In-Ear Insights: Generative AI for Conference Attendees

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss using generative AI for conference attendees. Using the MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2024 (#MPB2B), you will learn how to leverage AI to define your goals, create a detailed plan to achieve them, and optimize your conference experience. You’ll discover how to use AI to select the most relevant sessions based on your professional goals and your ideal customer profile. Finally, you’ll gain practical strategies for improving your networking skills and making meaningful connections with other attendees.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher S. Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we’re in the thick of conference season—which, of course, goes on from basically September to Thanksgiving. We’re at all these different events. The next big one for Trust Insights is the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. Katie, I have a question for you, and I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say immediately that the question is wrong because I’m leading with the technology—which is intentional, but I know it’s wrong. How, then, why am I even here? Because I want to hear your answer to this question: How would you use generative AI—and again, we’re leading with the technology, which is canonically wrong—to prepare for attending an event like the MarketingProfs B2B Forum?

Christopher S. Penn – 00:48
What are the different ways you could use it to make the most of the event as an attendee?

Katie Robbert – 00:56
I think it depends on your goals as the attendee. If you don’t know what your goals are, perhaps that’s where you start. So, unsurprisingly, I would say start with the 5P Framework—Purpose, People, Process, Platform, and Performance. If you’re attending a conference like MarketingProfs B2B—which happens to be in Boston this year, which is fantastic for you and me, Chris, because the travel is very light—start with what you want to get out of attending a conference. If your goal is networking, or if your goal is professional development, or if your goal is to understand the latest and greatest in B2B marketing, those are great places to start and put those into your purpose.

Katie Robbert – 01:47
So, if you start the 5P Framework but you’re not quite sure where to go from there, I think that’s where I would use generative AI. I would say, “Here’s a framework I want you to help me explore. I know what my purpose is, but I’m not really sure on the rest.” Then, you can iterate with generative AI to say, “The five P’s are Purpose, People, Process, Platform, Performance. I know the purpose; help me figure out the rest of them.” Ideally, what you would walk away with is some kind of outline or plan so that you could get to the end of the five P’s with Performance—your measure of success. To say, “How do I know I attended MarketingProfs B2B Forum and met my goal?”

Katie Robbert – 02:39
I reached my purpose. I did my networking; I had professional development moments; I learned about the latest things. It’s fine to say you want to do those things, but then the rest of the piece—the People, Process, Platform—helps you figure out how you’re actually going to achieve those goals. That’s where I would start. I think there’s a lot more we can unpack in terms of how to prepare for a conference and how to use generative AI for that. But if we’re talking specifically about what you as the attendee want to get out of it, then I think that’s a good starting point.

Christopher S. Penn – 03:15
I agree. One use case I’ve seen other people use with reasonable success—but with not great prompting—is if your purpose is professional development and training. You can use these tools essentially to say, “Well, what should I attend? There’s all these sessions, all these things. My time is limited. How do I make sense of this?” So, I figured maybe for this particular example—and if you’re listening to this, I would recommend you switch over to YouTube because I’m going to talk through and walk through a demonstration of how you would specifically use this—the first thing we need is the program. This is the MarketingProfs B2B Forum program. If you go to MPB2B.marketingprofs.com, you can find the program. There are workshops on Tuesday; there are regular sessions on Wednesday and Thursday.

Christopher S. Penn – 04:10
That’s the raw data. What I would suggest doing is taking any good old-fashioned text editor—the simplest thing you can possibly imagine—and just copy and paste. This is not super complex; this is not super high-tech. Just copy and paste the agenda page by page (it’s only three pages) into a text file. So we have the agenda here. That’s part one. Part two is you need to then pull in the AI system of your choice. Here’s where things will get challenging for some folks. You need to be clear about not just what you want from the event, but where you are as well. This might be things like about your company, about you as a person. Who are you? Where do you see your relative level of skill at B2B marketing?

