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Hunter McKinley, cofounder and CEO of Backtrack’s parent company, Yac, speaks with an ECEF attendee in May. (Courtesy Lippman Connects)
Standing out as an exhibitor at trade shows and other events isn’t easy. The cofounders of Backtrack, an AI booth sales assistant app, realized that they needed a novel way to help them connect with prospects at the Exhibition and Convention Executives Forum (ECEF), held May 29 in Washington, D.C. So they hatched a plan — although during the 50 hours it took them to execute it, they started questioning whether it would end up being worth all that effort.
Jordan Walker
“Every idea we had led to another one,” Hunter McKinley, cofounder and CEO of Backtrack’s parent company, Yac, told Convene. “And it just spiraled into a whole, big project.”
McKinley and Yac cofounder Jordan Walker first landed on the idea of sending the 223 ECEF attendees handwritten, personalized letters, McKinley said, using a list of attendees ECEF had provided them. Both agreed it was important to establish a relationship with the prospects before the event, “so that way they knew who we were,” McKinley said. And it worked — at least 10 people at the event approached the duo first, knowing who they were before any initial conversation took place on site, Walker said.
McKinley and Walker didn’t stop with the letters. They also connected with every attendee on LinkedIn before the event — which was easier than what came next.
The Backtrack team leaned into the idea of making each prospect feel special, creating 223 customized internet landing pages — one for each of the attendees on the list they were provided. Each landing page contained the attendee’s name, title, company, and photo — plus a demonstration of the Backtrack technology.
One of the trading card holders the Backtrack team turned into a customized item for prospective customers.
To help the attendees get to the landing pages, the Backtrack team bought 223 trading card holders, each of which they decorated with the attendee’s name as well as an NFC chip that, when tapped by the attendee’s cell phone, would bring up their custom landing page on the phone. As if that wasn’t enough, they slipped a Starbucks gift card and their own Backtrack business card into each card holder. “Who’s going to throw out money and something that has their name on it?” McKinley said.
At ECEF, McKinley gave each attendee who came to the Backtrack kiosk his or her customized card holder. “We were able to hand them something that’s just theirs, and that we made just for them,” he said.
At this point during the prospect conversations, McKinley was able to demonstrate the Backtrack technology by recording part of the conversation. The Backtrack mobile app retroactively captures up to 20 minutes of audio history after a conversation has occurred. The recording can be activated by scanning a LinkedIn QR code, typing in an email address, or snapping a photo of a business card. McKinley used Backtrack to record a small part of his conversations, then sent the recording to each attendee’s landing page, where they were able to access and listen to it almost instantly.
An example of how the Backtrack recording appeared on the ECEF attendees’ landing pages.
Walker said it was satisfying to watch McKinley chat with the ECEF attendees at the kiosk. “He would say, ‘Hey look, we made something just for you.’ And their faces just lit up. They go, ‘Wait, what?’ And when they heard their recording, they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t even believe this.’”
Response to their tactics was positive, Walker said, with one attendee bringing six other people over to the Backtrack kiosk during the one-day event to show them what Backtrack had done. Sam Lippman, president and founder of Lippman Connects, producer of ECEF, called Backtrack the “poster child” of how to exhibit. Within 30 days of the event, Backtrack had more than $500,000 in potential business leads and more than 25 booked meetings, he said.
In addition to the time spent, what was the total investment for Backtrack to pull off a successful ECEF debut? In a LinkedIn post, McKinley wrote that it cost Backtrack $500 in materials and tech tools, plus $1,100 in gift cards — not to mention the four days they spent doing all the work which, Walker admitted to Convene, they’re “not gung-ho to do again.” McKinley said ECEF had the right number of attendees “to do something for every single one. If there had been 1,000 people, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
Backtrack’s 8 Steps to Better Exhibiting
In a LinkedIn post, Hunter McKinley wrote about Backtrack’s experience exhibiting at ECEF 2024. Here are his eight steps in brief, some of which can be applied to any exhibitor or sponsor looking to make an impression. Find all the details on McKinley’s LinkedIn here.
- Build the relationship before the event in a unique way.
- Show attendees you know them.
- Make the booth so interesting people will pull their colleagues over.
- Build the product demo into the experience.
- Optimize the packaging to be simpler, cheaper, faster to assemble.
- Make it easy to access the landing pages.
- Make it un-throw-away-able.
- Make sure people know how to get to their custom landing page.
Curt Wagner is digital editor at Convene.