Most defence consultancies attend EU defence events the same way. They register a few weeks out. They book flights and a hotel. They tell their partners to “be at NEDS” or “be at the EDF info day.” They show up. They have conversations. They fly home. And then they wait to see what comes of it.

This rarely works. Not because the events are bad. Not because the partners are bad at meeting people. The conversations themselves are usually fine. The problem is structural. The right people are in the room, but the consultancies attending don’t know who those people are, don’t know what to say to them, and don’t have a reason for them to want a meeting. So the senior conversations either don’t happen, or they happen by chance and produce nothing because nobody planned what should come next.

The consultancies that win senior defence projects at these events do something different. They treat the work before the event as the work that determines what happens on the floor. The event itself is when the meetings happen. The conditions that decide whether those meetings produce anything are set before anyone arrives.

Here is what that pre-event work looks like in practice. The architecture below is the same one we run with our clients. The specific moves change with each event. The shape doesn’t.

Choose the accounts.

The first step is a written list of 20 to 40 target accounts you want to meet at the event. Not “primes, integrators, MoDs.” Named organisations. Each one chosen for a reason you can articulate in one sentence: an open capability gap, a current procurement signal, a previous touchpoint that needs continuing, a specific service of yours that fits something they’re working on right now.

The discipline here is to make the list short enough that real work can be done on each account and long enough that some accounts can fail without breaking the campaign. Twenty is too few; sixty is too many. Thirty to forty is the working zone.

If you cannot write a one-sentence reason for why each account is on the list, that account does not belong on the list. Cut it.

Identify the people.

Most EU defence events publish their attendee list through an event app a few weeks before the event. The publication date varies. EDF info day attendee lists typically publish three to four weeks out. NATO Industry Forum publishes earlier. NEDS varies by year. Track when the attendee list for your specific event will be published, and block calendar time the day it appears.

When the list is published, cross-reference it against your account list. For each target account that has people attending, identify the specific person you want to meet. This is not always the most senior person. For a prime, the right contact is often the BD lead for the relevant capability area, not the VP of BD. For an integrator, it is often the programme manager for a specific contract. For an EU institution, it is usually the policy or programme officer, not the director.

The test for whether you have the right person: would a thirty-minute meeting with this person produce something concrete (a follow-up, an introduction, a specific piece of intelligence) that moves you closer to working with this organisation? If the answer is “maybe, eventually,” the person is too senior or too distant. If the answer is “yes, probably,” you have the right person.

The output of this step is 30 to 50 named individuals you intend to meet, ranked by how important each meeting is to your overall objective for the event.

Open the conversation.

This is where most consultancies fail, even the ones who do the first two steps well. The standard approach is some version of “Hi, I see you’re attending NEDS, we’d love to meet you there.” This rarely works. Senior people at primes, integrators, and EU institutions receive dozens of these messages before every major event. Almost all of them get ignored. The reason is simple: the message offers the recipient nothing. It asks for time. It gives no reason for the recipient to want the meeting.

The conversations that get opened are the ones where the sender gives the recipient a reason to be interested before any meeting is asked for. Three things consistently work:

A specific observation about the recipient’s organisation or recent work, accurate enough that the recipient knows you’ve actually read what they’ve been doing.

A piece of information they likely don’t have but would find useful, a relevant report, a data point about a recent procurement decision, an observation from another part of the market they don’t usually touch.

A specific question that signals you understand what they are actually dealing with, not a generic “I’d love to hear about your priorities” but something that names a real tension or trade-off in their work.

What matters is that the first message gives, rather than asks. The ask comes later, after the recipient has responded to whatever you gave them, and even then the ask is small. Twenty minutes. A specific time. A specific topic. The smaller and more concrete the ask, the higher the conversion rate.

Plan to spend roughly fifteen to twenty minutes on each conversation opening. Each message is written individually, informed by what you know about the specific recipient. There is no way to automate this work. Teams that try to send the same message to fifty people get the same response everyone else does, which is silence. Teams that send fifty different messages, each tuned to the recipient, get responses.

One thing to know about the response curve: most replies will not come right away. Senior people at primes and integrators do not respond to event outreach when it lands in their inbox weeks before the event. They respond when the event becomes real to them, which is the final days before it happens. Plan for this. Send the messages early, knowing that most of the replies will arrive much closer to the event itself.

Follow up, with discipline.

After the first round of outreach, a handful of recipients will reply quickly. These are usually the most senior, most organised people on your list, the ones who run their own calendars and respond to outreach in real time. They are valuable, but they are the minority.

The rest of the work is following up with the people who didn’t reply. Not “checking in.” Not “just bumping this.” A follow-up that adds something. A short note referencing something new since the first message, a relevant piece of news about the recipient’s organisation, a brief update on what’s happening in the market they care about. The follow-up gives the recipient another reason to engage, not another request for their time.

