Conferences and tradeshows are more than just events to attend, they’re strategic points of contact for building meaningful relationships and closing key deals. In our recent Inside the Source conversation, Joe Stevens, Vice President of Business Development at BW Forsyth Partners, dives into the pivotal role these events play in the business development process and the systematic approach his team takes to maximize their value.
Taking time to build strong relationships with targets could be the difference that separates dealmakers from the competition. With numerous players vying for the same opportunities, standing out requires a strategic, long-game approach. Joe Stevens at BW Forsyth Partners says, “conferences are a great way to do that.”
Joe shares practical tips on how to build durable relationships. He shares that while many teams focus on and excel at making initial connections, the true ROI lies in fostering those relationships post-event. By blending preparation, intentionality, and follow-through, he breaks down a roadmap for taking conference attendance beyond just showing up.
Dive into Joe Stevens’ unique strategy, real-life examples, and actionable tips for maximizing these events.
Transcription:
Sourcescrub (S): Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Joe Stevens (JS): Joe Stephens been with BW Forsyth Partners for coming up on three years now. We're based in Saint Louis. We've done at Forsyth Partners just over 50 acquisitions over the last 15 years. And we haven't sold business and have no plans to. We find that that approach resonates really well with a lot of these business owners and the founders of these businesses where we're able to build relationships over time. A great way to do that is at the conferences.
S: How do you define trade show success?
JS: Some you may go to with a massive list of groups that you want to visit with some, maybe there's just a handful of potential partnership or acquisition targets you want to check in with. But I think the best way to define that success is to really understand “Why am I going here?” You know, and it's doing the upfront work. For us, do a comprehensive screen of who's going to be attending and, you know, and what groups are interesting for us to, to get in front of. Is there anyone that's new to us? Is there any relationships that we've had over time? And then once we define that universe, just making sure we're doing everything we can to get in front of them at the trade show, whether that's grabbing coffee or setting a meeting to either introduce ourselves or catch up, but making sure we're doing everything in our power. And then, you know, once we're there, if we have booked time, that's great. You know, it's great to have that time set aside. But you've reached out, you've made phone calls, you’ve sent a couple of emails, you know, hopefully there's some name recognition there so that if you do swing by the booth and you can get a few minutes, at least know who you are and why you're reaching out. And you know, for us, we don't expect to walk away with a certain amount of positive meetings. It's moreso just doing everything we can to make sure we got in front of business owners.
S: In addition to initiating relationships, where do conferences fit in your business development process?
JS: I would say a big part for us is top of funnel, especially, you know, if you think about a new market for you, it's a great way to map that market, to really understand who's participating and build those initial relationships. But then, you know, as you move down the funnel a few years later, 5 or 10 years later even, it's a great check-in point because oftentimes, especially with private businesses, an owner may know that they want to sell at some point, but they're just not there. So making sure you're putting in your effort to establish those relationships and stay top of mind, you can't time a deal and you can't force someone to sell. But sticking around and being a friendly face as they get closer, it's really important. So I'd say throughout the funnel, these conferences play a pretty important part.
S: How do you determine which conferences to attend?
JS: And some of that's driven by the platforms that we operate. You know, what industry, what industry conferences are on their radar. That's a good place to start. Other times, you know, you may find a business that's really attractive and you punch them into a tool like Sourcescrub. And then a cool feature there for us is if you scroll down, you can actually see all the conferences that they're attending. So we do some desktop research that way. Try to piece together, hey, this one might be interesting to get to as well. And then also, you know, talking to business owners themselves: “Where else are you exhibiting?” And lastly, you know, you talk to other industry participants, other private equity groups or investment bankers just picking their brains on where they're spending their time, especially when there's good industry or coverage overlap. That's a good place to understand where you should be getting to.
S: What do you do to make sure you arrive completely prepared to take advantage of the time on site?
