Your Booth Is a Live Audition

Why Face-to-Face Moments Disrupt the Digital

Ancient Roman magistrates traveled to the temple of Fides, goddess of trust and good faith, in a covered carriage called a carpentum. When they arrived at the Capitoline Hill, they wrapped their right hands in white cloth before making oaths and signing treaties. The ritual was precise and public. Commitment couldn't be whispered in private chambers or documented in contracts stored in archives. It had to be witnessed. The covered carriage announced the journey's importance. The wrapped hands proved nothing was hidden. The temple location forced the pilgrimage.

Fides was one of Rome's oldest deities because Romans understood something fundamental. You can't command belief through documentation alone. Physical presence matters. Visible demonstration matters. Witnesses matter. When two parties needed to commit to each other, they made the journey together to her temple and performed the ritual where others could see.

In 2026, your prospects have access to every specification, every white paper, every case study, and every review your company has ever produced. AI search synthesizes competitive comparisons in seconds. Scientists can evaluate your acoustic liquid handler's CV percentages against four competitors before their morning coffee finishes brewing. They have all the logic they need to make a rational purchasing decision without ever speaking to a human.

So why does SLAS still matter? Because digital provides the logic, but humans provide the conviction. As I wrote in my LinkedIn newsletter on trade show success, your booth is both top-of-funnel and a user learning lab. It's where you disrupt the digital search process with your humanity. Where you “wrap your hands in white cloth”.

When Digital Provides All the Logic, Bring the Human

Product managers (PMs) have heard about the death of conferences since the first B2B buyer used Google. The prediction returns every year with new language: researchers doing their own online research, content marketing replacing field sales, AI search making conferences obsolete.

Here's what actually happened. Digital search eliminated the transactional functions. Your prospects don't need to visit 47 booths to collect spec sheets or attend product theater to learn about launches. They can get that information on their laptop in their pyjamas.

What digital cannot do is provide the human connection that converts evaluation into commitment. In life sciences, where a malfunctioning liquid handler can stall a screening campaign or a contaminated reagent lot can invalidate six months of assay development, scientists need more than specifications. They need to experience what it's like to work with your team.

Digital gives them the specs. Conferences let them experience your human side. That experience isn't your PowerPoint deck or booth graphics. It's how your team behaves when prospects are watching.

The Booth as Customer Experience Preview

Think of your booth as a live preview of what being your customer feels like. Everything your prospect observes at SLAS (or other conferences) becomes data about the relationship they're considering. This is your chance to show prospects what the customer experience looks like, not just tell them about it.

Presence and Attention

Walk the SLAS exhibition hall during peak hours. Hundreds of scientists move past each booth, scanning messaging, watching demos, deciding whether to stop. Some booths are alive with engaged conversations. Others have staff scrolling phones or deep in conversation with each other while prospects hesitate, then move on. That moment of hesitation is everything. The scientist considering your 1536-well acoustic dispenser watches your team for half a second. Are they present and aware, or absorbed elsewhere? That scientist is mentally extrapolating: This is how responsive they'll be when I submit a support ticket. This is whether they'll notice when I'm struggling.

Technical Depth That Shows They Care

Your FAS team at the booth represents your best. They're the ones who genuinely love solving application problems, who get excited talking about assay optimization, who can discuss detection limits and compound library logistics with equal enthusiasm. When they engage with a scientist's question about dispense head dead volume or high-density microarray sensitivity, something shifts. The conversation stops being transactional and becomes collaborative.

That shift is everything. The scientist asking technical questions isn't just gathering information. They're testing whether your team actually cares about their specific problem. They're watching for that moment when your FAS leans in, asks clarifying questions, and starts thinking through the application challenge with them rather than at them.

Watch what happens when your FAS hits the edge of their knowledge. The best ones admit it directly: "That's outside my compound library experience, but let me grab our high-throughput specialist who works with those plate densities daily." That honesty is magnetic. It tells the scientist they're working with someone who prioritizes solving the actual problem over protecting their ego. They're mentally extrapolating: These are people who will tell me the truth when I'm a customer, not people who will oversell their capabilities.

Curiosity-Led Conversations Build Better Follow-Up

The companies generating high-quality leads start with questions, not features. They ask about the prospect's current setup, what they like about it, and what they would need to see to consider a change. When you capture the buyer's exact language for describing their problems, you gain your strongest asset for post-show messaging.

A screening automation vendor asks: "What liquid handler are you using now? What’s working well? What drives you crazy about it?" The prospect says: "The gripper alignment drifts after about 200 plates and we lose half a day recalibrating." That exact phrase (gripper alignment drift) becomes the opening line of the follow-up email. When you reference the buyer’s exact problem in their own words, you prove you listened. The prospect is mentally extrapolating: This is a team that pays attention to what I actually said, not just what they wanted to sell.