Christopher S. Penn – 05:05
Where do you see things that you want to learn about? You might even—Katie, you can talk a bit about this while I get this loaded in—you might even want to load in your Ideal Customer Profile to say, “What should I attend to serve my customers best?” So you want to talk a bit about the ICP while I get these pieces put together?

Katie Robbert – 05:23
Yeah, absolutely. If you want to learn more about how you can get your own Ideal Customer Profile—if you don’t currently have one—you can go to TrustInsights.ai. An Ideal Customer Profile is exactly what it sounds like. What I’ve noticed in the work I’ve done is that a lot of us focus on who the person is once they’re in our ecosystem. We focus a lot on the sales funnel and how to close deals. We focus on how we keep people engaged. But the step that’s often missed is what happens outside of our ecosystem, and we think we have a good handle on it, but we can be a little bit off base with who we’re actually targeting.

Katie Robbert – 06:14
So what we’ve done at Trust Insights is we’ve developed a very efficient process using generative AI and your data to help narrow down who your ideal customer is—but not just who they are in terms of “here’s their job, here’s their industry”—but really digging deeper into what are the pain points you can solve for them? What are the things that keep them up at night? What are their motivations for making a decision? What are the indicators that they’re about to make a decision or make some kind of transformation that would signal you need to have some kind of content or a service prepared to address those things?

Katie Robbert – 07:00
What it does is it takes you and your assumptions out of it, because often, as marketers, we say, “Here’s what I think you need; here’s what I’m going to do for you.” It’s all about us—it’s all about me, me—when really it needs to be about the customer and what they are asking for, not what we think they want. That’s one of the reasons why I really like using the Ideal Customer Profile analysis because you’re taken right out of it. You’re just given a set of instructions for what you need to do versus you trying to figure out what this person really needs. You’re going to be told through the analysis.

Katie Robbert – 07:39
So what Chris is doing here—if you’re watching (if you’re not currently watching, you can go to TrustInsights.ai YouTube and watch this demo during the podcast)—Chris is trying to target the right sessions when you go to an event like a MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston. By using the Ideal Customer Profile, it’s an additional data point; it’s an additional layer of information—not just “what do I, Katie, want to get out of it,” but “what do I, Katie, want to get out of it so that I can do better for my customers?”

Christopher S. Penn – 08:17
Exactly. So our prompt here is: “We’re about to attend the MarketingProfs B2B Forum conference. I want to figure out which sessions will help us serve our customers best; where we need to send our people. First, I’ll provide you with knowledge about us and knowledge about our Ideal Customer Profile and ask it to let me know when it’s ready.” And then I upload two PDFs. The first PDF is the Trust Insights ICP, and the second is the Trust Insights—I call it a knowledge block; it’s basically a comprehensive summary of who Trust Insights is as a company. We could talk another time—and maybe on a live stream—about how you would assemble these pieces.

Christopher S. Penn – 08:48
Because ideally you’d want to have these kinds of knowledge blocks stored up in the document management system of your choice so that you can just drop them in. You don’t have to type this over and over again. Recently, as a quick aside, I was looking at the ballot initiatives for the election coming up, the legislative initiatives, and I have a large knowledge block I wrote about myself and what I care about, so I could drop in ballot initiatives and my knowledge block and say, “How should I think about this? How should I evaluate this?” We’re going to do the exact same thing in a B2B context here. Here’s the ICP and the knowledge block. It says, “Great, I’m ready to review it.” And now I paste in all of the entire agenda here.

Christopher S. Penn – 09:30
This is obviously quite a lot. Let’s see, we’re using Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro version 2. It says: “Given Trust Insights’ focus on data-driven decision-making, AI, and helping marketing leaders in midsize to large B2B organizations, here’s a breakdown of recommended sessions from MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2024. Must attend: Elevating B2B Marketing Impact”—this is your own workshop, so you kind of have to go. That’s good, though. The fact that it figured that out is good. It didn’t say, “Go to this workshop.”

