This series breaks down the combinations of sources, solutions, and data signals top dealmakers use to identify, engage, and win the right opportunities.
This formula has all the elements you need to learn how private equity firms find deals at industry conferences. Read on for a step-by-step breakdown of how to identify trade shows with the highest concentration of relevant opportunities so you can connect with them ahead of time.
Nothing beats the valuable face time and relationship-building moments industry conferences and trade shows provide, so it’s easy to see why events remain among dealmakers’ top three deal sourcing tactics. However, there’s a major opportunity for dealmakers to use data and technology to streamline and improve their conference planning efforts — something that little more than half of firms do today.
Traveling to trade shows hoping to bump into transaction-ready private companies that match your firm’s investment thesis isn’t a reliable, repeatable, or efficient sourcing strategy, especially in today’s highly competitive and increasingly specialized market. Instead, smart organizations are harnessing the latest data and technology to make the best use of teams’ time by pinpointing the highest value trade shows and booking meetings with ideal targets before hopping on a plane.
Identifying and attending the right industry conferences has a major impact on the entire deal pipeline. Joe Stevens, VP of Business for BW Forsyth Partners, agrees. “Throughout the funnel these conferences play a pretty important part,” he said in a recent interview. “They’re a great way to map [a new] market to really understand who is participating and build those initial relationships.”
He continues, “But then as you move down the funnel they’re a great check-in point, because an owner may know that they want to sell at some point but they're just not there. So making sure you're putting in effort to establish those relationships and stay top of mind, and sticking around and being a friendly face as they get closer, is really important.”
For the purposes of this post, let’s imagine we’re a private equity firm looking for the right conferences to attend in the next month, ideally somewhere on the East Coast. Our investment thesis focuses on companies that are:
Read on for a step-by-step process for applying this formula using a deal sourcing platform like Sourcescrub.
In Sourcescrub or your deal sourcing platform of choice, start by selecting the right sources. Since we are looking for conferences to add to our calendar, we will choose all event-related lists.
Next, filter these lists by the conference location, industry-focus, and timeline that fits your needs. Remember we are hoping to find East Coast-based, biotechnology-related events taking place within the next month.
Now that you’ve narrowed down your trade show options, it’s time to start digging into each list to see which conferences offer the largest number of relevant targets. BIO-IT World Conference & Expo 2025 has over 400 companies planning to attend, plus we heard good things about last year’s event, so we decide to choose this list to investigate further.
Pro Tip!
Deal sourcing platforms that integrate directly with your CRM make it fast and easy to see whether any companies currently in your CRM are also planning to attend a particular conference. Depending on your goals for attending the trade show, this may help inform your decision by highlighting opportunities to catch up with existing targets as well as book meetings with new ones.
Start filtering the list by your desired firmographics and industry. For the purposes of this example, we will filter for private companies founded within the last twenty years and based in the United States only. Since this conference features a number of IT businesses that fall outside of our investment thesis, we will also filter by specific industry keywords like “biotech” and “bioengineering.”
If you have a particular revenue range in mind, apply this filter next. Since private companies are not required to publicly disclose revenue numbers in the US, many firms use employee headcount as a proxy, which is what we will use for this example. We are looking for companies between $5M and $25M in revenue and usually estimate $200K revenue per employee, so we will narrow the companies on this list down to those with between eleven and two hundred employees.
Depending on your organization’s focus industry and investment parameters, you may also wish to filter the remaining companies on your list by market presence-related signals. For example, we want businesses that have somewhat of a market presence, but not too large. In our case, it’s also important that companies paying to attend BIO-IT World Conference & Expo 2025 and other trade shows are receiving some industry recognition in return. So we further narrow our list to companies that are present in at least three conference lists, two “best of” articles, and two buyers guides.
Pro Tip!
Take a shortcut to identifying relevant conference attendees with custom company scoring. Create a model around your investment criteria and simply filter and/or rank trade show lists by score, rather than entering your parameters from scratch each time.
After applying all our parameters, there are six highly relevant targets attending Bio-IT World, making it a promising option for us to attend. This means it’s time to contact these companies’ owners and operators and try to schedule time to meet with them during the conference. Fortunately, the latest deal sourcing platforms provide highly accurate executive emails and phone numbers, so we can start reaching out right away.
Now that you’ve identified the trade shows with the highest concentration of targets for your organization, it’s time to start engaging with them and booking meetings. Check out this success story to see how Sourcescrub helps a leading buyout firm not only attend 2x more trade shows each quarter, but also increase booked meetings by 20%.
