Picture this: You’ve identified a fantastic in-person or virtual event geared toward helping individuals like yourself grow professionally and acquire more insights into your field.
Odds are, you want to sign up as soon as possible. After all, who wants to miss a chance for personal and professional development, right?
The only catch? The conference will take up a huge chunk of your time—not to mention your bank account.
How do you attend the conference without risking your job or breaking the bank? Simple: By talking your boss into letting you go on the company’s dime. So let’s look at how to convince your company’s decision-makers to send you to a conference.
Understanding the value of professional conferences
Professional conferences do more than just give you some much-needed time off from the monotony of your 9-to-5 job. They present numerous professional and personal development benefits, including:
- Allowing you to meet industry leaders: Professional conferences often include industry experts and leaders as keynote speakers. It’s the perfect opportunity to discuss developments in your field, ask questions, and build valuable professional relationships.
- Helping with skill enhancement: Attendees can share information and new perspectives, making conferences ideal avenues for gaining new skills.
- Facilitating networking: They allow professionals to interact with like-minded people and build or expand community relationships that could lead to new opportunities.
- Helping you keep up with industry trends: Keeping up with trends can make or break your career. From activating events with QR Codes to leveraging AI for SEO, conferences provide insights into what other professionals are doing and their achievements and failures.
The benefits of attending professional conferences aren’t limited to individuals only. Employee development also leads to increased job performance, job satisfaction, and retention, making professional development a win-win for both employees and businesses.
How to prepare your pitch and convince your boss the conference is a good idea
Convincing your boss to pay for you to attend a conference might not be the easiest of tasks, but these tips will help you prepare your pitch.
Plan what you’ll say
Want to avoid a shaky voice and sweaty palms? Plan adequately for your meeting to ensure you can justify your need to attend the conference.
Start by researching everything there is to know about the event. What kind of event is it? How long has it been running? What is its demographic? How can it help you grow personally or professionally? Does it have an impact on your role or company?
Finding answers to these questions will help you determine whether the conference is the perfect fit for you and prepare you for any questions your boss may have.
To increase your chances of getting a positive response:
- Outline how the conference agenda aligns with current project challenges or objectives.
- Emphasize the networking opportunities the conference presents for your team or the company at large.
- Give examples or statistics showing how the conference has helped other teams.
- Discuss how the event will help you or your team gain new skills to streamline operations, boost productivity, or increase the business’s bottom line.
Address common concerns
Conferences can come with a lot of costs. Apart from having to pay for things like event registration and transportation, your boss has to contend with the cost of time off. They may need to pay other employees overtime to cover your responsibilities, especially if you want to attend a long conference.
Be proactive and look for solutions to problems your boss may cite. For example, you could talk to some colleagues to help cover critical responsibilities when you’re away, saving your employer the hassle of coordinating with team members.
If you expect the cost to be a significant factor, emphasize the ROI your attendance will bring by preparing a short-term cost breakdown and comparing it to the expected long-term benefits. Also, suggest more cost-effective solutions, like taking advantage of early-bird offers and attending the conference virtually, if possible.
Be confident
The more confident you are, the harder it’ll be for your boss to say no. To be confident, prepare adequately for your pitch. Focus on the value the conference will bring to your team or company, and be ready for counter-arguments by finding solutions to potential problems.
Also, time your request appropriately. Don’t wait until the last minute to ask—give your boss plenty of time to think about it and weigh the benefits. Be sure to approach your boss about it at a time when they’re less busy and less stressed as well.
Additionally, tell your boss you’ll be willing to share vital takeaways with your team or prepare a post-conference report. This way, more people benefit from your attendance.
How to strategically network for conferences: What to know
It can also help to show your boss how you plan to make the most out of your time at the conference. These strategies for effective networking before, during, and after the conference can help boost your chances of a positive response.
Use digital business cards
Digital business cards are excellent networking tools because they help you maintain connections with other conference attendees. With a simple smartphone scan, attendees can save your contact info, LinkedIn profile, website, and more.
Start by identifying possible event attendees you’d like to network with—reviewing the conference’s target demographic and keynote speakers can help. Then, find a reliable digital business card solution to show your employer you’re proactive. Lucky for you, we have just the right one—Bitly.
With Bitly, you can easily create short, tracking links that direct event attendees to your company or personal landing pages. You can even see how much traffic each individual link drove, when people clicked, and from which devices. You can also create a Bitly Link-in-bio with your contact information and social media links and add it to your digital business card with a customized Bitly QR Code!
Adding these links to your business cards gives you a detailed visual of how many people from the conference are interested in working with you. This can help you justify future conference attendance, as you’ll get an idea of the ROI from comparing the costs incurred to the revenue generated directly from your attendance.
Analyze your networking goals
Analyzing your goals can show your boss you have a networking plan. To set smart networking goals, start by identifying what you want to achieve from your efforts. This will help you narrow down the people to focus on during the conference. After all, it’d be impossible to connect with every attendee.
After determining what you want to achieve, identify your target connections by assessing the conference’s potential attendees. Then, strategize your networking process, planning how to approach each target connection and what to focus on when presenting your company.
Bitly Analytics can help with this by showing you the content or profiles that generate the most interest. This allows you to make the most of the short time you’ll have to interact with other attendees.
Use QR Codes and short links
Detailing your plan to use QR Codes and short links can show your boss you have a follow-up plan to help you maintain connections after the conference.
Incorporate Bitly QR Codes and short links on physical or digital conference materials, such as handouts, presentations, or name tags. This allows you to easily share valuable resources, session summaries, or insights gained from the conference with new contacts, reinforcing connections and demonstrating value.
Track engagement and follow-ups
This is a great way to show the value of conference attendance when seeking future approvals. Bitly Campaigns allows you to monitor engagement with the links you share during the conference, helping you prioritize follow-ups based on interest levels.
To track engagement, you simply need to navigate to the Campaigns section in your Bitly account and select View link details to assess each link’s performance. Note the highest-performing links to determine what your contacts are the most interested in so you can create more targeted networking or lead-generation campaigns.
Make networking opportunities more valuable with Bitly
Get your boss to sign off on a conference by adequately preparing a pitch that highlights the value it brings to you and the organization as a whole. When you get permission, measure the impact of conference attendance to boost your chances of approvals for future events.
Bitly links and QR Codes make it easy to track the impact of conference attendance. You can see how much engagement each conference drives by assessing the performance of your networking links or QR Codes on the Bitly Connections Platform.
Explore Bitly today to get valuable insights into your event networking efforts and boost your conference ROI.