That FAS captured one conversation. But what happens when your PM, floating between demos, hears three different screening labs mention gripper alignment drift in the same afternoon? That’s not anecdotal feedback. That’s a pattern. And it’s the kind of signal that structured VOC interviews during new product development (NPD) rarely surface with the same urgency or specificity. The FAS owns the depth of a single conversation. The PM owns the pattern across all of them. 

How You Handle Their Complexity, Not Yours

A screening director walks up and describes her environment: three vendors’ liquid handlers running different protocols, a LIMS that was customized five years ago and never updated, a team split across two buildings, and a compliance review coming in Q3 that requires full audit trails on every dispensing step. She doesn’t ask “does your system integrate with LIMS?” She asks: “If I swap out one of my three handlers for yours, what breaks in my existing workflow, and how long before my team stops losing time on the transition?”

That question is the real test. She’s not asking about your product. She’s asking whether your team understands her operational reality well enough to tell her the truth about disruption costs. This maps directly to Geoffrey Moore’s framework in Crossing the Chasm. Your early majority buyers, the pragmatists running screening facilities and managing multi-vendor automation programs, don’t evaluate products in isolation. They evaluate how your solution fits into a workflow they’ve spent years building and can’t afford to break. The booth is where they test whether your team thinks in systems or just knows how to demo a single instrument.

The scientist watching that conversation is mentally extrapolating: Does this team understand that my problem isn’t choosing an instrument, it’s managing a transition inside a running operation? If your booth team defaults to feature comparisons when the prospect is asking about change management, you’ve told her everything she needs to know about what working with you will feel like

The Product Manager as Live Customer Discovery Lab

Your FAS owns the technical conversation. Your sales team owns the relationship. But neither of them is wired to do what the PM does at a booth: synthesize across conversations in real time and compare what they’re hearing against the assumptions baked into the product development process.

During new product development, VOC interviews follow a structure. You recruit participants, schedule calls, ask prepared questions, and capture responses in a controlled environment. That process is essential. It’s also inherently filtered. Respondents self-select. They answer what you ask. They frame problems within the categories you provide.

The booth strips away that filter. Scientists don’t walk up to your liquid handler demo thinking about your interview guide. They tell you what’s actually on their mind, in language shaped by their frustration, not your question framework. When a pharma automation director mentions that her team spends 12 hours a week on manual plate tracking because their LIMS integration never worked properly, she’s not responding to a prompt. She’s venting. That unstructured, spontaneous feedback is where the NPD process has blind spots.

The PM who recognizes the gap between structured VOC and live booth feedback gains a real-time validation layer for product-market fit assumptions. Your development team built the roadmap around “throughput” because that’s what scored highest in the conjoint analysis. But at the booth, four separate core facility directors asked about staff onboarding time, not throughput. That disconnect doesn’t invalidate the NPD research. It reveals what the research couldn’t capture: the operational reality that shapes purchasing decisions in ways a structured interview misses.

This is why the PM belongs in the booth. Not behind a demo screen, not handing out swag, but positioned as a roving listener who tracks themes across conversations and pressure-tests them against development assumptions. End each show day by comparing what you heard against your Target Product Profile and roadmap priorities. If the booth keeps surfacing problems your product plan doesn’t address, that’s not noise. That’s the market telling you something your NPD process filtered out.

The Human Advantage in the Digital Age

Like those Roman magistrates making the pilgrimage to the Capitoline Hill, your prospects are making the journey to SLAS to witness behavior that can't be digitized. They're watching whether you bring your human side or hide behind polished presentations.

Digital search provides the logical case for considering your product. Your booth experience provides the human connection that converts consideration into commitment. Logic identifies qualified vendors. Human connection selects the winner.

The Romans considered fides so fundamental that they made it a goddess, built temples to it, and created elaborate public rituals around it. That concept gave us a family of English words we still use in business: fidelity (faithfulness), confidence (with trust), fiduciary (a relationship based on trust), and bona fide (literally "in good faith"). The ancients understood what we're rediscovering in the digital age: trust can't be manufactured through documentation or claimed through marketing. It has to be demonstrated publicly, witnessed, and built through visible behavior.

Stop thinking about conferences as lead generation events. Start thinking about them as opportunities to disrupt the digital search process with your humanity. You're not there to distribute specifications. You're there to demonstrate the human side of your company, the part that can't be Googled or AI-summarized. You're there to “wrap your hands in white cloth” where witnesses can see.