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I've been gifting since I was a seller — before it had a platform, a category, or a LinkedIn debate about ROI. It just worked. Still does.

I saw why again this week, walking HubSpot’s Unbound event with Sendoso, the gifting category leader.

At an event that size, every booth fights for the same five seconds of attention. 

Sendoso had a different problem: tons of booth traffic. I liked that you could gift right there on the spot.

By the end of the conference, Sendoso had booked more than 70 sales meetings. 

If you want to create a moment your prospects and clients will remember, you ought to check out Sendoso.

See what Sendoso can do for you →

(The event formerly known as Inbound).

And I need to tell you about the octopuses.

Picture a line of grown adults. Marketing specialists, sales leaders, and execs. Real people with real P&L responsibility. All of them waiting their turn to stack as many plush octopuses as they could in 60 seconds. If your tower falls over, you're out.

But here’s what threw me.

Most people in that line had no idea there was a prize.

There was a juicy prize. A Sony PS5. But that's not why they were standing there. They were standing there because they wanted to know how many octopuses they could stack.

I watched a woman calmly stack her best work of 8 octopuses. The leaderboard was 16. She didn’t come close. But she was unbothered.

And not because I was lost or just getting my steps.

Because I had a question that needed answerin’:

Why do some booths have a line, while the booth 30 feet away is a ghost town?

Get a line at your booth and your CMO will swoon. I can’t think of a better scenario when investing thousands in an event booth. It's the photo that goes in the recap deck to the CEO and board. It's the slide that justifies next year's spend. It’s what makes your sales team love you instead of treating you like a Slack vending machine.

But only a small number of booths have this figured out.

(Quick shout to HubSpot here — they built the floor as an octagon, so you never dead-end and you're always discovering something new around the bend. Seven laps and I didn't get bored once. That's harder to pull off than it looks.)

The ghost towns weren't a location problem. I checked. Of course there was some prime real estate, but there were no “bad” booth locations.

There was a two-screens-and-a-tagline problem. Some messaging on a board. Three or four people standing there in branded polos, waiting to be discovered.

I watched the old adage get tested in real time: If you build it, they will come.

They did not come.

And look — I talked to a team at one of those booths. Bottom quarter of the floor, not dead but nowhere close to booming. They knew they were outmatched. But they were still upbeat, still saying they'd had good conversations and learned a lot.

Which is the part that got me, because the booth employees didn't lose the event. They didn't pick the booth. They didn't approve the spend. They probably didn't get a vote on whether there'd be a single reason for a stranger walking by to stop.

You don't lose the event at the event.

You lose it in a planning meeting three months earlier, when somebody approved the invoice for the booth without an attention strategy.

One hired a professional blackjack dealer. Real dealer, real table, real gambling for prizes. That booth didn't just have a line — it had a crowd standing behind the line watching strangers win and lose.

I woulda played myself, if the line wasn’t so long.

One had a caricature artist. Eight people deep waiting to get drawn. I talked to the head of marketing running that booth and he said it was working exactly how he wanted: people stop, they sit for five minutes, and five minutes is a conversation.

I woulda got one myself, if the line wasn’t so long.

And then PandaDoc, which is my favorite one, because they gave out free protein shakes and the only price of admission was talking to a human being.

I asked them. How’d it work?

The sales guy lit up, “Best thing we’ve ever done.”

(I woulda got one myself, but I had just eaten lunch.)

I could almost see his eyes counting his commission. They’d made over 1,500 protein shakes, and most turned into conversations.

No. Nobody knows yet, next week at the absolute earliest.

But I'd bet there’s a big fat pipeline coming out of those conversations.

Because anybody who's worked a floor knows a warm conversation beats a cold badge scan every single time, and there were a whole lot of people who seemed to be having a genuinely good time at a vendor’s event booth.

When’s the last time you experienced that? Usually I’m dodging aggressive salespeople itching to scan my badge.

We can’t measure the emotional sentiment of these attendees (which is probably a good thing!). But I think it's the part that lasts. Don’t underestimate the value of being liked and remembered.

The same thing was happening upstairs. Only up there, the booth is a session title.

A few of my hallway conversations circled back to an unexpected theme. A woman told me she went to a session called "How We Scaled to 1,000 Agents." It was a packed room. The founder never actually shared how they did it.

I don't think this is an intentional bait-and-switch. I think it's selection pressure. Hundreds of companies pitch for a handful of slots, and the flashiest promise wins. Then there’s nobody grading whether the session delivered.

So the title earns the stop and the session doesn't pay it off. That's worse than the ghost town booth.

Nobody's mad at a ghost town. You just didn't get the conversation. But when 200 people sit down expecting the playbook and leave with nothing, you didn't fail to make an impression — you made a bad one. On the exact people you most wanted to impress.

The quieter way to lose a room is data dumping. I sat in a session where the research was genuinely good, but it still landed like a readout. Slide after slide of numbers isn’t a story. It’s exhaustive. So you walk out going "cool, thanks" and you never want anything from that person again.

The ones telling a story and then showing exactly how they pulled it off? Line at the stage afterward.

We got world-class at earning the click. We can’t get lazy about earning the finish.

They had a small booth. But you’d hardly notice because they were busy every single time I walked past.

I think it helped that she and her CEO had a session called "How I Turned My CEO into a Thought Leader" that was completely sold out.

It was so booked that I had to sweet-talk the Vector team into finding me two seats (one for me and one for the ever-talented Christina Le.)

I sat front row. It was excellent.

Tactical, specific, not a single wasted slide. And when it ended, there was a line of people waiting to talk to them, which is the ultimate "you crushed it” signal.

Here's what people will miss about Jess: she didn't earn that attention in Boston. She earned it over a year on LinkedIn, then she cashed it in at Unbound.

Nearly everybody else on that showroom floor was trying to win over three days what she already had in the bank.

And then she did the thing that reminded me why I’m a fan for life.

She put a slide up showing exactly how she makes the graphics that got her 6x more views than her podcast video clips. A play she'd stolen from Amy Poehler.

She showed before/after, specific examples, and her step-by-step process on a slide, for free, to a room full of people who could go do it tomorrow.

I took a picture of it mid-session and texted it to Kristin before Jess was off the stage. We're running it on Between the Lines.

That's the whole game right there. Teach somebody how to do their job better, and they'll go do your marketing for you.

Why should a stranger stop walking?

If the answer is "we'll have a screen," keep your money.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

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Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

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