RSAC 2027 runs April 5 to 8 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. If you’re reading this in late November, you’re about four and a half months out. Booth space, meeting suites, and the best dinner venues are already going fast, so start with the five-month items below this week.
Most RSAC regrets come down to timing. The team that books its dinner venue in February gets whatever is left. The founder who starts meeting outreach two weeks before the show lands in San Francisco with a half-empty calendar. Neither problem is hard to solve if the work starts at the right moment.
This checklist breaks RSAC prep into the moments that matter, from five months out to a month after the show. It builds on our RSAC 2027 guide for cybersecurity founders and CMOs and on what we learned supporting six clients on the ground at Black Hat USA 2026. Use it as your own plan, or hand it to your team as a starting point.
Five months out (early November): make the big decisions
Everything else on this list depends on the choices you make now. Space and venues are the hardest things to fix later, so start there.
- Pick one or two goals: Most RSAC plans center on demand gen, ecosystem relations, brand, or customer engagement. Each one calls for a different plan on the same budget. Write your goals down with measurable KPIs and get your CEO, CFO, and CRO aligned before anyone books a flight.
- Set the budget: Work backwards from the number of Sales Opportunities you need from the week. Add some buffer for the line items that hide inside a booth package, like power, wifi, carpet, and lead retrieval.
- Choose your footprint: A booth on the show floor, a meeting suite or activation space near Moscone, or a meetings-only plan with a full calendar and no floor space. Our RSAC 2027 guide walks through the tradeoffs of each.
- Book space and venues: Expo space, suites within walking distance of Moscone, and restaurants with private rooms for 20 or more go first. If a dinner or happy hour is part of your plan, reserve the venue now.
- Book hotels for your team: San Francisco hotel prices climb fast as April gets closer. Check whether your sponsorship includes a hotel block before your team books on their own.
- Bring in your partners early: If you’re working with an agency or field marketing team, now is the time. Five months gives them room to plan with you instead of scrambling for leftovers.
Three to four months out (December to early January): design the experience
With space locked in, turn to what people will see, hear, and walk away with. This is also when RSAC week starts taking shape as a news moment.
- Build your concept around one message: Write down what you want visitors to say about your company after they leave, then design the theme, experience, and swag around it. A strong concept can be cheap. Stravito’s LEGO minifigure activation cost under $1K for 200 kits and kept visitors at the booth far longer than usual. For more ideas, see the best booths at Black Hat 2026 and why they worked.
- Source and brief your vendors: Booth builders, AV, furniture, catering, and print all need sourcing, briefing, and follow-up. Good booth builders book up well before spring.
- Plan your news: If you’re launching, set a date to announce before the show so you arrive with momentum. Line up press and analyst briefings, and map out award submissions and their deadlines.
- Apply to Innovation Sandbox if you qualify: RSAC’s startup competition is one of the biggest stages of the week, and applications for 2027 open on December 1.
- Plan your side event: Pick the format, build the guest list, and decide who from your team hosts. See more of the nitty gritty logistical details you’ll need to figure out in our guide to hosting a conference dinner people show up to.
- Book a photographer and videographer: Give them a written brief with the shots you need, from the booth and suite to the dinner and team photos. That content fuels your LinkedIn for months after the show.
- Start on swag: Custom items like socks and apparel have long lead times. Check the swag mistakes worth avoiding before you order anything. Ship to your team’s hotel instead of the advance warehouse when you can, since warehouse fees can run several times the value of what you’re shipping. Save every tracking number.
Two months out (early February): build the meeting machine
We estimate that everything visible at a show drives about 20% of your ROI, and the other 80% comes from meetings booked before you land. Two months out is when that work starts in earnest.
- Finalize who’s going: Lock the attending team, register passes, and decide whether a customer advocate will join you.
- Set your meeting targets: Aim for 10 to 15 meetings if you’re founder-led, or 20 to 30 for an early-stage team with a small Sales team. Start outreach about six weeks out.
- Build your target list: Include new accounts, open pipeline, current customers, investors, partners, and analysts. Sort them by priority so your best outreach goes to the people who matter most.
- Set your Sales team up to succeed: Give reps exact outreach copy, a specific list, suggested time slots, and one shared booking link so nothing gets double-booked. Then have marketing handle the invites, confirmations, and reminders once a prospect says yes. Build automated Slack digests that keep a running leaderboard of booked meetings, so everyone can see who’s booking and outreach keeps moving.
- Send dinner invitations: Executive calendars for RSAC week fill early, so your top guests should hear from you now.
- Hit your sponsor portal deadlines: Booth graphics, lead retrieval orders, and badge details all have due dates. Write them on your calendar the day you get portal access.
- Set up lead capture: Decide which qualification questions your team will ask, and add them to your lead retrieval app so every scan comes back with context.
