a founder to first is a pick we have not made. Ask a security leader in the city which room is alive this season.