Katie Robbert – 10:03
No, but it means that we are aligned with who we’re trying to address. Spoiler: Chris and I are actually speakers and presenters at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. If you didn’t know that, now you do. So if it wasn’t recommending our sessions for our goals, for our audience, then you and I, Chris, would be doing something completely wrong.

Christopher S. Penn – 10:32
Yes, exactly. Or the AI was really hallucinating—one of the two. So that’s Tuesday. We have to go to our own…

Katie Robbert – 10:38
Workshop. I would think so. I mean, I’m pretty sure we’re required…

Christopher S. Penn – 10:42
To be there. Exactly. On Wednesday, it says: “Here are some sessions on Wednesday: The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Prompt Engineering”—which is mine, again, that’s important—”AI and Beyond”—that’s Katie’s session; so we have to go to that one, too—”Building a data-driven culture in the AI-enabled age”—Zanti’s session—”Demand generation and AI with Ken and McDonald’s.” So these will be the four sessions it says we should be must attend. On Thursday, we have Dale Bertrand’s “Reverse Engineering Google’s AI,” we have John Miller’s “AI and B2B Email,” we have Jonathan Milne’s “AI, essentially marketing sidekick,” “Closing the credibility gap” with Daniel Raskin, “Can AI go straight for your CEO?” with Ahava Leibtag, and “Battling burnout” with Phoenix Harvey. So those are the—it said those are the must-attends.

Katie Robbert – 11:34
It’s interesting because it looked at the company as a whole. If you are sending a team of people and you want to make sure that your company goals and your customer goals are covered, this is a great process to follow because you can see that—and we haven’t gotten into the analysis—the AI is going to recommend, depending on individual team member focus. You can do this for a large group or you can do this for individuals and set those goals for each person who is attending. If you’re spending money to go to an event—which is one of the best ways to do professional development—you’re getting the most out of it. So that when people come back and say, “Oh, what did you learn at the event? How can we use what you learned?” it’s a very clear set of recommendations because they went with a very clear purpose.

Christopher S. Penn – 12:35
Exactly. Now let’s keep scrolling because we have recommendations depending on individual team member focus. Several sessions on content marketing, sessions on email marketing, sessions on marketing and sales alignment. Less relevant sessions have least focused on social media—it’s not a primary focus for your ICP, according to the provided document. Sessions on branding and advertising might be less of a priority compared to data-driven analytics and AI-driven strategies and general sessions on marketing strategy. Key considerations: client needs, team expertise, and networking opportunities. I think this is a pretty good job of winnowing down stuff, like, “Yeah, this is the places you must go if you want to get the most out of this conference.”

Katie Robbert – 13:16
I agree. I think it’s an incredibly valuable exercise for any conference. If you’re going to go to a conference, it can be very overwhelming because there are a lot of people, a lot of sessions, a lot of data, a lot of vendors. Having a plan going in is going to help you focus and stay focused on why you’re there. I really don’t know anyone who goes to a conference just to go and kind of see what happens. It’s time out of your week; it’s travel; there are expenses associated with it, so you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Another way you could look at this is if your goal is networking—well, I guess networking is a good one.

Katie Robbert – 14:12
You could load up the bios of all the speakers who are at an event and say, “If my goal is X, which speakers best align with my goals?” You could attend those sessions, or you can go out of your way to try to make networking connections with those individuals. A big part of going to events is the networking—it’s why you have all these people in one place. Where do you find those like-minded people? Where do you start to build that community? Starting with the speaker bios is probably a good place in addition to the sessions themselves, because a lot of times the sessions don’t give you enough insight into the speakers and what they are—what their skill sets are, what their expertise is.

Katie Robbert – 14:59
It’s just another way to do this kind of exercise.