JS: I think it depends what you're trying to get out of a conference. If your goal is just to get to the show and walk the floor and see who's there and you can do that with pretty minimal effort. But for us, generally, we put in a pretty big lift upfront. So we're combing through the conference list really trying to understand what each business is doing. You know, what aligns with either our platform or potential new platform and what's really interesting to us. So we're doing some heavy research on the front end and just trying to see what might be a good target to try and get in front of. From there, you know, we're doing some solid outreach as well where it's not just a one email campaign trying to send a couple emails, trying to tell our story a little bit, trying to make some phone calls to, you know, like I said earlier, it'd be great if we could schedule time with the business owner or a participant on a conference. But even if we can't schedule that time, I'm hopeful that when the day comes, they'll know who Joe Stevens is and why he's been reaching out. So just trying to get some of that name recognition and then trying to map out the show as well, because you have a finite amount of time once you're actually there. So if you're able to get the booth numbers and have some sort of game plan as you're walking the show, for us it's helped us be more efficient. And that leads to just getting in front of more business owners throughout the day. We want to map it out 6 to 8 weeks ahead of time, that you don't want to be 6 months ahead of time because, you know, people don't know what their days are going to look like. But hopefully 3 weeks out, the team generally has their sales meetings booked, and maybe there's a few windows to grab a coffee or briefly connect. That's where we've seen a ton of success. But going into conference week, you want to have mostly everything firmed up.
S: Are there any outreach tactics or tools that you have found particularly effective for connecting with targets ahead of time?
JS: What we've found to be successful for us is just showing that we've done our research, maybe calling out some interesting things that they've been working on and telling a bit of our story to show maybe there is a bit of differentiation that we're bringing to the table, and then if it's not top of mind, that's completely okay. But if it is top of mind, we're hopeful that, hey, you know, we were interested in what you all are doing and this is what we're bringing to the table. Maybe there might be a reason to connect. You know, what we're trying to do is just tell our story and let them know that, hey, we'll be here if this is interesting to you. And the cool thing about it is that maybe 4 or 5 years in a row, it's not interesting, but that 6th year when the business owner is potentially considering doing something, there might be a bit more of a catalyst to connect with us.
S: What’s your advice for staying in touch and continuing to have meaningful interactions with folks after the conference is over?
JS: As much as you'd like it to go quicker, oftentimes it comes back to conferences. So say we had a good conversation at a show and then maybe there hasn't been much going on on a company's site as far as news goes. You know, we don't have much of a reason to reach out. But hey, we're going to be in a show together, maybe up in Boston this fall. It'd be great to just check back in. We use them as check-in points a lot of the times. And it all goes back to this is the story you know, we're telling. And we'd love to continue the relationship. We understand maybe right now isn't the right time to dive any deeper, but we're going to be around and I also think that being at these shows shows that you are a market participant, you're not just a blue blazer coming in and trying to buy up all the businesses. You know, you're actually participating and seeing a friendly face time after time helps build that relationship.
S: Is there a particular trade show that stands out in your mind as having been particularly successful?
JS: There was a show we, we attended a few years ago. This would have been for a new platform for us or a new platform area for Forsyth. And we lean very heavily into all the practices that I outlined earlier. You know, we spent quite a bit of time in the attendee list, and there's thousands of attendees. So put in the legwork upfront. We chuck out to, I want to say, 50 or 60 really exciting businesses to us. And we dug in. We try to figure out who was going to be there, and we made sure to do our outreach and our own work on that. On the front end. Booked a ton of meetings. I think we bought somewhere close to, if memory serves, 10 or 11 meetings. So coffees or lunches or whatever it may be had significantly more connections once we were there. And a lot of these owners excitedly enough, they knew who we were because we ended up reaching out. We've been making phone calls, sending emails, and this was looking at the calendar now, this was 2.5 years ago. And some of these relationships are still, you know, fully engaged with us. And I don't think we've partnered with a business from this show yet, but I'm hopeful 1 or 2 could be partners here in the next 12 months.
S: What’s one lesson you learned from a conference that didn’t go your way?
JS: When you start going through the conference circuit, you figure out what are good M&A conferences and what are strictly sales conferences. What we found, you know, just getting our reps in. And it is that some shows you get there and there's really no ownership at the conferences. It's going to be a lot of regional sales individuals. And there's not much of an opportunity to make any meaningful connections there. And if your goal is to, learn more about businesses, that's great. You can definitely do that. But you're not going to walk away from one of those shows with, some exciting meetings having taken place.
S: How do you think conference planning and strategy has evolved over time?
JS: I think we're always trying to get better. Even today, when we prepare for shows, we're trying to do it in a more differentiated way. And, you know, there's more and more groups coming into the market trying to deploy capital. So it's always, hey, how can you be a little bit different and get a business owner to take a meeting with you? So for us, it's just continuing to get better at doing our research, get better at communicating that differentiation and telling our story. But then, you know, at the same time we found some things work and sometimes you just got to try new things, whether it's a couple more emails, a couple more calls, maybe sending something tangible to a business owner ahead of time, just anything to build some of that, that name or brand recognition and stand out.
