Author name: Mollie Ring

Return on Investment

Your Trade Show Business Strategy Starts with a Need

/

How is your trade show business strategy different from your company’s overall business strategy? The answer is, it’s not. As we mentioned in our most recent post, Trade Show Success Strategies that Deliver ROI, the purpose of a trade show is to make the best use of available resources to achieve more transactions. As a result, how you approach each and every trade show, from planning to follow-up, must be guided by the explicit needs of your target customers. Similarly, every business model begins with a strong value proposition aimed at a clearly defined market. Trade show business strategies are no different. Who Should be the Focus of Your Trade Show Business Strategy? Prior to participating in any trade show, we recommend that you clearly identify the most high value prospects for your service or product. From there, you’ll want to develop two or three unique buyer personas for these individuals. (Here’s how we recommend you do that.) Your trade show selection process should be a direct reflection of this buyer persona research. You’ll want to choose shows based on their likelihood of attracting high concentrations of your ideal customers. What Keeps Your Ideal Customers Up at Night? Identifying the number one problem that keeps your ideal customers up at night is critical to developing the right offer. In the B2B world, this will be the aspect of their business they feel most challenged by. If this challenge relates to your product or service, you have a unique opportunity to develop an offer that speaks directly to their needs, triggering them to self-identify as a prospect on the trade show floor. If you discover that what keeps them up at night is not related to your product or service, then they’re probably not a prospect because they won’t realize a need that relates or is urgent for your solution. Whatever the challenge, if your product or service has to power to solve someone’s #1 problem, you want to make that clear. Offers Come in Many Forms. You know what keeps your ideal customer up at night and how your product or service helps to address this challenge. Now what? At MEET, we recommend employing next level lead nurturing assets. Whether it’s marketing newsletters, webinars or white papers, client assessments, informational videos, or facilitated discussion groups, these are your best marketing assets that you can promote in the form of an offer. To transform these assets into an offer you will want to repackage them for promotion with provocative titles. Recall the Got Milk? advertising campaign. Those two simple words got people nationwide to stop and think: do I have milk? If not, I should probably get some. You want an offer that really stands out. With so many communications bombarding trade show attendees as they walk down the floor, it’s difficult to stay focused. On top of that, 50% of attendees identify as introverts, meaning it’s extra challenging for them to walk up to a booth and start a conversation. Building a trade show business strategy around the needs of you ideal customers means developing offers that are easy to spot, compelling and overwhelmingly attractive. Sound like your larger business strategy? That’s a good thing. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Uncategorized

Trade Show Success Strategies that Deliver ROI

/

At MEET, our focus is helping B2B growth companies develop and execute the most effective trade show success strategies to amplify their ROI. Perhaps the most fundamental of these trade show success strategies is crafting the right offer for attracting quality prospects. In our webinar, Booth Bait: Are you Attracting Flies or Prospects, we uncover that 90-95% of exhibitors catch flies with their booth offers, meaning they tend to fail in this area. Sadly, this is their best leverage point. The purpose of a trade show or general marketing activity is to make the best use of available resources to achieve one very specific goal—transactions. The purpose of the booth is simply to identify the prospects in the room by distinguishing them from the rest of the trade show attendees. To define a prospect is simple: they must have an expressed need, the resources to fulfill that need, and a strong degree of urgency. Or as we like to say: NEED, MONEY, NOW. Similar to fishing, attracting true prospects takes strategy, preparation, and excellent execution. Fortunately, once you’ve mastered it, your results change dramatically. Anyone can collect business cards, increased productivity comes from connecting to volumes of likely buyers. Top 6 Challenges to Trade Show Success Strategies Challenge #1: Prospects are not labeled—they all look the same on the trade show floor. Exhibitors need a way to easily separate them from the crowd. Challenge #2: 50% of attendees are introverts—many do not interact or engage easily. Exhibitors need a way to get their attention in a non-coercive manner. The idea is to get them to opt-in, like a fish swims to bait. Challenge #3: Exhibitors use the wrong bait—unless you are selling iPads, you have no reason to give one away. iPads or other generally attractive offers do not attract quality prospects that are aligned with your product or service. Challenge #4: Booth clutter—exhibitors tend to load their booth with too much information and too many giveaways, making it difficult for salespeople determine who should stop. Challenge #5: Salespeople operate the booth—placing sales people rather than transaction professionals in the booth may cost you valuable time that could be used more effectively elsewhere. (See our post on this topic: Looking to Maximize your Trade Show ROI: Start by Doing the Math.) Challenge #6: The team is not well trained—it is critical that those who are staffing your booth and working the trade show are well-trained and focused on your objective. Developing the right offer will ultimately solve each of these challenges by focusing your team, your booth and the trade show floor on what it is you came to achieve. Why is this the case? Prospects Opt-In Similar to inbound marketing, the process through which online companies draw in customers by offering content in exchange for contact information, quality prospects should immediately opt-into a well-crafted offer. That’s because they recognize the connection between your offer and their urgent need and are willing to do what is necessary for that asset or resource. The key distinction is that prospects opt-in as opposed to being coerced to engage with your booth. At MEET, we can’t help but rely on a good fishing analogy when talking about trade show success strategies. This one is the lobster trap. Lobsters are drawn into traps using a small piece of bait. Once they have entered the trap, they are drawn in further with more bait until they are caught. While no one is looking to trap their prospects, the analogy works in that you want prospects to see the bait, withdraw themselves from the sea of trade show attendees, and engage with your team for more information, i.e. more bait. Every B2B company may describe their trade show success strategies somewhat differently. What unites them is a well-crafted offer that is designed to catch the right fish in each audience. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Return on Investment, Uncategorized