Christopher S. Penn – 15:03
Exactly. So let’s do your professional background, Katie, to say, “What should Katie attend at this event?” I’m going to take your existing speaker bio or your existing general bio here and just append a paragraph at the end here. This is all from the Trust Insights website; this is all basic factual data. And I’m saying at the end here: “Katie’s an expert on strategy, organizational change management, strategic thinking. Katie’s not a hardcore technologist or coder and doesn’t seek to become one. Katie’s especially great at stakeholder management and is always looking for more ideas and use cases to advance the use of AI, especially generative AI, in determining useful use cases that are strategy-driven and not technology-driven.” What else would you add to sort of your “about me” for this particular use case?

Katie Robbert – 16:02
The big—I mean, the big thing is different kinds of management, but team building is a big one—skills assessment. I think right now, especially with AI, there’s not enough emphasis on the people. It’s all tech; it’s all, “What can the technology do for me?” The people are kind of forgotten about. The platform I’ve been really trying to push is that it has to be people first, which goes into change management. Calling out team building specifically is hopefully going to help the AI focus in on those particular things.

Christopher S. Penn – 16:44
So I added: “Katie also focuses heavily on team building, people management, and professional development and advancement of people within the context of AI.” What else would you add, if anything?

Katie Robbert – 16:53
I think, for the sake of this exercise, that’s a really good start. That’s pretty comprehensive.

Christopher S. Penn – 16:59
Okay, so let’s take this and say: “Now I’m going to provide you with the background about our CEO, Katie, who will be attending MarketingProfs B2B Forum as well as speaking at it. With this background information, review the list of sessions and make a personalized list of session recommendations for Katie.” Now let’s add in Katie’s background and let’s see what it comes up with because it might be the same things. Obviously, I would hope that it’s going to your sessions.

Katie Robbert – 17:58
Well, I mean, if I don’t go…

Christopher S. Penn – 18:00
To my sessions, leading her own session…

Katie Robbert – 18:02
Is essential, but at least it acknowledges that it’s the same person.

Christopher S. Penn – 18:07
Exactly. So it still says Zanti’s session, still says Kenda’s session, “Leading remote creative teams”—Test Needham’s session. “Given Katie’s CEO,” this could offer some useful insights as well. Let’s see: “Your forgotten audience,” “How to gain and lose organizational buy-in” with Tara Bryan, “Closing the marketing and credibility gap”—that’s Daniel Raskin’s session—Ahava’s session is still there, Phoenix’s session is still there, “Responding to change while following a plan”—Andrew Fryer’s session. So it actually did come up with some better recommendations.

Katie Robbert – 18:38
And I think that’s really helpful because, as I mentioned, it can be really overwhelming. When I go to an event as a speaker, for better or for worse, I focus less on what other people are doing and what their sessions are. I really hone in on making sure that my session is well-prepared. But by the time my session is done, there’s still a whole event happening, and I haven’t really thought about, “Where should I spend my time next?” I’m just sort of relieved that my session is done and hopefully went well. But then I want to make the most of my time.

Katie Robbert – 19:16
Having this short list of things I should be attending is going to help me make that transition from “I just got off stage and I need to go do something” to “I just got off stage; here’s where I go next. I don’t really need to think about it; my thinking is already done.” I really like that approach because, like I said, I keep coming back to—events can be really overwhelming. But if you have a plan going in, you just follow the plan, and it just makes it that much more enjoyable. You get that much more out of it.

Christopher S. Penn – 19:49
Exactly. Let’s see what it says for medium priority. You have the Christopher Penn sessions, like supporting her co-presenter sessions.

Katie Robbert – 19:58
I do appreciate that. It knows exactly who we are. It’s like, “You can go support him, but you don’t really need to attend it.”

Christopher S. Penn – 20:05
Exactly. “AI, your essential psychic,” the Jonathan Milne session, the John Miller session is in the medium priority. Lower priority, again, social media, et cetera. “Sessions targeted towards practitioners rather than leaders. Networking: Katie should prioritize networking events and opportunities to connect with attendees, especially CMOs and other executives.” So I think that’s a nice call-out to say, “Yeah, you might have more than one purpose in attending this event.”

