In a few weeks, I’ll be in Valencia for Esomar Congress. This year’s theme is “Metamorphosis” — a nod to how much the research industry is changing, from AI and synthetic data to entirely new ways of understanding people. It’s a good theme. It’s also made me think about a much smaller, much more fixable problem I see at almost every big industry event: most people show up selling the wrong thing.
Walk any conference floor and you’ll see it immediately. Booths stacked with one-pagers. Elevator pitches fired off within thirty seconds of a badge scan. Demo requests before anyone’s asked a single question about what the other person actually needs. Everyone is selling their product. Almost no one is selling their expertise. And in a room full of buyers who’ve been pitched a hundred times before lunch, expertise is the only thing that actually gets remembered.
The $25-an-hour problem, at scale
I’ve written before about the moment my hairdresser asked if I made more than $25 an hour, and then asked why I was still cleaning our office bathroom on the weekends. The lesson was about knowing what your time is actually worth, and stopping the low-value work that was quietly capping my (and my company’s) growth.
Big events are the same problem wearing a different outfit. When you spend your limited time at a conference reciting product features to whoever walks by, you’re doing $25-an-hour work with $500-an-hour access. You have a room full of decision-makers, industry peers, and potential partners in front of you for three or four days — and you’re using that access to do something a website landing page could do just as well. The real value you bring isn’t your product. It’s your judgment, your pattern recognition across dozens of client problems, your point of view on where the industry is headed. That’s the thing nobody else in the room can hand out on a piece of marketing collateral.
What reinventing your value actually looks like in 5 easy steps
- Lead with a point of view, not a pitch. Instead of “here’s what we do,” try “here’s what I’m seeing across the accounts we work with, and here’s where I think it’s headed.” It’s a completely different conversation, and it’s the one people actually want to have.
- Ask better questions than everyone else. The fastest way to be remembered as an expert is to ask a question that makes someone stop and think, not one that sets up your next slide.
- Publish your perspective before you show up. A short post, a talk, even a well-argued opinion in a group chat ahead of the event means people are already looking for you by the time you land. You’re not one more badge in the crowd — you’re the person whose take they wanted to respond to.
- Let the product come up last, not first. If the conversation is good, someone will ask what you do. That’s the moment to talk about your product — after you’ve already proven you understand their problem better than most vendors bother to.
- Follow up as a resource, not a rep. The best post-conference emails I get are the ones that reference something specific we discussed and add a new thought, not one that just says “great meeting you, let’s set up a demo.”
The metamorphosis worth making
Esomar picked “Metamorphosis” as this year’s theme because the industry is visibly changing shape. But the more useful metamorphosis is a personal one: the shift from showing up as a vendor to showing up as an expert. It doesn’t cost more, and it doesn’t take more time. It just requires deciding, before you walk onto that conference floor, that your point of view is the actual product — and that your product is just the proof.
If you’re heading to Valencia for Congress, reach out to me. I’d genuinely love to compare notes while we’re there.