Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.
Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.

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10 Skills Every Trade Show Event Staffer Should Have

The following is a guest article by Margaret Colebeck of Vantage Advertising LLC.

When it comes to preparing for an upcoming trade show, first impressions are everything. From trade show displays and signage to product demonstrations and presentations, the first impression your brand creates with trade show attendees sticks with them for life.

In order to create the ideal first impression for your brand, you must have a team of highly skilled and reliable trade show event staffers at your booth. But, what skills should they have? Below, we’ve listed the top ten most important skills every trade show event staffer should have. Use this list as a guideline to determine which skills are the most beneficial to your booth.

10 Important Trade Show Event Staffing Skills

  1. Tech Savvy – This is a big one! Without question, every event staffer at your booth should be knowledgeable and skilled with using technology, such as smartphones and tablets. This is most important when it comes to social media. Your booth staffers should be able to easily access your company’s social media accounts and share your social information with others. Social media, especially Twitter, is very popular for networking and lead generation at trade shows, so be sure your event staff come prepared with technology and social media skills.
  1. Strong Communication Skills – When it comes to trade show event staffing skills, your team’s ability to communicate effectively is one of the most important. Communication is the basis for everything at trade shows, so it’s important to fill your booth with event staffers that have strong communication skills. Lack of strong communications skills should never be a reason your team doesn’t meet their trade show goals.

  1. IMG_5416

    Listening Skills – Along with great communication skills, your team must also have great listening skills. Why? Because as important as it is to communicate your brand to attendees, it’s more important to listen to their needs so as to effectively provide a solution to their problems.

  1. Persuasion – If your event staffers can’t persuade attendees to try out your product, follow your brand on social media, or sign-up for more information, then why bring them to the trade show at all? Consider what your team’s trade show goals are and only bring team members that will be able to help achieve those goals.
  1. Multi-Tasking Skills – Trade shows are a busy place where multi-tasking it a must. Make sure your team is full of event staffers that can handle the fast-past, busy trade show environment. If the team members you select can’t multi-task at the office, they definitely won’t be able to on the trade show floor. So, don’t bring them
  1. Stamina – This skill should be a no-brainer for exhibitors that have worked trade shows in the past. Trade shows have long, draining hours the require event staffers to remain on their feet the whole time, while also keeping their personalities and moods turned on.
  1. Go-Getter Skills – It’s also important for your event staffing team to be full of people interested in achieving. Go-getters are the type of people who are motivated to approach as many attendees passing by your booth as possible. They are amazing networkers and typically have an incredible elevator speech.
  1. Flexibility – Flexibility is an important aspect of any trade show event staffing team because without flexibility a team can quickly fall apart, especially when problems arise and last minute adjustments are made.
  1. Negotiation Skills – The trade show floor is unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen or who you’re going to run into. By having the skills to negotiate with attendees, your team will increase trade show leads and sales.
  2. Problem Solving Skills – Finally, no matter how hard your team plans for a trade show and no matter how many precautions your team takes, something will go wrong. And, when it does, your event staffers need to have the problem solving skills and patience to create an effective solution. Because as they say, the show must go on!

Margaret Colebeck is the Marketing Manager for Vantage Advertising, a nationwide event staffing company that provides exhibitors with experienced trade show models and booth talent for their events. She manages and writes educational content for their blog & social media pages in an effort to inform and inspire trade show exhibitors about trade show marketing, lead generation, event staffing, and more.

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What’s in Your Exhibiting Toolkit?

When it comes to your Exhibiting Toolkit, I don’t mean the screwdrivers, masking and duct tape and scissors (although those and other items will come in handy), but what about the various bits and pieces that will help draw visitors to your booth and capture more leads?

Let’s create a short but incomplete list of some of the necessary tools you should consider having in your toolkit.

  • A Damn Good Plan
  • A Well-Trained Booth Staff
  • A Booth That Represents Your Company Brand at a Glance
  • Lead Capture Mechanism
  • Follow-up Plan

Let’s break these down a little more:

A Damn Good Plan should include what you’re going to do 6 months before the show, 3 months ahead, 2 months, a month, etc. It includes your pre-show marketing schedule, the booth details (making sure to review the booth ahead of the show with plenty of time to do any minor repairs), electrical grid if needed, shipping dates, booth staff schedules.

