Make In-Person Conference Count
Updated: 2 days ago
How to Make the Most of an In-Person Procurement Conference in 2026?
In 2026, there is no shortage of ways to meet people without leaving your desk. You can have a video call with a buyer, send a LinkedIn message to a procurement director, join a webinar, or use AI to research almost anything about a company before you approach it.
So why go to an in-person conference?
Because some things are still difficult to do through a screen: understand the room, read the context, have an unexpected conversation, build trust quickly, and discover an opportunity that you did not know to look for.
That is particularly relevant in procurement. A supplier can have the right product, the right certification, and the right price, but still need to understand how a procurement organisation actually buys, what its priorities are, and where a new supplier could realistically fit.
Forward Summit 2026 is designed around that reality. Across two days, the agenda brings together corporate procurement leaders, underrepresented suppliers, founders, industry experts, and ESG and inclusion professionals, with discussions and activities focused on inclusive sourcing, procurement, supplier opportunities, and turning conversations into action.
Here are five ways to make your time in Amsterdam count.
1. Learn What You Cannot Find Online
Do not attend a procurement conference only to promote your business. Attend to find out what is changing. The most useful information may not come from a slide deck.
It may come from:
hearing how a procurement leader describes a problem,
listening to another supplier explain a barrier you have also experienced,
discovering that two companies approach supplier onboarding completely differently.
The Agenda Already Has Your Back
At Forward Summit 2026, the agenda gives you several opportunities to understand the bigger picture, from “Why Europe is Different” and the new EU public procurement framework to supplier communities and “One Europe, Multiple Markets.” The Procurement Masterclass goes further into sourcing cycles, categories, frameworks, onboarding, and compliance.
Listen for patterns:
What are buyers struggling with?
What are they changing?
What are they looking for from suppliers?
Where are the barriers?
And perhaps most importantly: what are people saying that you did not expect to hear? That is the kind of market intelligence that is difficult to get from a website.
2. Let AI Help You Prepare for Your 1:1 Meeting
A 1:1 matchmaking meeting deserves more preparation than a casual networking conversation. At Forward Summit 2026, the curated matchmaking sessions are built around specific requests from corporates, connecting underrepresented suppliers with buyers for focused conversations around real procurement opportunities.
If you know who you are meeting in advance, use publicly available information such as the company's website, LinkedIn, annual reports, procurement pages, and recent announcements to understand the organisation before you arrive.
AI tools can help you pull this information together and identify the areas that are most relevant to your meeting.
For example, you could ask an AI tool to help you identify:
What markets does this company operate in?
What products or services might it typically procure?
What are its current business priorities?
What sustainability or ESG commitments does it have?
What could be relevant about your business to this organisation?
What questions would be useful to ask a procurement professional from this company?
The important thing is to use AI to prepare better questions. The aim is to arrive with a better understanding of the organization and a few relevant questions, while still leaving room for the conversation to go somewhere unexpected.
3. Bring Proof, Not Paper
In 2026, there is little reason to bring large amounts of printed material to a procurement conference. Your phone can do much of that work for you.
Before you arrive, make sure the essentials are easy to access digitally and up to date. Make the information easy to find and easy to forward internally. If a procurement professional has to spend ten minutes searching through a PDF to understand what you actually provide, the document is probably doing too much.
Consider having:
An updated digital company profile
Case studies and certifications on hand
Brief and concise introduction of your products/services
A digital business card
An up-to-date LinkedIn profile
A list of the people you want to meet, including their names and LinkedIn profiles, saved in your Notes app
A QR code linking to your most relevant information
The point is not to be glued to your screen. Your phone can work quietly in the background so that you can concentrate on the people in front of you and make the most of attending Forward Summit 2026 in person.
4. Treat the Two Days Differently
A two-day conference does not have to be one long version of the same day.
Use Day 1 to explore.
Listen to the European context. Understand the procurement landscape. Hear from supplier communities. Use the Procurement Masterclass to understand how buying actually happens. Pay attention to the challenges people are raising and the language they use to describe them.
Then use Day 2 to test what you have learned.
The agenda moves towards European perspectives, the 2030 Challenge, the Amsterdam Principles, and ultimately “From Amsterdam to Action.” The agenda is designed to move from understanding the challenges towards shared commitments and practical action.
Use that progression yourself. What did you learn on Day 1? Did anything challenge your assumptions? Did you discover a market, category or procurement process you need to understand better? Then use Day 2 to explore those questions further. This turns the conference into a learning process rather than a series of disconnected sessions.
5. Build Your Follow-Up System Before You Arrive
The best time to decide how you will follow up after the Summit is before the Summit even starts. Otherwise, you risk returning to your normal workload with a notebook full of names and good intentions.
Set up a simple system before you travel. It could be a CRM, spreadsheet, Notion board, project-management tool, or even your calendar.
Create categories such as:
Follow up immediately
Potential procurement opportunity
Send information
Supplier registration required
Introduction needed
Future opportunity
Research further
Then give every useful conversation a specific next action. This makes the conference much more than two days out of the office. It becomes the beginning of a process.
After all, the final session of the Summit, “From Amsterdam to Action,” is built around this idea, with buyers, suppliers, and advocacy leaders making commitments for what happens after the event. Your own version can be much simpler: three things you will do within the next seven days, and then turning those ideas into action.
The Value of Being in the Room
The biggest reason to attend an in-person procurement conference in 2026 is not that you cannot find information elsewhere. It is that information is more useful when you can put it into context.
You can hear what buyers are thinking, understand how procurement works, test your assumptions, see where your business fits, and have conversations that would probably never happen through a cold email.
Come prepared, but stay curious. Bring proof and treat your 1:1 meetings as genuine business conversations. Make the two-day agenda work for you and, ultimately, move from understanding to action.
That is particularly relevant to inclusive sourcing, and it is what Forward Summit 2026, co-hosted by EGLCC, ESDP, and telos, is built around: bringing procurement leaders, corporations, and underrepresented suppliers into the same room and turning shared insight and connections into practical opportunities.
