This year, in what is becoming something of a tradition, the iFX EXPO conference will take place on May 22-24 in Limassol (Cyprus). Members of the forex industry will gather to discuss market trends, share personal experience, and chat with regulators. For how to get the maximum benefit from these three days among industry representatives, we hear from Valentina Drofa, CEO of the PR agencies Drofa Group and ICOPR Agency.

These few days on Cyprus in late May are no beach resort: they can make your entire year, if you plan your activities right. iFX EXPO is a major industry event, where everyone is someone worth knowing. The only people here are those who will define forex’s future in the world, which means each of us has a wonderful opportunity to become one of them. Based on my clients’ and my agency’s experiences at this conference, I whittled down five key steps that will make attending iFX EXPO an excellent tool for promoting yourself and your services.

1. Define Your Goal

Clearly, if you’ve gotten yourself into such a serious and – to put it bluntly – expensive event, you must have some goal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going with a huge booth or as an attendee. Obviously, all of us have a primary goal to sell something: the services of our company or ourselves as an employee, our expertise, and so on.

This may surprise you, but most attendees have not formulated their goal for attending the conference in any way, and have not discussed it amongst the team manning the event. “Show myself off,” “find clients,” “sell my services” don’t sound like goals that can be aimed for and judged at the end of the conference on whether you achieved them or not. If your company has set up its sales funnel, you should be able to accurately calculate how many meetings you need to schedule, how many you need to conduct, how many offers you need to send out, all to earn a specific amount. If you don’t have a sales funnel yet, at the very least try to set goals for generating income, contact info, and useful connections. If you specify the goal, it will be easier to achieve.

I formulate my goal in terms of the number of contracts I want to bring home from the event. We have a rather long sales cycle and take half a year to build on an established base, so I understand that I will not get immediate income from the expo. But after six months we take stock and see whether we achieved the goals we set. For now, all our expos and conferences have been a net gain.