Katie Robbert – 20:33
I want to mention that all the sessions curated for MarketingProfs are incredibly valuable for attendees. The sessions it’s mentioning here are the ones specific to me and my professional goals. If you do this exercise for yourself, your list is likely going to look different. My session might not even show up; Chris’s session might not even show up, especially if the things that are lower priority for me are higher priority for you. A focus on SEO and social media and email marketing—those are going to be things that are incredibly important to you. My session might not be relevant at all, and that’s okay. You need to go in making sure you’re getting out of it what makes sense for you.

Christopher S. Penn – 21:24
And to your point earlier about speakers and speaker bios, one of the things you might say as an attendee of a show like this is: “I know at any given conference, I know I want to see Katie Robbert; it doesn’t matter what she’s talking about. I know she’s a great speaker, and we get a lot of sessions.” You might specify in your opening prompt: “If there’s a session by Katie Robbert, or Ann Handley, or Donna Moritz, or Brooks Ellis, I want to go to those sessions. I don’t care what they’re talking about; those are priorities for me because those are speakers I know and trust.”

Christopher S. Penn – 21:54
Using these generative AI tools is a fantastic way to herd the cats, if you will—to bring some order to the chaos—because you are investing a lot of time, money, and personal energy showing up at these events. It would be unfortunate to miss easy opportunities for advancement because you weren’t sure what to do when these tools exist to help us with those things. Again, if networking, for example, if you are going as a salesperson, networking is essential. You would say, “Okay, I need to prioritize every networking opportunity. Which sessions should I go to—maybe to listen to attendee questions so that I can see how to tune my sales pitches?” You might not care about the session content; you might care about the Q&A session parts.

Christopher S. Penn – 22:43
There are any number of ways to approach this, but the key message is you should be using these tools to help you focus.

Katie Robbert – 22:52
I would take it a step further, too. If you are a nervous attendee or new to attending conferences, you can use generative AI to help you prepare. Let’s say you go through this exercise and it says you should really be focused on networking, and you’re like, “Oh, man, I’m really not great at networking; it’s just not one of my strengths.” Use generative AI to do a couple of things. One is you can practice. There are new features that have been rolled out where you can interact with generative AI. Use your ICP as a stand-in for someone you might be networking with and practice—gosh, I hate to even say it—practice your small talk. Practice your icebreakers—things you’re not very comfortable with but are necessary for networking.

Katie Robbert – 23:41
But also use generative AI to help you come up with more interesting icebreakers—better ways to start the conversation—more than just, “Oh, so what company do you work for? Oh, where are you guys located? Where are you coming from? What’s the weather there?” Like, there’s better…

Christopher S. Penn – 23:58
What do you do, Katie?

Katie Robbert – 24:00
Yeah, exactly. There are better ways. “Oh, how’d you get into that?” That’s not really helpful information, but it’s what we all do as a standard conversation starter. So what are other conversation starters? Give it samples of your writing; give it samples of other people’s writing that you really like and say, “Help me come up with a list of networking conversation starters so I can get the most out of a conversation with someone like Chris Penn”—maybe someone you’ve been wanting to talk to but don’t know how to talk to. What are the things Chris talks about? What are the things I want to know? Help me bridge that gap to figure out if I have a moment to talk with someone like Chris Penn.

Katie Robbert – 24:45
How should I start that conversation other than, “I’ve been reading your newsletter for 10 years, and I really follow everything you do, and I really liked your…” and it just blew my mind. And then you walk away and it’s like, “Okay, well, that wasn’t really a conversation; that was just word vomit all over Chris.” So how do you get better at having more confidence about starting those conversations and getting what you need out of them?

Christopher S. Penn – 25:10
You could even go so far as to download the PDF version of someone’s LinkedIn profile and have the tool maybe simulate—maybe if you do subscribe to that person’s newsletter or podcast—whatever, feed in a few issues or a few episodes and say, “Okay, I want you to simulate this person. Help me have a conversation with them.” This is something I wish more podcasts would do: give me a list of questions that this person has not been asked, because that’s going to create interesting conversations.

