Trade Show Tips for Technology Marketing.
Trade
Show Do's and Don'ts
Jim Schakenbach
Managing Partner, SCT Group Inc.
www.sctgrp.com
Every year the trade show debate rages within just about every company
that has the potential to include show participation in its marketing
budget. To make the issue even more problematic, 9/11 has forced this
debate to now include safety issues. But at the heart of the matter is
the question “just how effective are trade shows, REALLY?”.
The answer is a definitive “depends…”.
It depends in large part upon what a company puts into it. While trade
show attendance is certainly down, it doesn’t mean it’s out.
In fact, the attendees who show up at shows these days are there because
they really want (and need) to be. The days of the free-and-easy, company-subsidized
junket are over and any company worth its salt is demanding ROI on any
travel expense, especially trade show attendance. What does that mean
for the exhibitor? Fewer “tire-kickers” and more qualified,
interested, potential customers.
OK, so now we’ve established an argument for participating in an
industry trade show even though attendance is almost certainly going to
be off what it’s been in the past. How do you capitalize on this
opportunity? Let’s start with the most common mistakes exhibitors
make:
Creating unintentional barriers. Ever notice that the booths with
the most traffic are also the ones that are easiest to get into? They
have wide, inviting spaces that seem to blend into the aisles so that
attendees can pass easily from a common traffic area into a company’s
selling zone, often without even knowing it. That means removing those
ubiquitous eight-foot folding tables that people erect across the front
of their booth space, with carefully fanned out product literature and
stony-faced sales reps sitting impassively behind this protective barrier,
waiting for someone to stop and talk to them. Waiting and waiting and
waiting….
The result is as inevitable as it is unintentional – “The show
was a flop…nobody stopped to talk to us…”.
Put the cell phone down. Let me say it again. PUT THE CELL PHONE
DOWN. How many times have you walked past a booth, only to see a representative
talking earnestly into a cell phone, staring off at some invisible horizon,
usually with a finger pressed into his or her open ear in a desperate
attempt to hear the other person. Totally oblivious to the hundreds of
potential sales walking right past them just a few feet away, these clueless
individuals instead are concentrating all their efforts on a single person
they can’t even see. Does that make any sense? Of course not. Instead,
relegate phone business to a limited period of time, away from booth activity.
Then every rep in the booth should be instructed, while working in the
booth, to turn…the phone...OFF.
“I’m not sure…” Some companies, desperate for
personnel to staff a booth, will tap employees with little or no product
knowledge or, worse, because they have a pretty face. Then, when confronted
with a question of perhaps even modest technical difficulty, they respond
sheepishly, “gee, I’m not sure…I don’t really handle
that product….the sales manager will be here this afternoon, can
you come back then?”. If someone is staffing the booth, they ought
to have at least a passing knowledge of what’s on display so that
they can provide potential customers with more information than what they
came in with. There’s no substitute for knowledge, even if it’s
just a little.
The bulletin board look. Also known as the College Dorm Display.
You’ve seen them – a fabric-covered pop-up display covered in
what looks like white paper reprints, some product photos, maybe a half
dozen or so small graphics. They’re confusing to look at, worse to
decipher, and at best, a waste of time. The key word is “display”
– this is a company’s chance to show the world exactly what
it has to offer in the best possible light. Throwing up a bunch of data
and some digital photos does not do that. The best any company that puts
up such a display can hope for is one or two confused people wandering
through, peering quizzically at the myriad of prints and photos, half-heartedly
trying to figure out what the exhibitor actually does.
Does all this sound depressingly familiar? That’s because hundreds
of companies commit these violations on an all-too-frequent basis. But
that means opportunity for you, if you choose instead to maximize your
trade show participation and create an effective, interesting lead-gathering
sales machine.
Here are ways to do just that:
Create open spaces. Remember those eight-foot tables? If you must
use them, stick them on a back wall or along the side drapes. Open up
the front of your booth and you open yourself up to sales opportunities.
Keep product displays to the side or back of your booth so that you can
draw people in to view them. Use pedestals wherever possible to create
islands of interest. Removing physical barriers also removes psychological
ones.
Create excitement. Remember the College Dorm Display? Instead,
work toward creating a single, exciting image or theme for your display.
Opt for a single, large color image in your booth that graphically depicts
what your company offers or does. Ideally, a person walking past should
be able to glance at your display and immediately determine “oh,
they’re involved in (blank)”. The added benefit is ease of set-up
and transportation, lack of clutter, and often less expense – sometimes
it’s cheaper to create a single, larger graphic than it is several
smaller ones.
Multimedia displays are even better, and can serve the added benefit of
providing compelling “live” digital demos that might not be
cost-efficient or even possible to do physically.
Leave sales literature in the box. Or even better, back at the
office. Companies waste an enormous amount of money printing up beautiful
four-color sales materials and stacking them in come-hither piles at their
booths where everyone then scoops them up and unceremoniously dumps them
in a trash can outside the exhibit hall because they’ve got too much
stuff to carry. Instead, have just a few brochures or catalogs available
discreetly under your table so that when you have a really live candidate,
you can offer literature if the situation calls for it. Use your valuable
literature instead as a response sales tool that you can mail to your
leads when you get back home. This provides you with another reason to
contact them.
Many companies are now opting to put sales and product literature on CDs
as PDF files in addition to, or instead of, printing them. In the case
of catalogs, there are certainly some substantial cost savings in both
printing and shipping when you bring a stack of CDs instead of boxes of
heavy catalogs.
Use real people. Remember, this is your opportunity to show the
industry the breadth and depth of your company, so bring out your most
talented, knowledgeable people. If that means engineers who aren’t
used to the light of day, make sure you pair them up with experienced
sales people who can run interference for them if they become uncomfortable.
Make sure you have the intellectual firepower in the booth to handle the
kind of questions you’re likely to get. The quicker you can answer
a potential customer’s question, the quicker he or she becomes an
actual customer.
Don’t be afraid to go out and greet people. The booths that are always
crowded and active are the ones with better outreach. Staffers who greet
people in the aisles with a smile and a friendly question attract more
interested attendees than the walled-off booths with dour employees staring
sullenly at the passing traffic.
Conclusion: Less is more.
In short, the ideal trade show display has fewer barriers, less clutter,
singular themes or images, and more opportunities for contact and prospecting.
By using these guidelines and a little common sense, you can turn even
today’s diminished trade shows into the effective marketing tools
they ought to be.
©2007 SCT Group, Inc.
sctgrp.com
Return to SCT Group home
For more articles
about successful marketing
click here