In this recent webinar from Handshake.com and Andy Saks of Spark Presentations, you’ll see how the process works on how to get those most-valuable prospects to actually come to your booth, and once they do, what to do with them when they’re there.
I always learn something from watching and listening to Andy. I’m sure you will, too.
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One of my favorite weekly newsletters arrives every Monday morning. It’s called the Monday Morning Memo. Clever! Roy H. Williams of Austin, Texas, the Wizard of Ads, sends out an informative and entertaining missive every week that grabs my attention and makes me think. If only all writers could do that.
This past week he told the story of submitting several writing samples to have IBM’s Watson computer analyze them. He was noting that no matter what writing samples he submitted, the analysis was very similar. Conclusion? It’s pretty accurate.
Here’s what Watson had to say about the manuscript of Tradeshow Success: 14 Proven Steps to Take Your Tradeshow Marketing to the Next Level:
You are heartfelt and somewhat insensitive. You are calm under pressure… (click the image to see it a bit larger).
Time to wrap up a handful of recently spotted articles and blog posts about tradeshows.
Let’s start with the Huffington Post. Shuly Oletzky of Frigibar Industries posts this nice look at 9 Ways to Make the Most Out of Your Appearance at a Tradeshow. Many great ideas here.
If you want some food for thought, check out Inc.com’s The Death of Tradeshows by Dev Aujla, the Founder of DreamNow.
In the news, the White House has announced that President Obama is going to attend the world’s largest tradeshow for industrial technology. Here’s the Associated Press with the story.
TechCrunch believes that the recently completed 2016 Consumer Electronics Show is now a show for start-ups. Here’s their take.
David Saef at TSNN.com goes over The Secrets to Making Live Events Worth Every Penny.
Spark Pay details How to Get Prospects Flocking to Your Booth at a Tradeshow. Some great ideas here, such as investing in look and feel, the use of technology and getting the best location you can.
3 Common Mistakes of Tradeshow Exhibitors (And How to Avoid Them) comes from Contributing Writer Spider Graham at the Business Journals.
And finally Exhibitor magazine chimes in with tradeshow Budgeting: Stats and Formulas. Always a useful thing when preparing for a tradeshow.
The more people find the TradeshowGuy Exhibits Exhibit Design Search tool that allows them to share ideas with team members, the more they like it! Check out the video:
Tradeshows are a great opportunity to promote your company. Yeah, we all knew that already.
But are you promoting the company’s brand away from the tradeshow floor?
If you have branded shirts, wear them as you travel. Put the shirt on prior to leaving for the airport. There’s a good chance someone will be on the same flight going to the same show. If they’re familiar with your brand, it might prompt them to strike up a conversation with you. If not, maybe they’ll remember the logo when they walk the floor and see your booth.
At the show, you’ll have your show badge, but what if you had a personal name tag as well? Something like that would stand out a little, too, giving people another chance to remember your name and company name. Getting a name badge with your company name and your name costs only a few bucks, and you can wear it at all public events.
If your company throws parties for clients and prospects at the show, there’s another opportunity to show off the brand with embroidered shirts and name tags, not to mention some other item, such as a kiosk in the corner of the room that allows people to charge cell phones. If you have one of those branded charging stations for the booth, there might be other opportunities to use that away from the tradeshow floor. Think where you might find that opportunity.
Tradeshows are full of competing companies, all vying to get their name out in front of their competition and in front of your eyeballs. Finding other opportunities to brand your company away from the tradeshow floor might give you that edge you’ve been looking for.
Exhibits are a big investment. Tradeshows cost money, and one of the biggest costs is the initial outlay for a new custom booth. Even smaller, modular booths with little to no customization can put a big ding in your pocketbook. With such a big investment, it makes sense to care for the investment so that it lasts year and years, giving you a better return on your investment.
A new car comes with a warranty, and often comes with free oil changes and maintenance for a set period of time, depending on how desperate the car companies are to sell you something. A new exhibit will usually have a warranty covering many items, but you’re still responsible for upkeep. Imagine your new car. Yes, you get the oil changes done regularly, but do you clean and vacuum the car often? Do you check to make sure headlights, turn signals and brake lights are all working? You’d hate to get stuck on a cold winter night with no headlights. It’s the same (and different) with your exhibit. It’s the same because it needs upkeep and attention. But it’s different because unlike a car which is driven virtually every day, an exhibit is seen only when it’s out of the cases or crates.
