From Booth to CRM: The Human + Tech Congress Formula

About this session

(Onomi) unpack a hard truth about congress ROI: it rarely fails because teams lack effort.

It fails because the most critical moment of the entire investment, the five-minute booth conversation, is treated as operational detail rather than strategic leverage.

The contradiction is clear. Pharma spends months preparing content, symposia, logistics and internal alignment. Yet preparation for human interaction at the booth is compressed, deprioritized or skipped altogether.

Congress is not a normal selling environment. It is high-pressure, noisy and unnatural. Confidence drops.

What you’ll learn

• Congress, however, is not a normal environment. Confidence drops. Behaviors change. And five-minute conversations carry disproportionate weight. Treating them as routine interactions is one of the most expensive assumptions in congress execution.
• Why do so many congress dashboards look “successful,” yet ROI still breaks down?
• Pierre challenged the metrics.
• Booth traffic is not the same as HCP conversations. Badge scans are not the same as follow-up. And a busy booth is not proof of meaningful engagement.
• When you look closely, a significant share of people on a booth are internal staff, vendors, competitors, or non-target visitors. The number of truly relevant HCP exchanges is often much smaller than the headline figures suggest.
• Big numbers are easy to report. They are harder to convert into impact.

Speakers

• Paul Bobin — Director, The Other Mind
• Pierre Metrailler — CEO & Founder, Onomi