A Well-Trained Booth Staff is a crew that is pleasant, friendly, knowledgeable, friendly (did I say friendly?), willing to work long hours, flexible and trained. Trained in what? Booth etiquette, how to interact with visitors for maximum efficiency, lead capture knowledge and more. Your staff is your front line in a chaotic environment. If there are any weak links in this chain it will eventually show.

IMG_5636
Photo by Tradeshowguy Tim Patterson

A Booth That Represents Your Company Brand at a Glance: this often means a custom booth, but it certainly doesn’t have to. There are a lot of tradeshow booths that can be customized to fit your brand sensibilities. They also have to function well, meaning there has to be proper storage, product display and meeting areas to accommodate your company exhibiting goals.

Lead Capture Mechanism: Whether you’re writin’ those leads down on paper, or capturing them in electronic form, all of the leads should have maximum information required to confirm the next step, and nothing more. Name and address, phone number and email are often the top of the list, but ask if all of those items are absolutely necessary. What’s as important is agreeing on the next step, whether it’s a follow up call, meeting or simply sending more information. Agree on what the next step is, and when it will take place.

Follow Up Plan: How are the leads getting to the sales team back in the office for follow up? Are they being transmitted electronically back to the team each night? Are they being transported in your briefcase? Whatever the method, make sure not to leave them for someone else. Too many leads wind up in Neverland. Sticking them in an envelope and then tucking that envelope into the booth crates often mean that the next time you see them is 11 months later when you open up the crates to prepare for next year’s show! Beyond that, your sales team should be prepared to receive and follow up on the leads in a timely manner.

No doubt you can add to this list, but these are the basics. Leave any item here aside at your own risk!

Tricks of the Tradeshow: Get the Conversation Started

smiling woman greeting

This is a guest post by Ruthie Abraham of The Brand Builders.

Regardless of whether you’ve worked at dozens of trade shows around the country or whether you’re headed to your first show, coming up with a compelling way to get people to stop and see what you have to offer is always one of the greatest challenges at a show. A standard greeting normally isn’t enough to engage someone, so you need to develop a catchy opener.. Pre-plan your opener. It can be catchy, intriguing, flattering, startling, weird, clever or some combination of these, but we recommend having a few on hand and testing your pre-planned lines to see how initial attendees react. If you get a good response on one, you can continue to use it for the rest of the show and at your next exhibition.
Here, we break down 10 ways to get the conversation started in a compelling way and connect with a quality lead:

  1. Be upfront. Give me two minutes of your time to find out about how you can ___.
  2. Lead them. What is your department doing to lower your total cost of _____.
  3. Establish common ground. What do you think of our show so far?
  4. Take an indirect approach. Can I ask your opinion on something? 
  5. Get physical with a hands-on demonstration of product. Help me out with this!
  6. Show you care about client needs by asking them what problems they face. Which part of our service or product is most relevant to your needs?
  7. Draw them in with an offer, challenge or contest. Have you entered our raffle to win a free _____?
  8. Be presumptive. I see you looking at our services. Are there any features you have questions on that I can explain to you?
  9. Ask them to think about an industry problem (that your product solves). Hey! Do you know the statistic of _____?
  10. Make it open-ended. How are you familiar with our product or services?

Ruthie Abraham is the founder & President of The Brand Builders – a B2B marketing agency focused on helping companies drive results, return and revenue from their online marketing.  Their B2B Marketing Blog is a resource for executives and professionals to learn about lead generation, content marketing, strategic sales, social media, trade show marketing and more.

What’s In It For Me?

Tradeshow visitors ask themselves some version of this question: What’s in it for me? They’re asking it when they see your pre-show marketing inviting you to their booth. They ask it when they see your booth from a distance. They ask themselves the question when they stroll up to the booth, knowing they have three more appointments before the day is done and they want to stop by six other booths on their list and are also thinking about dinner with that new client.

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Your question is this: how well are you answering that question in your visitor’s mind? Are you even thinking about that question, or are your marketing efforts focused on what’s best for you?

