Getting in the Mindset for Trade Show Success

At MEET, we focus on helping B2B growth companies soft-land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. By using time-tested strategies to identify prospects, select shows, align marketing techniques and measure outcomes, MEET works to de-risk the scaling process by ensuring a steady stream of high-quality prospects for our clients.

Why do we focus on trade shows?

For B2B companies, most marketing dollars are spent with the hopes of someday getting face-to-face with target prospects.

When optimized, trade shows deliver the most efficient way of achieving this goal. They provide the venue and the audience for these transactions. They also provide a number of other unique opportunities to improve your position in the market and connect with key stakeholders.

For companies looking to scale to the U.S. market, trade shows represent a vital opportunity to meet target customers, test value propositions and offers. The beauty of this approach for scaling firms is that they can begin before investing major resources in infrastructure and staffing in the new market.

Trade shows are also exhausting and represent a huge commitment of time and resources, which is why we recommend taking every step possible to guarantee your ROI. Even steps that may seem a bit less tangible.

Mindset matters

Psychologists have spent years studying the impact of one’s self-beliefs on their success or failure, and have proven that mindset does, in fact, play a significant role in determining achievement.

At MEET, we believe that taking the steps to get in the right mindset before and during an event helps to ensure that every other investment in that opportunity is fully leveraged.

And having participated in close to 5,000 events in our collective 75 years of experience, we’re pretty familiar with what it takes to achieve that trade show mindset.

Here are the steps we recommend to help get you in the mindset for success.

Take a pause

Whether you’re coming off of a busy morning, a crazy travel schedule or a full day in the office, take a moment to refocus and re-energize before walking through those doors. We all have different rituals for shifting gears. Here’s what works for us:

• Find a quiet spot where you can be alone. This might be your car, a park bench, or a nearby café.
• Use this time to remind yourself why you’re attending the event and what your explicit goals are.
• Make sure to remove other activities and responsibilities that may be a distraction or inhibit you from reaching those goals.

For example, if your goal is to find resources for your company and existing customers, put aside your sales pitch. Similar to fishing (where using the wrong bait will scare away the fish you’re aiming to catch) a misapplied sales pitch can easily scare away target contacts.

Take steps to ensure that your strategy matches your audience and your goals, and remove all other barriers.

Channel your role models

We all have someone we admire for his or her networking skills. Having a clear picture of a person whose skills you’d like to emulate in a networking situation is a great way to gain and maintain focus throughout an event.

Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, events can be taxing, particularly those that last for several days. We all have behaviors that we revert to when we’re tired or feeling overwhelmed. Looking at technology, sitting down, or socializing with friends should all be avoided.

Having a role model in mind can help you in those moments. Instead of reverting to these behaviors, think about how your role model would behave in the booth or while engaging with trade show participants.

Whether it’s encouraging people out of the aisle to have a conversation, or simply not sitting down, it’s helpful to have specific qualities in mind that you’re aiming to replicate during an event.

There’s a lot that goes into maximizing ROI from a trade show event. If pre, during and post-event strategy weren’t enough, there are the steps you must take to ensure that your mindset (and the way it causes you to behave) is aligned with the success you worked so hard to achieve.

That said, there is no comparison to the connections, relationships, and targeted exposure gained from trade shows and in-person events.

So get on your game face. It’s worth it.

For more on this topic of strategic engagement at trade shows, check out our recent webinar: How to Start Conversations and Identify Opportunities at Events. To check out all of MEET’s webinar content on how to successfully scale your company in the U.S. market, subscribe to our YouTube Channel.

About

MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft-land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward.  Contact Bill Kenney for a no obligation conversation: bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.