Another OSP EXPO is behind us and, considering the economy, attendance was good. That got me wondering about what drives vendors and attendees to decide whether or not to go to conferences.

The Vendor
If you think your company and products are important to the industry and didn't support this major conference, OSP EXPO 2009, your absence was conspicuous even if you were walking the floor. Your customer, potential customers, partners are wondering if you are still a healthy company and whether your products and service are also suffering from your budget cuts. Customers go to OSP EXPO to learn, to see, to benefit from the one big opportunity each year to make buying decisions about today and/or to be influenced by your branding for future decisions.

The Customer
If you wanted to attend and couldn't due to budgets, consider pushing your boss harder next year. This conference, once a year, gives you tremendous visibility to hundreds of vendors in a very short period of time. It's a great way to get first hand information on products and services, and also to pick up free training. As a professional trainer, let me explain what that means in terms of training dollars: A one-day training class for you could cost anywhere from $400 to $1,000. You had an opportunity to learn -- for FREE -- from between 30 and 40 technical seminars and several summits over a two-day period. If you took advantage of any of that free training, think of what that means to your company. And where else can you see the top executives in the industry all together in a roundtable session talking about challenges of today and well into the future?

So work with your employer next year when he's grumbling about travel budgets and help him or her see the value in this once-a-year commitment to a tremendous, cost-effective opportunity to see and learn about products and services.

If a vendor cuts out this major conference, it means lost branding and probably several lost leads. For the attendee who didn't attend, he falls behind his competitor and misses out on valuable, free training and a tremendous information-gathering opportunity. What do you think? Is OSP EXPO valuable to you and your company?  And will you be there next year?

By the way, mark your calendar:

OSP EXPO 2010
October 13-14, 2010
San Antonio, Texas