In marketing this often comes down to showing and explaining the benefits of your products of service, instead of the features. It may also mean showing what other companies have benefitted from your products. For example, if Joe’s Snack Shack claims that by using your products they were able to increase sales by 25%, there’s a good chance that your visitor might imagine their company having the same results.

Your pre-show marketing might take the approach that instead of bragging about a new product, you might say something like ‘Joe’s Snack Shack tested our new sales program and showed a 25% increase in sales in the third quarter thanks to our program. Come by our booth for a demo in person. Call to arrange an appointment.’

In the 80s, when I started going to seminars to expand my knowledge, I would often hear the speaker talk about WII-FM. After I got what he was talking about I smiled a little, but after that it became somewhat trite.

It’s not. The acronym “WII-FM” may be a bit old, but the idea is as valid today as it was back then, when we really listened to FM radio.

Magnet Productions Demo Reel

Tradeshow colleague Ken Newman’s Magnet Productions just released their newest demo reel. Since all they do is draw mobs of crowds to tradeshow booths, this is probably something that you should see. As Andy Saks of Spark Presentations said in his Facebook post mentioning the reel, “thanks to the lovely and talented Ken Newman and his company Magnet Productions for including some clips of me in Magnet’s new trade show talent demo reel. This was all recorded at the VMworld trade show in San Francisco in August when I was presenting for Magnet’s client Citrix (I do not have that much gray hair though, that’s all CG).”

Tradeshow Success is All About Attracting a Crowd, Then Knowing What to do with it

You may have a spectacular booth, a cool product and a well-trained staff. You may have a great spot on the floor near the main entrance. You may even have a special guest star in the booth for a few hours.

EXPO_Entrance

But all of that can go for naught if you can’t draw a mob on a consistent basis. In a recent meeting with a potential client, we asked the following question: when you get back to the office, what is the one thing that you would point to that would indicate your exhibiting experience was a success?

The answer? A sheer mob – almost all of the time.

So drawing a crowd is deemed important; probably the most important part of a tradeshow, in fact.

So how do you consistently draw a crowd to your tradeshow booth exhibit?

There are more ways to draw a crowd than there are ways to portray Dr. Who on television.

One favorite way is to hire a professional or two. Having a professional presenter in the booth that has the experience in attracting a crowd and informing that crowd about the exhibitor’s products and services is one of the most effective methods. The presenter can be an actor, presenter, magician, juggler, or unicyclist. Or maybe all at once!

Another way to attract a crowd is to have live music in the booth. This was done effectively at CES recently when large exhibitors were able to hire bands such as the Foo Fighters, Black Eyed Peas, Maroon 5 or others.

Okay, you don’t have that big of a budget or booth. So now what?

Some would shout the praises of money-blowing machines, prize wheels or free giveaways. But I would ask if these curiosity-arousing items are really attracting the right people. It depends on the show. CES is one place where a band would work. The local or regional industry show might be better for using a money blowing machine or prize wheel, but you would still want to have a method in place that allows you to ask attendees questions to quality or disqualify them as potential clients or customers.

As Anders Boulanger says in this great article, ‘do not leave free gifts out in a bowl for passer-by to grab and go. It is important that they don’t get it until they give something first,’ such as an email address, phone number or business card.

One way to attract a crowd is to have some sort of interactive element that relates to your product or service. If it’s software, for instance, you can offer a brief demo. If you’re selling iPad kiosks, have one or two that can show people how they work by opening them up and taking them apart. If you are promoting your service that helps put your company on the social media map, you can show attendees how it works with case studies and other demonstrations.

Or have an in-booth trivia game based on your company’s products and services. Every hour giveaway prizes to attendees that can answer the most questions based on the available handouts or brief onscreen interactive presentations.

What draws a crowd? In a word: curiosity.

Other methods of drawing a crowd can involve pre-show marketing or creating a buzz on social media outposts such as Twitter, which are heavily followed at most shows.

But there’s more to taking home a lot leads than drawing a crowd. If you hire a professional presenter that is prepared to draw dozens or hundreds of people to your booth two or three times an hour, is your booth staff prepared to sift through them and find the good hot leads, collect contact information and confirm the next step?