Be Your Own Trade Show Consultant

/

There are many reasons for hiring a trade show consultant, from help with goal setting to powering your execution. The process of developing a marketing and sales event strategy may be daunting and a trade show consultant can offer valuable resources to get you started. In our recent post, 5 Steps to Achieving Your Best Trade Show Selection Process, we uncovered five strategies for determining the best trade shows for your organization, including developing a scoring matrix to help you assess the value of each event opportunity. In this post, we’d like to share how to use your scoring matrix as a basis for measuring results and making decisions that will impact your annual strategy—in essence, acting as your own trade show consultant. What to Measure Using a Scoring Matrix Optimizing your scoring matrix to measure results from each trade show event will uncover an array of valuable data points, such as: Opt-ins The number of people who stop by the booth and give their contact details in exchange for your offer 1st Meetings The number of first meetings that occur as a result of these opt-ins Proposals The number of proposals that happen as a result of these first meetings Sales and/or Revenue The number of sales / total revenue that results from these proposals. From this data, you will be able to generate information such as revenue per lead, leads per show, and revenue per show. And by going through the process of understanding your buyer persona and developing an offer that corresponds to that persona, you can be confident that your opt-ins will become progressively more qualified prospects. In other words, good preparation = good data = strong results. You may choose to measure additional data points depending on the particular event you are evaluating, but overall as you begin to map these results across events, you will uncover the relative value of each opportunity. Just like a good trade show consultant, you will produce data to help make informed decisions. How to Use Your Trade Show Data Strategically Fully understanding the costs (both time and money) of an event and comparing these costs to your results will directly inform your event selection strategy. Additionally, you will be well positioned to negotiate with event organizers whose events deliver subpar results. For example, for those who employ a quarterly trade show strategy review, it may be the case that two events per year deliver exceptional performance results, while two deliver results that are subpar. Assuming you want to return to these subpar events in the future, it’s possible to use results data to negotiate reduced costs or increased exposure with the event organizers. Ultimately any adjustment that will increase the value of the event is a win—not just for you, but for the event organizer as well. Most trade show hosts want you to succeed and when presented with data that reflects how their event compares with others, it is in their interest to improve these results. Reliable data has that power. Course Correct Quarterly Finally, just as a trade show consultant might support you through a full cycle to ensure their plan’s sustainability, make sure to review your data on a regular basis, refresh it with new inputs, and adjust as needed. Plan for at least 12 months ahead, but course correct quarterly as you incorporate new knowledge. With some industries, we recommend planning as much as 24 months ahead, particularly for speaking opportunities. Plenty of support is out there if you need it, but at the end of the day, there are times when being your own trade show consultant is just as effective. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821

