Inviting people to a conference you sponsor: a four-week plan

Sponsors tend to treat attendance as the organiser's problem. It isn't. The organiser fills the venue; nobody fills your stand. The people who come and find you are, almost always, the people you invited.

That makes the invitation a sales task, not a marketing one. The people best placed to do it are the ones who already know the contacts. Here's a four-week plan they can run without needing anything about the event beyond a date, a place and a registration link.

Week one: the list, and the reason

Each salesperson picks fifteen to twenty people they'd genuinely like to see in the room: existing clients worth deepening, prospects who've gone quiet, contacts from a previous event. Not a mass list. Twenty people they can write to by name.

Then one sentence per person on why this event, for them. A talk on their topic, a peer they'd want to meet, a problem they mentioned last time. That sentence is the invitation; everything else is packaging.

Week two: the first invitation

A short personal email or LinkedIn message. What the event is, when, why you thought of them, and the registration link. Under 120 words. No agenda attached, no brochure. The first message earns a reply, not a registration.

The company page posts in parallel: one post on why the event matters, one on what's actually on. These aren't for the twenty people; they're for the people who look you up after a message lands.

Week three: the follow-up, with something new

A week later, one follow-up to anyone who hasn't answered. The rule is that it must carry something new: a speaker confirmed, a session added, seats filling. "Just checking in" is not a follow-up, it's a nudge, and people delete nudges.

This is also the week for the phone. A two-minute call to the five people who matter most does more than any number of messages, and the script is simple: why I thought of you, when it is, can I put you down.

Week four: the last call and the meeting

A few days before, one last message to the unregistered, honest that it's the last one, with the date and the link. And to everyone who has registered, a different message entirely: where to find you, and a proposed time to meet. A registration is a maybe. A time in the diary is a yes.

Keep it away from the event's own planning

The sales team doesn't need the budget, the supplier quotes or the task plan, and the event team doesn't need to see who's being invited. Keep the two apart. In SeatCue that's a campaign with a purpose of "invite people to an event": it holds the date, the place, the link and the audience, writes every piece above, and nothing else. The event itself, with its costs and its plan, stays where it belongs.

When they hesitate

Most people who don't register aren't saying no; they're saying "not sure". The three usual reasons are time, relevance and travel, and each has an honest answer. Time: name the one session worth coming for, so it's a two-hour decision rather than a whole day. Relevance: say who else from their world will be there. Travel: offer to meet at a specific time so the trip has a fixed point in it. What doesn't work is pressure, and "seats are limited" when they aren't.

Two mistakes worth avoiding

The first is sending the same message to everyone. Twenty personal messages take an afternoon and get replies; two hundred identical ones take an hour and get nothing, plus a reputation. The second is inviting people to the conference rather than to you. The organiser has already invited them to the conference. Your invitation is to a conversation that happens to be there.

Then count. Registrations from your invitations against registrations overall, and meetings booked against people invited. Those two numbers, next to what the stand cost, are the sponsorship report.