If not, what’s the point of drawing a crowd? Attracting a crowd isn’t hard. But making sure you have a system in place to benefit from that crowd is the very important second step to your tradeshow marketing success.

How to Issue an RFP for a Custom Tradeshow Exhibit

When it comes to sourcing a tradeshow exhibit builder for a new custom booth, you can do a number of things, such as ask colleagues who they have used, ask exhibitors at shows who built that booth, search online or perhaps pull out your tarot cards. No doubt there are hundreds if not thousands of exhibit companies eager to take your money and build you a fabulous booth.

Custom tradeshow booth from Bob's Red Mill
Custom tradeshow booth from Bob’s Red Mill

But how do you determine which builder is right for you?

If you’re starting from scratch and want to review the capabilities of several tradeshow exhibit builders, you can contact a half dozen of them and ask for a statement of capabilities, or you can go whole hog and issue a Request for Proposal.

The RFP is meant as an introduction to your company and your specific requirements and asks companies to respond with detailed information as to their capabilities and experience.

So how in-depth should it be? Let’s take a look at what you might want to include.

Start with a profile of your firm, including your target market and major competitors. Describe your products or services, your brand(s), and any industry trends that might be important.

Next, describe your objectives for your tradeshow marketing, making sure to identify specific goals for major shows. If the RFP is for a specific show, detail the size of the show, dates, size of your booth space and other pertinent information.

Describe any functional needs of your booth. It may be helpful to include photos of previous booths and include any comments you may have that describe the pros and cons of those booths.

Detail any brand basics along with guidelines and history if pertinent.

Include any show service needs you’d like to be a part of the RFP, such as I&D (installation and dismantle), carpeting, electrical, and on-site management.

Want any in-booth activities to show off your products and services? Be sure to include these if you want the tradeshow builder to consider providing these show marketing services. If so, describe the best outcome you’d like to achieve.

Finally, include your budget for the booth; let the respondents know if it’s all-inclusive or if some costs, such as space rental, are handled separately. Finally, include the dates of the show(s) that you need the booth and services.

In a nutshell, you’re describing your company’s background, show services requirements, booth design and functional requirements, budgeting and timeline.

Finally, be clear if this is a design competition. Some companies have the ability to easily spend a week or two on a spec design and others are not as well equipped, even though they may be able to build a stunning booth. While a design competition is a great way to see what the companies are capable of producing on short notice with no conversation, realize that the best design does not always equal the best end result. However, it is great to see the various ways a half dozen companies approach your booth needs.

Finally, don’t skimp on information. If you can’t decide whether to include something, you might err on the side of leaving it in. Seriously, it’s hard to include too much info in an RFP.

Using Technology to Optimize Your Exhibit (Infographic)

Infographics do a great job on illustrating a concept or breaking down a complicated concept to an easily understandable set of images and text.

Like this one. I heard from a fellow tradeshow exhibit from the UK who offered to share this particular infographic.

By using technology, you can uncover many benefits, as indicated in the original article on the Nomadic Display site:

• Social media and other forms of digital communication can enable you to connect with potential leads before a trade show even commences. In this way you’ll have list of warm prospects who are keen to speak to you on the day of the show.

• Gathering leads is a key aspect of many trade show exhibitions and technology can make this easier too. Touch-technology, instant messaging and social networking all make it easier than ever before to gather contact details from exhibition attendees.

• Technology can help you to demonstrate even complex products, to show testimonials and case studies and otherwise engage an audience who otherwise might pass straight on by your booth.

• Staying “front of mind” helps you to ensure that your company is the first that your leads think of when they need a solution that you offer. Increasingly sophisticated tools make it easier to maintain contact with your prospects after a show without making them feel “claustrophobic” and ensures that your messages arrive at optimal times.

Optimizing Your Exhibition Stand with Technology

An infographic by the team at Nomadic Display

Thanks again to our colleagues across the Atlantic for sharing!

