What it’s like to be a ‘booth babe’ at cybersecurity’s biggest conference

What it’s like to be a ‘booth babe’ at cybersecurity’s biggest conference(washingtonpost.com)

5 points by ryutin 12 years ago | 6 comments

toolz 12 years ago |

I don't get it. There's nothing wrong with using your physical assets to draw in conversation and make a sale. If someone labels you as a 'booth babe', then great! You've done well to have one of your assets recognized to get the job done. If you don't want to have that certain asset acknowledged, don't feature it.

To make myself clear, I don't think there is anything wrong with physical attraction. We're all adults and we all understand physical attraction gets peoples attention. Why do we have to pretend, then, that it's some sort of derogatory title when you're acknowledged for taking care of your body and wearing sexy clothing?

MichaelGG 12 years ago |

Ideally we wouldn't need this kind of stuff, people would have some perfectly logical approach to evaluating all the vendors, and use their attention correctly. Perhaps it's a game theory problem; if we were guaranteed no one else would use sex appeal, nor would we. The problem then is that big flashy booths are far, far, more expensive then hiring even a half-dozen very attractive people.

But really, it goes deeper than that. A lot tradeshows are a vacation for the attendees, so if throw a fun party for everyone, you'll have a lot of potential customers hanging out with you. This is important if you're in a competitive service business where your competitors are nominally offering the exact same service. Everyone says their datacenter won't go offline, that they'll have proper service, etc. Getting to know your vendor/customer goes a long way in keeping that business relationship when shit hits the fan, as it inevitably will.

As far as the sales info on the floor, of course you need real full-time staff. The temporary staff is just to get people's attention, let them know more or less what we offer, and keep them enqueued while a one of our sales people gets over to them. But for commodity services, everyone already knows pretty much what we're offering. This probably doesn't hold true for truly novel software products that really are different from competitors.

Anyways, if the gender balance changed, and attractive young women weren't enough to get a party going with our customers, we'd come up with something else. But parties seem to be a fairly common denominator, so I doubt that'll change any time soon.

hoopism 12 years ago |

Pretty superficial... the article I mean.

trebor 12 years ago |

By the time I've gotten to talk to someone at the booth, the last thing I want to find is that the person is a model (a "booth babe" if you will). My questions are technical and typically involve the nitty-gritty details of a project. I really appreciate whenever I meet someone who's an involved with the actual product.

MichaelGG 12 years ago | |

Do you find that you're actually being prevented to talking to a real sales person or engineer at shows? Usually the models are there to keep the queue, since it's rather cheap to hire attractive and outgoing people to do just that. It's probably just a reflection that sending FTEs to shows is expensive, so there might only be a few of actual employees there. But the models should be helping you get to one of the FTEs as soon as possible - that's pretty much why they're hired.

IgorPartola 12 years ago |

On some level this short article provides the answer: as more women attend the conferences, there will be fewer cases of "booth babes" being hired, and the ones that will be will have to be proper sales people. Then again, there is a big difference between the RSA conference and, say, a video game convention.