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1 General Discussion

1 General Discussion

Best Practices for Managing Customer Speakers at Conferences in Government Contracts

·Sep 10, 2026 06:37 PM(edited)·

Does anyone have a good process for sourcing/coordinating customers to speak at conferences that they could share? Right now, basically people come to me (sometimes like 2 weeks before a conference) and ask if we can get a customer to speak at a conference with one of our employees presenting. Or sometimes they're asking for a conference to do an entire presentation themselves. Then it's like... where is it? What type of conference? Do we need to find a customer that's already attending? That can magically speak to this topic? Or would they need to pay to attend? OR are we asking them to show up for an hour, speak, and leave? We work wtih government, so it becomes even more tricky because we usually can't cover any expenses.. Anyway, this is so not my area of expertise but somehow I keep getting tasked with it. I would love to follow a process, or even better shove a process over to someone else and tell them to figure it out themselves 😂 OH and it's extra fun when you do give them a customer, and then they reach out but never do any follow up, or respond to the customer's questions, and it makes you all look bad. But I digress!

5 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Gabrielle Herrera
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You need
some sort of ticketing form like asana or even a google form
better boundaries around turnaround time
A CRM or AI connector (I use the HubSpot Claude connector) to actually source said champions
4
Rachel Lurie
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Create some sort of request intake form with all the details you need. Highlight very clearly what your lead-time requirement is. Determine what types of events you can support. For example, my team supports tier-1 and corporate events, but we do not support smaller regional events -- our regional marketing team owns those but keeps us in the loop on any customer speakers they source in partnership with the local sales team. We simply do not have the bandwidth to support all the regional events our company participates in. For tier-1 and corporate events that we do support, we require a 2-3 month lead to for customer sourcing / content creation and prep time.
Deja Darrington
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+1 to what everyone else has said. We use a Slack intake form that routes into Salesforce, with validation rules around timing and required information. That has been helpful for preventing last-minute requests and ensuring there is enough context and lead time to vet the right customer, align with the relationship owner, and secure approval. I am also building AI-supported matching for speaker and reference requests to make the initial candidate list more intentional based on use case, proof, prior participation, and customer context. It still requires human judgment, but it reduces a lot of manual research. We also highly leverage customers from our customer programs for these, and partner with CS too.
Sarah McCoy
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Agree w/ everyone's thoughts here. One company I worked for had a Confluence page (this could also be done in Sharepoint or your company intranet) and we had guidelines for marketing requests like this and SLAs, etc. so that you're not put in a position that really isn't feasible or sustainable. I would suggest outlining what is needed for the whole process and a realistic amount of time to secure a customer, etc. and then clearly outline what is in scope and what isn't. Then I also agree that if you have a system to catalogue your reference pool (we use Deeto but this can be done on a spreadsheet or Smartsheets, etc) but have a column or "opt in" where the customer says if they are willing to speak publicly. You can ask the question during customer story interviews, as an example (we had a list of activities and our team would ask what they'd be interested in doing and then that gets recorded on a sheet or you could use a form, etc). You definitely need a service desk or at least a form for marketing requests (Smartsheets works well for this if you don't have Asana or Jira) to manage requests and keep track of the steps. A lot of work to set up but then I would suggest going on a "roadshow" with this info to your marketing partners or other teams who tend to put in these requests to share how the process works and what their end of commitment should look like in order to leverage your "recruitment" or sourcing efforts. For a customer to create a presentation, they need a few months! And the team should have at least a couple of talking points prepared about what is in it for the customer speaker.
Kristine Kukich
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I worked with our marketing team to identify conferences we would like to participate in, then identified those with speaking opportunities and folded in a two-tiered process: (1) those where we sponsored the conference and were presented with a speaking opportunity (paid all client speaker expenses), (2) those where we would sponsor the speaker application and conference fee (maybe travel expenses) for our customers to showcase us while still staying within the confines of the conference content requirements. As a conference coordinator for CEdMA, I get requests for time to speak from a huge variety of people.