Lisbon week is here: how do you decide which meetings are worth your time?

[AffKong]

Hey everyone

SBC Summit Lisbon kicks off tomorrow, and as with every big event, calendars are already packed with back-to-back 15-minute slots. After enough conferences, we've noticed that a surprisingly large share of those meetings quietly fade away once everyone flies home.

A few patterns we keep running into:

• Meetings booked just to fill the calendar, where neither side has checked what the other actually works with.
• Pitches that take up the whole slot and leave no room for questions about traffic sources, tracking or commission models.
• Great conversations that never turn into a follow-up because nobody agreed on a concrete next step.
• Swapping contacts with dozens of people and struggling to remember who was who a week later.

Our team tries to keep things simpler. We book fewer meetings and look into each partner's traffic and verticals beforehand, so the time goes into details rather than introductions. We also aim to leave every conversation with one agreed next step, even a small one like a test setup or a call date, and we follow up within a few days while the context is still fresh.

Curious how the rest of you handle it. Do you plan your conference meetings in advance or leave room for spontaneous ones, and what tells you a meeting is worth continuing after the event?