HighLevel Summit ran 13–16 October at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas. When it wrapped, we had a table booked for our partners a few floors above the city.
Why a dinner as well as a booth
We spent the three days of Summit on the expo floor, and it did what a floor does — we wrote about that separately, and deals genuinely started there. But a booth conversation is four minutes long and it ends when the next person walks up. That is how you get found. It is not, on its own, how anyone decides to build a business with you.
A conference the size of Summit sharpens that. Thousands of agency owners in one building, every vendor competing for the same four minutes, everybody’s badge already full of scans by lunchtime.
So the evening it ended we did the other thing as well. One table. About a dozen people. Three hours and nobody walking up.
We got there first
Nothing clever here — we just wanted to be the ones already sitting down when people arrived, rather than the ones apologising for traffic.
Which meant twenty minutes in an empty dining room watching a chef work the pass, and a table set for twelve with nobody at it yet. That is a slightly nervous twenty minutes. You have invited people who spent four days being pitched by everyone, and you are about to find out how many of them actually come.
Who was at the table
Partners, mostly. A couple of HighLevel shirts among them.
What we did not do was pitch. There was no deck, no demo, nobody stood up. The whole point of taking people to dinner is that dinner is the thing — if you turn it into a sales meeting with steak, you have spent the money and lost the room.
What it was for
People were grateful, and said so.
That sounds like a small outcome and it is not. Our partners spend most of their relationship with us inside a dashboard. Four days of Summit and then a dinner where nobody sells them anything is the part they remember, and the partner who remembers you is the one who picks up the phone next quarter.
If you are going to the next one
We will be at the next Summit, and we will do this again.
If you run an agency and you want to be at that table next time, book a call and we will sort it out before the tickets go on sale.
