Staffing & Briefing

Decide who goes, what each of them is responsible for, and brief them properly. Pipeline conversations left to chance during a reception do not happen.

When to use

• Deciding who attends and how many people to send
• T-1 week, building the briefing
• After an event where the team stood together and talked to each other

Inputs

• Reads: workspace/events/<event>/meetings.csv, workspace/audience/target-list.csv, workspace/events/<event>/run-of-show.md, the account dossiers if any exist
• Needs from user: who is available, their travel constraints, and their capability with this audience

Workflow

1. Size the team from the meeting target, not from enthusiasm

Work backwards. Two people running back-to-back thirty-minute meetings across a seven-hour day, minus sessions they must attend and time to eat, is a hard ceiling of roughly twenty meetings between them. If your target is higher, you need more people or a lower target.

For a dinner, the ratio matters more than the number: three or four of your people at a fifteen-cover table. More than that and it is your dinner rather than theirs.

Every person sent needs a reason expressed as a responsibility. If someone cannot be assigned named guests or named meetings, they do not need to travel.

2. Assign named guests to named people

The mechanism that turns attendance into conversations. Before the event, every team member gets three to five named attendees they own: they seek them out, they have the conversation, and they own the follow-up.

Written down. Confirmed in the huddle. Reviewed afterward, person by person.

For a dinner, assign two guests each for the dessert window, plus the seating neighbors each person is responsible for during the meal.

3. Build the VIP track

Identify the five to ten people who are the reason for the event, then design a different experience for them:

• A named handshake at the door by someone briefed on who they are
• Reserved seating, or a deliberately chosen seat at a dinner
• A side conversation with your most senior person, in a specific place, at a specific time
• One team member who owns them for the whole event
• A separate, personal follow-up tier

This costs almost nothing and it is the most common thing missing from an owned event.

4. Build the briefing pack

Per person, on their phone:

• Their schedule for the day, one page per meeting
• Their named guests, with one paragraph each: who they are, why they matter, history, and the specific next step to aim for
• The room composition: who else is here and what to know about them
• The three things we are saying, and the things we are not saying
• Logistics: where to be, who to call, what to do if something goes wrong

5. Run the huddle the night before

Twenty minutes, team only:

• Walk tomorrow's schedule
• Confirm guest ownership out loud, person by person. Saying it aloud is what makes it stick
• The VIP list and who greets each one
• Competitive and objection refresher
• Where everyone is at doors, and the escalation path

The night before. The morning of has no time in it.

6. Set the behavior rules

Obvious, and consistently broken:

• Never stand in a group with your own colleagues. It is the single most common failure at a conference and it makes your team unapproachable
• Nobody sits at the stand. Nobody eats at the stand
• Two-hour shifts at a stand, then rotate
• Same-day notes on every conversation
• Nobody packs up early

7. Debrief the same day

Fifteen minutes at the end of each day: what happened, what changed, who needs a different approach tomorrow. Notes captured while accurate, not reconstructed on a plane.

Output

• Writes: workspace/events/<event>/staffing.md with the team, guest assignments, the VIP track, the briefing pack, and the huddle agenda
• Prints: the assignment table, unassigned high-value guests, and anyone attending with no responsibility

Rules & quality bar

• Team size derived from the meeting target, not from who wants to go
• Everyone attending has named guests or named meetings. No passengers
• Guest ownership confirmed out loud in the huddle
• The VIP track exists and has named owners
• The huddle is the night before
• Never stand in a group with your own colleagues
• Same-day notes and a same-day debrief

Related skills

• Reads: meeting-engine, audience-machine, run-of-show
• Pairs with: the format skills
• Feeds: event-followup, event-retrospective