The next time your booth is set up, get there early and go over it with a fine tooth comb. Take photos of damages and make notes of changes you’d like to make such as graphics or layout.
Time for an Upgrade?
When driving a used car, after tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of miles, you might need a major overhaul. A new transmission, a new engine, of course new tires and brakes on a regular basis. With an exhibit that’s showing it’s age, you just might be ready for an upgrade. Perhaps your company is growing and you need a larger space. This might mean you have to either get a new booth or add on to your current booth. Adding on is the more economical route (usually), and it allows you to keep using the basic booth for a few more years.
Upgrades can also mean adding or changing graphics. And chances are, if your older graphics are at least a few years old, the newer graphics will be printed on newer generation printers with better substrates, which means a much better look.
One often overlooked area for maintaining the value of your exhibit investment are the shipping cases. Whether you have a custom-jigged wooden crate, or a series of smaller cases with custom-cut pads for the exhibit parts, it makes sense to take a close look at those items to make sure they are maintaining their integrity. Over the years those cases and crates are also open to wear and tear. Felt can come off, custom cut jigs can get broken – after all, the very act of setting up and dismantling exhibits is hard on them. If need be, engage somebody to make repairs, or send it back to your exhibit house for repairs.
The final thought on maintaining the long term viability of your tradeshow booth is to make sure you’re not going to shows that are no longer any good for you. After all, if it’s not a good show, and you’re making the effort to be there, your booth is going through the motions of shipping, set-up, dismantle and shipping back to the warehouse more than it should be. And that adds just one more show to the overall wear and tear.
Like your car, your tradeshow exhibit will last many years. And if you keep it in good shape with tune-ups, tender care and a loving touch on a regular basis, you’ll get even a few more years out of it.
Got a tradeshow exhibit project in mind? Submit a Quote Request with no strings attached.
It’s nice to have a couple of snapshots of your tradeshow booth to show off on Twitter or your Facebook page.
But there are more reasons for taking pictures – a lot of them – of your booth.
Let’s start with the design and the look. Take snapshots of the booth from several angles so you get a good feel of how it looks from different directions. Next, take shots of the booth’s neighbors. No need to go crazy, just a few quick photos to see who’s next to you.
Now, take some close-ups. Tradeshow booths are only pulled out of their crates a few times a year, and if you have photos of details it might save you a trip to the storage area to open the crate. Take close-up photos of graphics. In fact, pull out a tape measure and take photos of all of the graphics so you have ‘real-size’ documentation of the graphics. You might be surprised at the difference between the specified size and the actual size. Good information to have on hand. Depending on the number of graphics, this might take awhile.
Is there any part of the booth that is damaged, worn, torn? Take photos to show exactly what’s going on so that when the booth returns home you can be specific about repairs that may be needed.
In some cases, you may want to hire a professional photographer to take photos of your booth. The best time to do it is prior to the show opening, so there are few people on the floor. A professional portfolio of your booth may come in handy for a variety of reasons. You can release photos to the media, send them out on social media where they’ll stand out from the crowd, and you may find that the exhibit can be entered in a design contest (like our friends at SoYoung last year).
Yes, I occasionally post an absolutely blatant product placement. But let’s face it – when it’s a cool customizable charging station like this one, it’s worth plugging. Classic Exhibits just posted this video on their blog, and since we are a distributor and work with Classic all of the time, I wanted to share. Here’s Mel from Classic Exhibits explaining what’s going on with this:
Learn more about the charging station and how you can make it work for you here.
Hey, it’s a Top Ten List! Let’s look at ten things to do as you prepare for another year of tradeshow marketing:
The more prepared you are, the better the opportunity to increase your leads, sales and brand awareness.
With all of the moving parts in your tradeshow marketing program, there is one area that stands out above all the rest as being critical to your success – how to break the ice and engage tradeshow visitors.