 

Tradeshow Marketing Podcast: Lew Hoff – Bartizan

Lew Hoff of Bartizan Connects
Lew Hoff of Bartizan Connects

I had a chance to catch up with Lew Hoff, President of Bartizan Connects recently. We spoke a few years ago when the iLeads tradeshow lead tracking tool was fairly new. Its had a chance to grow up a bit since then, so Lew and I discussed what iLead really does in this day and age and how it’s quickly becoming a smartphone and tablet tool that you can use anywhere at the tradeshow – not just on the show floor.

[powerpress url=”http://www.tradeshowguyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/TSMPodcast-LewHoff-Bartizan.mp3″]

Learn more about Bartizan here.

Here’s more information on the iLeads app.

7 Ways to Make Sure Your Tradeshow Exhibit Experience Sucks

Naah, I don’t want your tradeshow exhibiting experience to suck. But if it does, perhaps its because you did one of the following:

  1. Don’t have a plan. Next time you walk a tradeshow floor as an attendee, try to determine which exhibitors actually know what they’re doing there and why. If they have a fishbowl and are giving away an iPad to some random visitor that tosses a business card into the bowl, you can be assured they really don’t have a plan. If they say something simple and innocuous to passersby, such as “hi, how are you?” it becomes apparent they haven’t put any thought into what they actually want out of the show. Instead, make specific show goals (number of leads, counting visitors, number of demos, etc.) and come up with a strategy and plan to accomplish those goals.
  2. Natural Products Expo West 2009
    Natural Products Expo West 2009

    Don’t train your booth staff. If those staffers at the show that you’re still walking through are sitting at the back of the booth, talking amongst themselves, or chatting on a cell phone or texting somebody or eating, you know for a fact they have not been properly trained. Eating in a tradeshow booth is still the number one turn off to visitors and will pretty much ensure that anyone wanting to stop in at the moment will keep going. And probably not come back.

  3. Don’t do any pre-show marketing. If you don’t let people know you’re at the show, you’re leaving much more to chance. By working the phones, sending out emails, postcards, contacting media, doing PR, and more, you’re increasing the chances that people will make their way to your booth, no matter where it is.
  4. Don’t let your staffers know what’s going on other than the bare minimum. This is somewhat different than booth staff training, but falls under the same umbrella. If you don’t make sure your staff knows everything you can tell them about the products, service and specific show goals, they won’t fully grasp the reason(s) you’re at the show. On the other hand, if your staff has full knowledge of show goals, products, services, company hierarchy and other pertinent information, you’ll come a lot closer to being able to let visitors know as much about the products and services you offer as possible.
  5. Don’t have a booth that accurately and fully represents your brand. Too many exhibitors think that any ol’ booth will do. No. A booth is a statement. It’s a physical representation of your brand, from the materials, the graphic messaging, to the layout and the look and feel of the booth. If you’re a rootsy, eco-friendly, vegan pancake company, what are you doing with a high-tech booth that looks like it should be selling software? Visitors should be able to see your booth and instantly get a feel for your company that accurately reflects your products, attitude and mission.
  6. Don’t have a specific lead generation system in place. Think of it: you have a limited time at the show to capture information from potential clients or customers. If the show is a three day show and the floor is open just 7 hours a day, that’s 21 hours. If there are 30,000 visitors, that’s a potential of 1,428 visitors per hour IF they all walked by each booth once. We know that won’t happen, but if you get 100 visitors an hour and 20% of those visitors are ‘hot’ leads, what’s your method of capturing a lead’s specific contact information, along with follow up details? If you haven’t figured this out before the show – and your show goal is to capture as many good warm leads as possible – this will pretty much guarantee that your tradeshow exhibiting experience will suck.
  7. Don’t have a good follow up system in place. If you’ve gotten this far – planned a show, trained your staffers, have a good brand-representative booth and captured a plethora of leads – it will all be for naught if you don’t follow up properly. Still – in 2014! – surveys and statistics show that nearly 4 out of 5 tradeshow leads don’t get a follow up call or email. Eighty percent! Really! Do your job and make sure that all leads are tracked from the point of collection to the various touches over the next few weeks and month that lead to a sale. Because once you’ve made a sale, that’s when the fun begins and you’ve got a new client. And it all came from your tradeshow appearance.

But not if you suck at any of these seven items.

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