Uncategorized

5 Steps to Achieving Your Best Trade Show Selection Process

/

At MEET, we’ve identified five simple steps to help organizations achieve their best trade show selection process. You might ask, “How do you define best?” Our answer is it’s personal. Just as any good workout instructor will tell you, optimizing your results from an exercise routine requires a deep understanding of where your body is at and what you hope to accomplish. Achieving your best trade show selection process similarly requires that you consider the unique position of your organization.  At MEET, we start by looking at maturity. For companies that are ready for the national market, we embark on a series of steps to explore national and global events. For earlier stage companies, we recommend a strategy that is more focused on local or regional opportunities. The Value of Local and Regional Events for Early-stage Companies One of the main reasons we recommend local or regional events for early-stage companies has to do frequency. Local and regional events typically occur more often and are more intimate than national or global events that take place annually. Whether these events are weekly, monthly or quarterly, their frequency offers three advantages for young companies or those entering new markets. Allow for testing of different targets, value propositions, and offer hypotheses at every interaction. Offer training opportunities in how to represent and sell a product in these settings. Foster a community of advocates that can be leveraged in the future at larger, more resource-intensive events. Either way, local and regional events are a great opportunity to roll up your sleeves, get feedback and build relationships. 5 Steps to Achieving Your Best Trade Show Selection Process Here are the steps we recommend to determining your (personal) best trade show selection process. Step 1: Focus Utilize your buyer persona(s) to determine precisely whom you are aiming to target at these events. (Check out our webinar Everyone is Not a Prospect: How to Focus and Win at Trade Shows for more on how to do this.) Step 2: Search Research, using Google or your preferred search engine, which events will connect you with these buyer personas. Additionally, tap into your networks—those targeting the same buyers, as well as competitors and partners, to find out which events they plan on attending. Step 3: Score Develop a scoring matrix to help you assess the value of each event opportunity. Sample data points may include the quality of the audience based on the density of prospects per attendee. You’ll want to evaluate the importance of each criteria based on where your company is at, i.e. your personal growth goals. At MEET, we’ve developed an intricate scoring tool for our clients to determine their best trade show opportunities. Contact us for a sample or more information. Step 4: Decide Overlay your findings from the scoring matrix with assumptions and the experience of your team members to see which events rise to the surface. Develop an initial plan of action. Step 5: Refresh Review your plan quarterly and refresh it with market data and event results. Tweak for optimization. Your plan should be dynamic and evolve continuously as you hone your message and collect more valuable data. The best trade show selection process is one that reflects your personal goals—where you are today and where you are aiming to be tomorrow. The results will look different for everyone; these steps will get you there. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Uncategorized

Nail the Follow-up: Close More Sales, Part 2 of our Conversation with Scott MacGregor

/

We’re thrilled to share Part 2 of our discussion with Scott Macgregor, founder and CEO of SomethingNew. Our conversation with Scott was live-streamed on September 19th as part of a new series we’re offering at MEET: Coffee and Conversation. Join us periodically as we chat live with experts and veterans in trade shows, events, and complementary industries to hear their wisdom on common challenges and simple solutions for success. You can check out Part 1 of our recap here, or feel free to catch the full interview with a fresh cup of coffee here. We chose Scott for the topic of trade show follow-up because of SomethingNew’s uniquely effective approach. Here are some of the questions we asked him. What does effective post-event follow-up look like? Effective follow up is about making sure that you’ve collected all the information you need so that you can activate immediately following the event. One strategy Scott uses for collecting data on the floor is shorthand. “People are really focused on collecting lots of business cards at events, they’re meeting all these people and they think they’re going to remember these conversations afterward. However, when the event is over they really don’t know who anybody is and they don’t know what to do. Using shorthand, whether it’s “H” “W” “C” for hot, warm, cold, or “I” for influencer, something to clue you into who this person is and where you need to go with them—what’s the logical next step in your follow-up process. That’s really important.” The next step Scott recommends is getting this information into your CRM or contact management software quickly. People walk away with fistfuls of business cards and say, “I’ll do that data entry tonight, or I’ll do it over the weekend,” and it never gets done. Having someone dedicated to entering data into Salesforce, etc. can be very helpful. Speed is a critical element to follow-up. When do you schedule your follow-up meeting? If possible, set up your follow-up meetings while you’re still at the event. In a world where everyone has their calendars on their phones, it’s possible to set that date for coffee on the spot. This is also a great way to tell if someone is truly interested, like a “trial close.” “Setting things up immediately is a game changer,” according to Scott. Over time, even those you had incredible conversations with can go cold if not followed up with immediately. What are the rules of effective follow-up? Always have a clear next step. 

