The Mistake Almost Every Conference Speaker Makes #n1

Introduction

Brendan Farnand, co-founder and Chief Evangelist at Knak, has spent the past year in conversation with more than 100 enterprise marketing teams—including OpenAI, Google, Stripe, and AT&T—to understand where AI genuinely helps marketing, where it breaks down, and what separates the companies merely experimenting from the ones actually shipping better work. He's also logged serious stage time at Adobe Summit, Salesforce Co ections, and the MarTech Conference. That combination of enterprise-scale perspective and hard-won speaking experience makes him a sharp voice on a problem most marketers recognize but few admit: the conference sessions that waste everyone's time.

The Sales Pitch Trap

Ask any marketer about the worst conference session they've sat through and you'll hear a version of the same complaint. You settle into your seat expecting insight, and instead you get a product roadmap. Farnand names the mistake directly—the full-on sales pitch dressed up as a talk. "The worst thing that I see—and I've been guilty of it—is doing a full-on sales pitch in front of your audience. I think that can be cringy at best." It's a candid admission from someone who has been on both sides of that stage, and it reframes a familiar frustration as an avoidable choice rather than an industry inevitability.

Why Marketers Keep Falling Into It

The pull toward the pitch is easy to understand. When you've built a product you believe in, the stage feels like an opportunity to demonstrate it. But that instinct misreads the room. A conference audience isn't there to watch your feature list scroll by—they're there to leave with something they can use. The moment a session tips from teaching into selling, the value proposition for the audience collapses, and the speaker's credibility goes with it.

Speak to Relevance, Not Roadmaps

Farnand's counter-approach is simple to state and hard to execute: make sure whatever you say is genuinely relevant and useful to the people in the seats. "I want to make sure that whatever I'm saying is really relevant to people and they can actually bring something back with them that is useful to their organization." The test is portability. If an attendee can carry an idea back to their team and put it to work on Monday, the talk earned its slot. If they can only recall your product name, it didn't. That shift—from showcasing what you sell to solving a problem your audience actually has—is the difference between a memorable session and a forgettable one.

The Takeaway Test for Any Content

This principle extends well beyond the conference stage. The same discipline applies to webinars, sales decks, and marketing content of every kind. Before you present anything, ask whether the audience walks away with a usable idea or just an impression of your brand. Content built around the customer's problem outperforms content built around your feature set—on stage and everywhere else. The best marketers treat every audience interaction as a chance to be useful first, which is precisely what earns the right to be remembered later.

Key Takeaways

The core lesson is one that cuts across marketing entirely: lead with value, not with your product. Avoid the roadmap presentation disguised as a keynote, and instead design every talk so attendees leave with something they can actually apply. Measure your content by portability—can someone bring it back to their organization and use it? And treat the stage the way you should treat all your marketing: as a service to the audience, not a showcase for yourself. Get that right, and everything from conference sessions to campaigns starts working harder. And, as always, the best long-term strategy is simply to focus on keeping your customers happy.