One month out (early March): promote and produce
Your plan is set. Now it’s about making noise and getting physical things where they need to be.
- Launch your landing page or meeting calendar: Include the link to the official RSAC registration page alongside your own booking link.
- Start promoting: Post on LinkedIn with your team, your booth number if you have one, and your booking link. RSAC is a national event, so it’s fine to email your full marketing database. For your top prospects, a short personal note from your CEO goes further than any campaign. Our post on 17 ways to get your sales team to book meetings before a conference has more tactics.
- Draft your run of show: One document with dates, hotels, contacts, booth hours, every scheduled meeting, press, side events, and how to hand out swag.
- Set up your team’s tools: At Black Hat, each of Novee’s 20+ team members on site had a personal Slack assistant. It sent a daily agenda every morning and answered questions about hotel check-ins, reservations, booth hours, and side events on the spot. Build tools like these now so they’re tested before the week starts.
- Write your follow-up emails and nurture plan: Drafting them before the show lets you send them in the first days after, while you’re still fresh in your prospects’ minds.
Two weeks out (late March): confirm everything
This stretch is about confirming every detail, so the week runs on its own.
- Send your second round of outreach: Exclude anyone who already replied or booked, and keep the copy short.
- Confirm every meeting: Each one should get a confirmation, a reminder, and a briefing doc so your team walks in knowing who they’re meeting and why.
- Confirm vendors and deliveries: Check in with your booth builder, AV, caterer, and venue. Confirm dinner headcount, menu, and any dietary needs.
- Hold a know-before-you-go call: Walk the team through goals, talk tracks, and the run of show. Everyone should leave knowing the meeting targets, the one message you want prospects to repeat, and where they need to be each day.
- Make your announcement: If you’re launching, the week or two before RSAC is when your news gets the most room.
One week out: get the team ready to fly
Most of the work is done by now, so this week is about getting people and packages where they need to be.
- Send your final outreach and post: One last email to prospects who haven’t replied, plus a LinkedIn post with your team and where to find you.
- Share the run of show and open a group chat: Slack or WhatsApp both work. People rarely reread a long document during the week, so daily reminders in the chat matter more than the doc itself.
- Confirm shipments arrived: Call the hotel concierge and check that every box is there.
- Pack the small stuff: Business cards, banners, chargers, and printed one-pagers have a way of getting left behind.
- Book your post-show debrief now: Get it on everyone’s calendar for the week after, before the week wipes it from their minds.
The week after: follow up while it’s fresh
RSAC ends on April 8. The days right after decide how much of the week turns into pipeline.
- Follow up within one to three days: Personal notes go out from whoever met each person. Everyone else gets a well-written email, ideally from an SDR or salesperson.
- Get leads into your CRM: Export your badge scans, upload them, and walk through the list line by line with the team to assign an owner to each follow-up.
- Thank every dinner guest: Dinners are small, so follow up with everyone who came, including the ones who seemed least likely to buy.
- Send missed-connection emails: If you have an attendee list, reach out to the people you didn’t get to meet.
- Hold your debrief: Capture what worked, what didn’t, and the themes and objections prospects kept raising. Skip the recap blog. The debrief notes are far more useful raw material for your content plan.
- Pull your photos and video: Get the best shots to your team quickly so founders can post while the show is still on people’s minds.
The month after: turn the week into pipeline
This is when RSAC starts showing up in your pipeline numbers, as long as you keep working the leads.
- Nurture every badge scan: Most scans won’t convert right away, and that’s normal. Treat each one as an account-based marketing touchpoint and keep them in a nurture track.
- Measure against your KPIs: Look at meetings held, Sales Opportunities created, pipeline influenced, and cost per opportunity. Compare them to the goals you set five months ago.
- Repurpose your content: Turn video into founder posts, case study material, and website assets. Turn the objections from your debrief into blog posts and sales enablement.
- Write down what to keep and what to change: Black Hat in August is closer than it looks, and the lessons from RSAC are easiest to apply while they’re fresh.
How Blue Seedling can help
We’ll be at RSAC 2027 with several clients, so you get the reach of a much larger events team: a local San Francisco crew, vendors and venues we already know, playbooks from Black Hat and past RSACs, and extra hands when the week gets busy. We can take on the whole countdown above, or just the parts you’d rather hand off.
For RSAC 2027, we’re offering three packages:
- Starter Kit: No booth needed. We book your meetings, coach your team, and get you noticed with launch coverage, awards, founder posts, and photos and video.
- Suite: A private room that tells your product story, a full calendar of meetings, and our team on site.
- Booth: Concept, build, lead capture, and a read on what your competitors showed.
You can read more about our field marketing services here. If you’re still deciding how to show up, tell us where you are in your planning and we’ll size the right plan for your goals and budget on a quick call.
