Not every company is blessed with a famous, deeply technical CEO/founder with outstanding conversational skills, an intuitive grasp of networking and nothing better to do than to attend all your executive leadership events. Here’s some practical advice on making the best of the resources and availability you’ve got to work with.

When I was running CTO summits, there were always some vendors for which they were a bust and others that got huge value out of the same events. The biggest difference was always the people that they put in the room and how they engaged with the other participants.

1. Failure Modes

There are two common failure modes for the representatives you send to executive engineering events - the ones who can’t hang, and the ones who can’t network.

1.1 Can’t Hang

Unless it’s a larger event where you have a booth and someone asks “what do you do”, most executive events are about building relationships, not pitching your product.

Senior engineering leaders are generally smart, accomplished, deeply technical and experienced at building and running orgs. They generally go to engineering leadership events to share perspectives with their peers.

Because of this, it’s often very hard for a junior Account Executive to be able to find a topic or commonality to build a relationship. The ideal representative is one that can connect with and relate to the challenges of running an engineering org at scale.

1.2 Can’t Network

The other common failure mode is when a company sends a technical founder or other representative who is deeply competent, but has never learned to work the room. They might spend 3 hours in a room with 40 qualified prospects and end up having two good conversations and forgetting to get either of their names!

There is an art to working a room without making it feel transactional. You start a conversation, identify a commonality, find a reason to continue the conversation later, get their info and then smoothly move on to the next interaction.

You don’t have to be a sales person to work a room, but you do need to learn how to get value from an event. If you’ve got a technical founder who hasn’t learned to network, teach them before you start spending money for them to sponsor/attend events.

2. Making the Connection

There are a number of ways of building an authentic connection with an engineering leader. Generally the more potential connection areas your representative has, the more likely they are to succeed in delivering value from the event.

Technical

Most senior engineering leaders seldom get to code any more. Because of that, many of them really enjoy geeking out - whether it’s about trends in LLM models or home automation using an Arduino.

If you send someone who is technical to an executive leadership event, as long as they have reasonable communication skills, they’ll immediately have a bunch of topics to use to engage with the other participants.

Deeply technical founders, DevRel professionals or Principal+ engineers often do a great job of engaging with engineering leaders.

Organizational

A big part of the job of a senior engineering leader is building and managing an org. Budgeting, hiring, prioritizing, motivating, managing. For non-technical executives (especially ones with an operational background), they can connect and relate to engineering leaders by empathizing over the challenges of building and running an org.

I’ve often seen senior product and/or operations leaders leverage their experience of running teams to connect with an engineering leadership audience.

Business

Beyond a certain scale and seniority, most engineering leaders are usually also pretty knowledgeable about and interested in business - whether that’s trends in the market or changes in the funding landscape. This is sometimes another way to make the connection.

It’s not as strong as the others, but I have often seen that representatives with a deep knowledge of and curiosity about business can broaden their connection by being able to talk about more than just technology and orgs.

Personal

This is really hard with engineering leaders as generally we’re not attending events to talk about pickleball or our kids summer camps, but occasionally I’ve met sales people who are just so likable, they’re able to create a trusted relationship with engineering leaders even if they’re not deeply technical and haven’t run a similarly sized org.

I still remember one young account executive who broke all the rules. He was non-technical, had never run a team and had no deep insights into the state of the world or trends in business. That said, he was just so good at connecting with people that he was consistently successful at building connections while attending engineering leadership events.

3 Who to Send

Now that we know the two most common failure modes and the best ways to make authentic connections, who should you actually send to your engineering leadership events?

Founders/Executives

If you have founders or senior technology executives and you can justify their time, they are going to make the deepest connections with the most valuable participants and they’ll also bring back insights that might get lost if you only send people from your revenue team.

Just make sure to coach them in networking if they haven’t yet developed the skill. Buy a book, do some practice sessions and ask them to attend a few less important meetups first to build their skills and their confidence.

Solution Engineers/Field CTOs/DevRel

When you can’t justify sending a founder or an executive, a field CTO or (if you don’t have one) a solution engineer can be the perfect representation.

Generally solution engineers are deeply technical and have good communication skills. Feel free to help them brush up on their networking skills and to set worthwhile targets for the number of qualified leads, but if they work the room they’ll probable make some worthwhile connections.

Another option is a member of your DevRel/Developer Advocacy team. They’re generally deeply technical with great communication skills. Just remind the of the differences between your IC and executive value propositions.

Sales Professionals

For more intimate engineering leadership events, it’s really best to have an executive (as opposed to an IC) from the sales org in the room so they’re more likely to be able to make the connection.

At larger conferences (especially with booths) there’s nothing wrong with including AE’s who can speak to the product features, but even then, invite them to be curious, to attend some of the talks and to try to learn the challenges the executives are facing rather than talking too much about your solution.

Marketing Support

At larger events, you might also want to send someone from your marketing org to help with booth setup, badge scanners, swag and other logistics. Of course, if you happen to have a unicorn marketer who can also create authentic connections with engineering leaders, all the better.

And if you have a larger marketing team, consider sending different people to different events. It reduces the travel burden for your field marketing team and provides a great opportunity for the rest of the team to get a better feel for the people you’re marketing to.

The biggest predictor of the value you get from an engineering leadership event (other than the quality of the event) is the people you send to represent you.

Make sure you send the right people - who can hang and can network, with clear quantity and quality goals for leads to ensure they maximize the measurable ROI for the event.