And since this is a compelling question that needs concrete answers, I thought it worthwhile to bring in one of the pros at tradeshow engagement, Andy Saks of Spark Presentations. Andy has been training company booth staff in the art and science of engagement for years. I thought it would be an easy thing to have him share a few questions that he teaches his clients about how to engage, but it’s much more complicated than that! Of course it is.
As Andy describes it, booth staffers often walk into a booth shortly before the show begins, seeing it for the first time, and it’s a beautiful piece of branding that the company obviously spent a lot of time and money on. The booth is MUY IMPORTANTE, which immediately makes the staffers feel like they’re there to support this awesome booth and company. But it’s not necessarily the way it should be.
“The booth is there to support you, not the other way around,” said Andy. Without training, a booth staffer often feels like they are there to field questions and direct traffic. But a properly trained staffer who understands the situation – fully understands the entire scope of appearing at a tradeshow to gather leads and convert them into a customer – has a better understanding of how to approach engagement. Which will result in more leads and more business.
When you’re standing in a tradeshow booth, everything you do or do not do is reflecting your company back to the attendee. You’re representing them in everything you do. Something that’s minor and innocuous in any other situation is seen in a much different light at a tradeshow. If you’re eating food, for instance, in that moment a potential client sees that act of you gulping down a hotdog, the underlying message is ‘it appears they are not ready for me to engage with them; they’re not ready for me to be their customer.’
Everything you do in a booth, from eating, talking on a cell phone, standing with your arms folded, sitting in the back of the booth is sending a message to prospective clients that you’re trying to reach, and the message is: we’re not ready for you, please go somewhere else. So all that money spent on the booth and on staff travel and lodging is then wasted on that prospect.
Now that you’ve made yourself the most appealing thing at that moment, you move to the QUALIFYING stage. The goal is to ask smart, qualifying questions to build a personal rapport of trust and also reveals their pain.
Some of the questions that Andy recommends revolve around the idea of connecting with somebody, including this one:
“How’d you get started in your job or this industry?” The attendee will regard this question as a sign of your interest in them. Most people, as adults, are not doing what they thought they’d like to do as a kid. By asking this question, it recognizes that somewhere along the way, they took a left turn from their intended or desired career to get where they are now. People like to talk about themselves, and a question like this will reveal a lot of things that may be important. Other staffers in other booths tend to focus on product benefits, company marketing bullet points – in other words, it’s all ME ME ME, and if you ask about THEM you have made an impact. You have made yourself memorable.
As you get a couple of minutes into the conversation and you’ve uncovered that they may be using a competiting product, ask a COLLECTION question, such as, “What would you change about your current product if you could?” The tradeshow floor is a tremendous opportunity for market research, and if you’re in the midst of a one on one engagement, you can uncover elements of how they use that product. In fact, they might list the top three or four things about that product that they’d like to change – stuff they don’t like.
In this instant, you have someone who is a user of your competitor’s products, telling you specific things that they don’t like about that product. Can you imagine having that conversation 10, 15, 20 times a day and what market research would come from that?
That’s when you can say, “Well, just so you know, our product does such and such and solves those problems, so if you’re ever in the position to switch, we’d be glad to talk to you.” You’ve planted a seed that may help them grow into a client.
Now it’s time to wrap up the qualifying stage of the conversation. Take the information they’ve given you and feed it back to them: “Let me see if I have this correct: you’re looking for a product or service that has this feature and this feature, so that you can reach this goal of doing this and as a result you get this benefit and this benefit. Do I have that right?”
As Andy put it, when you’re saying this to the attendee, you’ll hear your voice and all of the noise of the tradeshow floor, but the attendee will hear angels. Because somebody on a tradeshow floor listened to them!
The sale is nearly 90% complete in this moment. All other details, like size, delivery options and so on can be worked out.
Your tradeshow booth staff is the front line. They represent your company from sunup to sundown in every moment on the tradeshow floor. How they represent you may be the difference between winning that big client or distributor for your product. If they don’t know how to engage attendees properly, you may not even know what you missed.
Andy Saks, Spark Presentations, excels in tradeshow presentations and tradeshow training for booth staff. Check out his page and the fun video. You’ll no doubt learn something very worthwhile!
