Executives from Cisco, Salesforce, Dell, Webflow and Workiva share their top tips
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. And that makes it critical for conference organizers to ensure that their first-time attendees are set up for success—particularly as a tidal wave of newcomers continues to flood the b-to-b event landscape. Between Gen Z aging into the workforce, and the post-pandemic “Great Reshuffling” that saw a large chunk of workers migrate to new industries, first-timers now comprise a sizable percentage of event audiences.
The movement is good news for show organizers, who are typically tasked with attracting more newbies every year to diversify and grow their conference audience, gain fresh perspectives and keep their event evolving like the living organism it is. Providing first-time attendees with both a comfortable and valuable experience, however, requires a measured approach. So we asked event executives from Cisco, Salesforce, Dell, Webflow and Workiva for their top tips and insights on rolling out the welcome wagon.
IDENTIFY YOUR COHORT
Before exploring how to engage your first-timers, it’s essential to find out who they are. Most brands use registration as an opportunity to ask questions that help identify who’s new and where they’re coming from. Many of them use basic info, too, to help distinguish attendees that may be newcomers, including identifying those with junior job titles.
For Webflow’s annual flagship event, Webflow Conf, which has seen a marked uptick in newbies, organizers directly ask attendees if it’s their first time attending during pre-event registration, then do their own number crunching to supplement it.
“Some people self-select and give us that survey information,” says Trevor Drewry, head of experiential marketing at Webflow. “But then on the back end, we’ll also look at past attendee lists as a backup measure. So we ask them, but then we also do our own analysis, and we get a good list of these folks that haven’t done this [event] before.”
On the other hand, Cisco Live has always attracted a large portion of newcomers, but when the event strategy needed to shift post-pandemic, the team did some experimenting to zero-in on who they were. In 2022, the brand did some testing on catering to “next-gen” personas, offering programming and messaging geared more towards age than experience. When that felt too confined, Cisco reidentified the cohort as “early in career” and found more success.
“In our registration flow, we included our definition and what we consider ‘early in career’ is—any customer, partner or prospect who has less than seven years in their industry, in their business or in their role,” says Britney McDaniel, global event content manager at Cisco. “So it’s not [new] in our industry, but in their industry. We also ask them an age question, and for those who choose to answer, we do capture age in that way. So we get some good information during the registration cycle.”
TAILOR COMMUNICATIONS
Pre-event communications with first-timers should be tailored to their status and designed to offer as much useful information as possible to help them get the most out of their experience. At Dell Technologies, the team has a dedicated manager who is responsible for doing just that for the brand’s flagship show, Dell Technologies World, taking place this year May 19-22. Post-pandemic, the event has seen “more first-timers than ever before,” according to Dan Preiss, vp-experiential marketing at Dell.
“We actually have a program manager on my team that’s taken it as a special project to take the lens of a first-timer across almost everything that we do,” Preiss says. “How do we do audience acquisition? When they register, what do those communications look like? How do we get them ready to come on-site? What do we tell them in the facts to ‘know before you go?’ And then when they get on-site, what’s that experience? So this is absolutely something we’re experimenting with in real time this May.”
It’s a similar strategy for Cisco Live. After zeroing in on which attendees are early in their careers, the brand tailors messaging to that group.
“We’re really building communications around that—web pages and pre-show communications and then community and activities on-site for that audience—and try to keep them engaged as much as possible, and bring them back,” says Kathy Doyle, senior director-global Cisco Live conferences at Cisco.
Post-event interactions should be targeted, too, the experts say. At Webflow, the team sends out a survey four to six weeks after the conference and asks attendees what learnings they’ve applied since the show and what their experience was like.
“Even if they don’t engage with the question itself, we’ll see those attendees download new stuff, or reach out and say, ‘Can you tell me more’ about something,” Drewry says. “It’s just trying to add more value… I think that the post-event stuff is just as important [as pre-event] in driving that repeat attendance, in turning first-timers into repeat attendees, too.”
PROVIDE A LEARNING MAP
Offering customized learning maps or curated session recommendations is one way to not only get first-timers excited to attend an event, but also give them a solid jumping off point for when they arrive on-site.
Cisco provides a learning map for early-in-career Cisco Live attendees that is focused on accelerating their occupation and building relevant skills. “There’s a sea of content at Cisco Live; we have over a thousand breakout sessions,” Doyle says. “So we really try to create this learning journey, this learning map for them, and say, ‘OK, you’re early in career, these might be some things that you’re interested in. And that really helps guide their journey at the event.”
In a similar vein, Webflow offers first-timer attendees a crash course on what to expect, content-wise, ahead of Webflow Conf, and delivers content that “primes them for the conference,” according to Drewry. The brand also provides newcomers with a link to the previous year’s keynote, which is available on-demand, to give them a general idea of how content is presented at the show.
“It’s all under the banner of, hey, we want this to be valuable for you,” he says. “Whether you’re paying to travel and attend, or you’re attending from your home office for free, either way, we’re trying to drive that value for everybody.”
For Salesforce, equipping newbies with a dedicated first-timer guide is essential to making them feel comfortable and prepared for its megawatt user conference, Dreamforce.
“We point to example agendas, like, ‘Hey, for Bob Smith, CMO, this is what their Dreamforce agenda looks like—alike titles, alike industries, alike companies,’” says Charlotte Pedersen, senior director-global strategic events at Salesforce. “We pull data from alike profiles to generate those suggested activations and sessions that could be relevant to them on-site.”
HOST A PRE-SHOW RECEPTION
Hosting a pre-conference reception for first-timers isn’t a new concept, but it is a tried and true practice that top conferences consistently employ to make new attendees feel at ease and foster community.
