It’s Monday morning and Bonnie is stuck in traffic, but she doesn’t
care. She doesn’t care because she’s going to have a great day.
Sitting on the seat next to her is a report on last week’s trade show.
It glows. It practically floats.
The annual trade show was the industry’s most important and glamorous
event. And all of the company’s competitors exhibit. Companies whose
annual sales climb into the hundreds of millions of dollars were there, along
with their customers – and so was Bonnie.
Over the course of the three-day event, a steady stream of people flowed
through the exhibit. Most of them were looking for exactly the kind of products
Bonnie’s company was offering. Many of them expected to purchase within
the next few months. In the end, the salespeople working in the exhibit booth
managed to collect over 700 leads.
One person visiting the booth, commonly referred to as an attendee, was his
company’s chief decision-maker on a huge project. Bonnie’s company’s
ace salesperson had tried for months to get in front of this man, with no
success. The salesperson did a doubletake when she read the man’s name
tag. But she moved in quickly, and within a half an hour, the man asked her
to bid on his project.
The attendees flocked around the new product being introduced at the show.
This was a problem, because the one editor unable to attend the pre-show
press conference couldn’t get a good look at it when he stopped by
just after the show opened. Fortunately, the crowd piqued his interest, so
he made a point to drop back by the booth during a lull.
The press conference also went well. A couple of the editors mentioned that
they planned to do a few feature stories on the new product. Another editor
asked to interview the company’s president.
Bonnie may be inching along the freeway now, but soon she will turn in her
wonderful report. She will pass by the offices of salespeople hard at work,
happily following up on leads and preparing bids. Then she will spend the
rest of the morning returning the phone calls of editors who’ve called
with follow up questions and requests for interviews.
A story with a happy ending? Absolutely. It can happen. You can write your
own successful trade show story.
It is Monday morning, you’re about to hand in your post show report.
What does it say?
So, how do you get there from here? How do you get from “Hey, lets
do a trade show!” to a fist full of leads? Thousands of companies successfully
exhibit at trade shows every year, boosting sales and enhancing their image
in the process. So can you.
The path to trade show success looks a lot like a jumbled maze. But there
is one thing that every successful trade show manager does. They turn the
maze into a checklist for success.
Let’s say you decide that you want to buy a car. That’s a goal.
So off you go to the nearest dealership. A salesman approaches and strikes
up a conversation. An hour later, you are filling out loan paperwork for
a red Mustang convertible. It’s expensive. But by now, you really need
that convertible, and hey, you deserve it. Is this how you go about buying
a new car? No, it’s probably not.
By the time you walk into the dealership, you’ve probably decided why
you need or want a new car, the model and how much you are willing to pay.
You’ve probably saved up the down payment, and planned an affordable
monthly car payment.
In other words, you decided that you wanted to buy a new car. You set up
specific goals that allow you to make the purchase. If you don’t set
specific goals, you won’t be able to plot a specific course, and you
won’t get that car.
Trade show planning works the same way. If you don’t set specific goals,
you risk wasting money you can’t afford to spend. If your aren’t
defined, you have no way of measuring your success. Let’s look at the
four most common goals of trade show exhibitors.
Leads. All exhibitors want to end up with a fist full of leads. But if all
an exhibitor wants is lots of leads, then she is better off simply renting
the list of attendees and skipping the trade show. What exhibitors really
want is a fist full of highly-qualified leads. In three weeks or three months
time, a certain percentage of these leads will turn into closed deals.
Here are some factors to consider, when generating leads is a priority:
•How many leads do you want?
•How many salespeople do you need at the show to capture these leads?
•How much time do your salespeople need qualify an attendee?
•How many hours will the trade show floor be open?
•What percentage of these leads do you expect to turn into sales?
•What is the average dollar-amount of these sales?
•What is the turnaround time, from opening to closing, of the average
sale?
•What is the batting average of each salesperson? What percentage of
leads is she or he able to turn into sales?