The discipline here is to keep the follow-up short and substantive. Recipients who didn’t reply to the first message do not need to be reminded of it. They need a fresh reason to engage. Each follow-up should be readable in twenty seconds and should contain at least one thing the recipient did not already know.

If a recipient hasn’t replied after two well-crafted messages, do not keep pushing. Wait. Most of the response wave is still ahead.

Prepare for the response wave.

Before the response window opens, do the work that can be done in advance. Three things matter.

Prepare meeting briefs for the meetings you already have confirmed. These are the early-responder meetings booked over the past weeks. Each one needs a one-page brief: who you’re meeting, why, what you want the meeting to produce, what your follow-up will be if it goes well. Get these done while you have time, because when the response wave hits, the bandwidth will be elsewhere.

Refresh your intelligence on the silent contacts. Has anything changed in their organisation since your last message? Any procurement news, leadership changes, contract awards, public statements? The next round of follow-up will land much harder if it references something current.

Confirm event logistics for yourself and any colleagues attending. Hotel, badge collection, on-site movement plan, where you’ll be when, who is supporting which conversations. This work has to be done at some point, and doing it now frees up time for the response wave.

Handle the response wave.

This is when the campaign earns its keep. In the final days before the event, most of the responses to your outreach will arrive in a compressed window. Senior people are now looking at their event calendars, deciding who to make time for. This is the moment when the work of the previous weeks either pays off or doesn’t.

Three things have to happen, often simultaneously.

Reply quickly. Senior responses come with short windows. A message sent at 9 a.m. that gets a reply at 11 a.m. needs an answer by noon, with a specific time and a specific location proposed. Twenty-four-hour response times that work in normal business communication do not work here. The competition is other people on the recipient’s calendar, and the recipient will fill those slots as they come.

Propose specific times, not “what works for you.” Senior people are bad at picking times in compressed windows. Give them two options. “Day one between 11 and 11:30, or day two between 14 and 14:30” converts at roughly twice the rate of “let me know when works.” Always confirm a specific location. “Coffee somewhere in the main hall” is not a location. “The standing tables by the southwest entrance, day one, 11:00” is. Send a calendar invite within an hour of the time being agreed.

Design the meeting in compressed time. For each newly confirmed meeting, write a one-page brief, even a short one. Who you’re meeting, why this meeting matters, what you want to produce in the thirty minutes, what your follow-up will be. Most consultancies skip this in the final rush. The ones that don’t, win.

By the time you arrive at the event, you should have ten to fifteen confirmed meetings, each with a confirmed time and location, each with a brief. Some will have come in weeks ago. Most will have come in the last few days. The pattern of when they came in does not matter. The fact that they’re confirmed does.

The compression of the response wave is the reason most consultancies cannot run this discipline alone. Founder-led firms in particular often lose the late-arriving meetings because the partners are still juggling client work and cannot focus on the inbox the way the moment requires. This is where structured support, internal or external, makes the difference.

Design what each meeting needs to accomplish.

Most senior conversations at events drift. The two people meet, talk pleasantly for thirty minutes, exchange business cards, and walk away with mutual goodwill but no concrete next step. This is what produces post-event silence. The conversations were fine. They just didn’t end anywhere.

The work of the meeting briefs is to prevent this. For each meeting, decide in advance what the conversation needs to produce. For a first meeting with a prime where you have no prior relationship, the goal is usually a specific follow-up: an introduction to a colleague, a specific document or report to share, a second meeting at a defined point in the next quarter. The aim is not to pitch. The aim is to leave with a concrete reason to be in touch again, soon.

For a meeting with a known contact at an integrator where you have an existing relationship, the goal is often more specific: a discussion of a current procurement, an evaluation of fit for an upcoming opportunity, a chance to be considered for a defined piece of work.

For a meeting with a senior person at an EU institution, the goal is usually intelligence and positioning: understanding their current priorities, signalling your relevance to their agenda, securing the right to follow up with specifics later.

Some meetings, when the conversation has gone well and the moment is right, can be ended with a structured offer of help. Not a pitch. Not a proposal. Something specific and useful you can do for the prospect in the next two to three weeks that fits the conversation you just had. This is the most powerful way to end a strong first meeting because it creates a defined reason to meet again, soon, with a specific purpose. The structure of that offer is its own subject, and we won’t cover it in this post.

At the event: execute the plan you’ve built.

If the previous work has been done well, the event itself is the smallest part of the work. You arrive with a list. You have meetings scheduled. You know what each one needs to produce. You execute the meetings, capture what was agreed, and move to the next one.

The consultancies that figure this out, in order, win the senior projects that the consultancies who only show up watch from a distance. The work is not complicated. It is just work. Structured attention, every event, every campaign, with the discipline to handle the response wave that makes or breaks the campaign. That is what turns defence events from a recurring expense into a recurring source of senior project wins.