Christopher S. Penn – 25:39
One of the things I love about the podcast *Hot Ones*, besides watching people suffer eating hot sauce, is that they do a really good job of research, and they ask questions that are highly unusual—deep cuts and stuff—where it’s not the same question over and over again that the interview subject has answered a million times. That applies to what you do when you approach an event. If there’s that one person you know you need to talk to, a) simulate them first, and b) figure out what question do they want to be asked that no one has asked them yet.

Katie Robbert – 26:18
Well, and to that, if you have questions, find out if they’ve already answered that question so you don’t have to ask it again. “Oh, Chris, how would you recommend I get into learning about AI?” That’s a question you probably get asked a lot, but have answered a lot as well. So if I’m someone who’s like, “Oh, Chris Penn’s going to be there,” I can ask him—I highly recommend, and you can use generative AI—do that research first because he’s likely already answered that question a lot. You could say, “Hey, Chris, I know you’ve answered this question a lot. I really appreciated the information you gave. I want to ask you…” I want to build on that question. Number one, it shows the person you’ve done your research.

Katie Robbert – 27:10
Number two, it’s like, “Oh, okay, I don’t have to answer that question again, but I can dig deeper.” I don’t get the opportunity to do that in a podcast or an interview because the questions go by pretty quickly. But someone like Chris has even deeper information. Doing that preparation upfront before you go to an event where there’s going to be a lot of networking and there are people you want to meet—you’re going to get the most out of it. You’re going to make those deeper connections; you’re going to build stronger relationships because you’re not just one of a hundred people walking up to someone going, “Oh, so what do you do? Where is that located? Oh, how long was your travel?” Those aren’t meaningful conversations.

Christopher S. Penn – 27:51
Katie, if your company was a fruit, what fruit would it be?

Katie Robbert – 27:55
Probably definitely a strawberry.

Christopher S. Penn – 28:01
Why a strawberry?

Katie Robbert – 28:03
Because they are really versatile; they’re sweet, but they can also be a little bit tart. I would say the majority of people really like it, but they’re also not for everybody. And it happens to be my favorite fruit, so that’s really all that matters.

Christopher S. Penn – 28:28
Fair enough. I would have answered pineapple.

Katie Robbert – 28:32
Oh, why pineapple?

Christopher S. Penn – 28:33
Because it’s the only fruit that digests you when you digest it.

Katie Robbert – 28:38
We don’t do that to people, though, so that’s weird.

Christopher S. Penn – 28:40
We do, in a sense, when we work with people and we start helping them revamp their processes and find their data and get them organized and help them get their heads on straight about things like AI. In many cases, as much as we’re taking in data, we are helping them restructure their people, their processes, and their platforms.

Katie Robbert – 29:02
Well, that just got weird. But it is a more interesting question to ask than, “So what do you guys do?” Chances are you already know what somebody does. So try to… But anyway, the point being is, if you’re someone who’s newer to networking, or even if you’re not newer to networking, use generative AI to brush up on your skills because networking can be something that a lot of us dread because of that small talk. So how do you make it more interesting? Use generative AI. Practice.

Christopher S. Penn – 29:44
Yep. If you want to practice and you don’t feel like typing and you have a paid subscription to ChatGPT, turn on advanced voice mode, and then you can have an actual conversation with it. Just really talk to it like one person or another. Say, “Hey, today I want you to help coach me on networking at conferences and events. I tend to be a nervous attendee. I want you to play the role of…” and you rattle off some stuff and then go through that interactive coaching process.

Christopher S. Penn – 30:11
There’s no shortage of ways to use these tools. If you have some tips for how you’re using generative AI to prepare for attending events like the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, pop by our free Slack group—go to TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers—where you and over 3500 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day. You can also let us know what company or what fruit your company would be if you happen to have an answer to that question. Wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on today, go to TrustInsights.ai/podcast, and you can find us on most places podcasts are served. Thank you for tuning in, and we’ll talk to you on the next one.

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