Booth traffic is easy to buy and hard to qualify. Swag brings a crowd, and most of that crowd came for the swag.

This is Gentry working with Port.io on the other problem: drawing people who are actually in the market, holding them long enough to have a conversation worth having, and handing them to the sales team while they are still interested.

If you exhibit at technical conferences, the measure that matters is not how many badges you scanned. It is how many of those scans a salesperson was glad to follow up on.

Gentry has worked booths at Black Hat USA for Akamai, at Gartner Security & Risk for Sygnia, and at ONUG for Lightyear.