At Dreamforce, which spans a nearly 2 million-square-foot campus, a first-timer meetup is always on the agenda for day one to help attendees get acquainted with fellow newbies. They’re also assigned an experienced “buddy” who walks with them to the opening keynote. And for the opening night concert, which takes place off-site, Salesforce team members meet up with first-timers to guide them to the venue.
Dell Technologies World is also slated to include a welcome reception for first-time attendees this May. “As people are getting on-site, we have an amphitheater in our attendee village, and we have our broadcast center right next to it. So we might have a 20-minute little food and beverage [experience] with ‘here’s what to look out for this week, and here’s some tips and tricks from some of our alumni,’” says Preiss.
Webflow also enlists specific team members to host a welcome reception for newbies the day before the conference kicks off to provide a sense of comradery. “It’s almost like birds of a feather,” says Drewry. “So we make sure we send team members to say, ‘Welcome to our Webflow Conf, it’s our annual user conference, and you can make these connections with other attendees.’”
OFFER A LAY OF THE LAND
Creating a sense of community among newcomers is critical, but depending on the size of an event, offering a physical lay of the land may be equally important. For mega-shows like Dreamforce and Cisco Live, whose vast campuses can overwhelm even the most seasoned attendees, providing a roadmap can go a long way in making them feel confident about navigating the footprint.
At Cisco Live, first-time attendees are given a curated, behind-the-scenes tour of the event, as well as the network operations center that powers the experience, which is like “Disneyland” for network engineers. Doyle says it’s an opportunity for newcomers to start forming a community while also getting their bearings.
ENLIST VETERAN ATTENDEES
Most people relish the opportunity to share something they’re knowledgeable about, and show others the ropes. Such is the case for many event veterans who enjoy attending a show year after year, and are happy to help prepare others for a meaningful conference experience.
“We tap into our alumni network and say, we would love to either feature you on slides or in person to say, ‘Here’s what I figured out. Here’s my hack. Here’s what I think is best,’” Preiss says.
And at the 2025 eTail Palm Springs retail conference, organizers split up first-timers into small groups that convened before the show officially began. The casual meetups were guided by members of the eTail Advisory Board, who spoke to the group about what to expect and how to take advantage of the event. They then led first-timers to the kick-off Battle of the Festivals cocktail reception.
LEAN ON THE EVENT APP
Mobile event apps are another avenue for communicating with first-timers and ensuring they’re equipped for various aspects of the show. Like Cisco, which leverages its push notifications that remind attendees when first-timer tours and events are taking place and how to get there.
And while not every brand has the ability to integrate its own technology into a mobile app, that’s exactly what Salesforce did during Dreamforce 2024. Following the announcement of its Agentforce AI platform, the brand built nearly 10,000 autonomous AI agents to address specific attendee questions and concerns.
“One opportunity is certainly making sure that all of our attendees feel aware and informed on the agendas or on the experience. So we built that into our on-site mobile app and people could ask, ‘Hey, what do I wear tonight? Where do I find this?’” Pedersen says. “I don’t want to negate the fact that we have all the traditional signage, we have ambassadors, we have a welcome center, we have meetup times. But if you can just ask really quickly in our event app… we can get you those answers right then and there, and you walk a little prouder.”
HOST FACILITATED NETWORKING
Networking opportunities are hardly groundbreaking in the world of b-to-b events, but organizers have shifted to a decidedly more purposeful strategy for matchmaking that provides a structured format for making connections.
At Webflow Conf, the team ensures that all newbies have a chance to connect one-on-one with a brand executive while on-site. “Then they have this connection, this relationship, and then that carries throughout the two days,” says Drewry. “So I think that facilitated matchmaking and networking, and making sure they [understand] ‘We are expecting you, and we’re so happy you’re here, and we want to make this as worthwhile as possible for you.’”
And at Dell Technologies World, the team works with the Braindate matchmaking platform to facilitate one-on-one meetups based on attendees’ specific interests. “Now you know each other because you both want to talk about a certain topic,” Preiss says. “So we feel like making it topical-based sometimes helps those first-timers or those introverts connect with the community.”
MEET THEM WHERE THEY ARE
There are more generations in the workforce than ever before, and that makes it tricky for conference planners who are working to provide value to first-time attendees that might have widely differing needs and expectations. Simply put, the experts we spoke with said the solution was to toss out the “we’ve always done it this way” playbook and meet people where they are.
“You now have to be very keenly aware of the patterns of how people network, connect and learn, generationally… The takeaway for me is authenticity,” says Preiss. “It’s meeting people where they are, having the space and grace for who they are and bringing their full self to a conference, and encouraging them to be authentic and aligning to that. So it’s listening to your community, and finding ways to do that—and there’s not just one way to do it.”
Meeting younger generations where they are may require a little extra je ne sais quoi, according to Alison Frederick, director-field marketing, Americas at Workiva. “Younger folks come in and they expect the events to be more exciting than, I think, their other counterparts,” she says. “So we have to be a lot more creative now. And that’s where we’ve helped our team grow, skillset-wise. I think the audience is expecting a little bit more pizzazz.”
Ultimately, the experts agreed that attracting, and catering, to first-time attendees is non-negotiable. Recruiting new audiences is vital to the health of b-to-b shows, as well as the event industry at large.
“It is super, super critical to get those new attendees and that next generation of attendees because, honestly, our audience is aging out,” says Doyle. “And today, you’re wondering how much do the younger generations find value in having face-to-face to events when they can get everything they want online in so many different ways. So it’s making sure that they understand and see that those face-to-face interactions are so critical and important, and it’s a different way to learn and gain so much. We’re doing everything we can to continue to communicate to people that haven’t been to Cisco Live, or the younger generation, how important it is.”
Photos: Courtesy of Dell; Cisco; Salesforce; eTail
