• Timeliness is key. Send them as soon as possible after the meeting or interview.

• Many people wait until the holidays to say thank you or reach out. Why wait? Your follow-ups will be timelier, more appropriate, and certainly better remembered.

• Don't forget to follow up with those who have acted as the gobetween for you and someone else. Let the original referrer know how the conversation went, and express your appreciation for their help.

Make follow-up a habit. Make it automatic. When you do, the days of struggling to remember people's names—and of other people struggling to remember yours—will be a thing of the past.

Military strategists know that most battles are won before the first shot is fired by the side that determines where, when, and how an engagement is fought. And so it is with most successful conferences. Turning a conference into your own turf and setting goals ahead of time is what turns a casual conference attendance into a mission.

Don't just be an attendee; be a conference commando! Conferences are good for mainly one thing. No, it's not the coffee and cookies at breaks. It's not even pricey business enlightenment. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment-type thought process. Is the likely return I'll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don't. It's that simple. That may seem like an awfully pragmatic view of conferences, but it works.

Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark.

The owners saw conferences as boondoggles—pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on a start-up company's balance sheet.

I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.

Their ill-tempered disposition toward these business gettogethers—and these executives are far from alone in holding such attitudes—stems from an all-too-common misperception that conferences are places to find insight. Wrong. Real, actionable insight mostly comes from experience, books, and other people. Roundtable discussions and keynote speeches can be fun, even inspirational, but rarely is there the time to impart true knowledge.

But there may be no better place to extend your professional network and, on occasion, get deals done. Let me give you an example based on sales. In the old model of selling, 80 percent of a salesperson's time went into setting up meetings, giving a presentation, and trying to close a deal. The other 20 percent was spent developing a relationship with the customer. Today, we focus mostly on relationship selling. Smart salespeople—in fact, smart employees and business owners of all stripes—spend 80 percent of their time building strong relationships with the people they do business with. The slickest PowerPoint presentation can't compete with the development of real affection and trust in capturing the hearts and minds of other people.

Those who use conferences properly have a huge leg up at your average industry gathering. While others quietly sit taking notes, content to sip their free bottled water, these men and women are setting up one-on-one meetings, organizing dinners, and, in general, making each conference an opportunity to meet people who could change their lives.

If these people seem as if they aren't playing by the same rules as their fellow attendees, you're right. They've gone well beyond the traditional, warmed-over advice to Wear Your Badge, Warmly Greet Everyone, Establish Firm Eye Contact, and other common refrains that fail to distinguish them from the rest of the horde.

Yes, there's a guide to getting the most out of a conference. My friend Paul Reddy, a software executive, claims people are either bowling balls or pins at a conference. If you're the ball, you walk (or roll) into a conference, event, or an organization, and you blow it apart. With a dash of bravado and ingenuity, you leave a positive impression in your wake, create friendships, and achieve the goals on your agenda. The pins sit placidly by, waiting for something, anything, to happen to them.

Don't think of your next conference as a business-related retreat. Think of it as a well-coordinated campaign to further your mission. Here are the rules I follow at each and every event I attend:

Help the Organizer (Better Yet, Be the Organizer)

Conferences are logistical nightmares. There are a thousand different things that go into pulling off a successful business gathering. The mess that can ensue is an opportunity for you to come in and help out—and become an insider in the process.

Once you're on the inside, you can find out who will be attending and what the hot events will be. And you'll find yourself at all those unlisted dinners and cocktail parties that are thrown for the conference poobahs.

How do you find yourself part of the process? It's not really all that hard. First, review the event's materials, visit its Web site, and find out who the main contact is for putting together the conference. Put in a phone call. The person responsible for these kinds of events is generally overworked and stressed out. I like to call these people a few months ahead of the event and say, "I'm really looking forward to the conference you're putting together. I'm interested in helping make this year be the best year ever, and I'm willing to devote a chunk of my resources—be it time, creativity, or connections—to make this year's event a smash hit. How can I help?"

I guarantee the coordinator will be shocked with delight. I say that because I was once responsible for those stressed-out planners back in my early days as CMO of Deloitte.

Deloitte Consulting was working with Michael Hammer to grow a credible reengineering practice. We thought a conference might be a great way to introduce our relationship with Michael to the market, strengthen our brand, and win a few customers to boot. So we proposed a joint conference hosted by Deloitte and Michael Hammer. We would bring the industry expertise and case studies, and Michael would bring his expertise in reengineering and his understanding of how to run a world-class conference.

It gave me a chance to see the inner workings of how a successful conference is orchestrated and of course build a great relationship with Mike. I became acutely aware of how powerful it was to know, in advance, who would be attending; why some speakers were chosen and some were not; and what the best forums were for networking.

From the outset, our idea was to apply some method to the usual conference madness. A tracking system was put in place that recorded daily our progress against the objectives we set for ourselves. Each Deloitte partner's objective was to meet two people who were assigned to them from the guests we knew would be attending. Each was given one person as a primary target—someone we really wanted to win as a client. The other person was someone we thought Deloitte would benefit from knowing, perhaps a member of the media. The basic goal remained, quite simply, to meet new people.