Scott is Sandler trained, which for him means that he never leaves an engagement without a clear next step. This includes letting prospects know that “No” is ok. “Especially if you have built rapport with someone, don’t get strung along,” he recommends. Either move someone into your sales pipeline or mutually agree that there is no future. Either way, your next step should be clear. Time kills all deals. 

People often give prospects a few days thinking they need time to get settled after a show. If you really believe in your product or service, don’t be the 10th person to contact your prospect—be the first. That may mean following up sooner than you think is appropriate, but you have to move quickly. We recommend you check out the full interview for more of Scott’s thoughts on the importance of immediate follow-up, why phone calls are better than email, and how to scale your follow-up strategy using an employee playbook. And don’t forget to tune in for our next live-stream interview on October 23rd when the topic will be: Walking the Trade Show Floor: How to Get Value When You Can’t Exhibit. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Exhibitor Tips, Workshops and Webinars

Nail the Follow-up: Close More Sales, A Conversation with Scott MacGregor – Part 1

/

In late July, our team at MEET launched an exciting new series: Coffee and Conversation, periodic live-stream interviews with experts and veterans in the trade show, event, and marketing industries.  Our goal with these conversations is to share the wisdom that comes from work on the ground and to identify common challenges and simple solutions. On September 19th we connected with Scott MacGregor, Founder and CEO of SomethingNew. After 17 years as a marketing and sales professional, Scott felt frustrated both by the overall quality of candidates he received from recruiting agencies, and the dearth of knowledge around how talent acquisition, arguably the most critical factor to a company’s success, could be done better. Scott started SomethingNew in an effort to transform the talent acquisition experience for large and growing companies. Using unique, proven strategies, SomethingNew helps companies identify, select and onboard marketing and sales professionals, and change the way they approach talent acquisition in the future. We chose Scott for the topic of trade show follow-up because of SomethingNew’s uniquely effective approach. For Scott, effective follow-up begins before the event ever takes place—a practice that sounded very familiar to us. (Check out our post Winning the Race Before it Begins to learn more about MEET’s approach to event preparation.) The role of preparation in a follow-up strategy Laying the groundwork for our conversation, we began by asking Scott to describe what type of events SomethingNew typically attends and how he approaches these opportunities. Scott described a diverse range of large and small events where marketing and sales professionals convene like Dreamforce or Hypergrowth put on by Drift.  In approaching these opportunities, he works to ensure they are maximizing ROI through preparation. He shared, “a lot of companies wing it and that’s dangerous. You’ve got to have a plan, you’ve got to have goals, you’ve got to know what your follow-up is going to look like before the event even happens.” How you execute on that plan becomes the next most important step. What can we gain from really good follow-up? Every action we take in business has a purpose. Imagining that we’ve self-actualized our follow-up precisely as planned, we asked Scott what is the best reaction or ultimate outcome we might see. In essence, what can really good follow-up earn us? “Sales is a process,” Scott replied. Really good follow-up gets you to the next step in your sales process. It is typically not the case that you meet someone and sign a contract on the spot. “There is discovery and a lot of listening that you need to do. It is critical that you understand and follow through with the entire sales process.” The role of trust Trust plays a large role in moving prospects from initial engagement through the sales pipeline. We asked Scott about how he builds trust at events and beyond. “We have a philosophy of not being desperate for business. Like a dog smells fear, prospects smell when you’re desperate for business.” Understanding sales as a process helps to eliminate the desperation trap as it helps to ensure a robust pipeline. “When you stop selling and start listening, you gain trust because people aren’t used to that. They’re used to getting hit in the face with a sales pitch constantly and when that doesn’t happen, they’re intrigued.” The key, Scott states, is to be a resource to your prospects. “When you’re not trying to ram something down someone’s throat you become a trusted advisor very quickly.” Effective follow-up requires planning, it requires trust building, and overall, it requires a long-term view of the sales process. Stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview with Scott MacGregor from SomethingNew to learn more about his unique strategies for closing sales through follow-up. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Exhibitor Tips, Uncategorized

5 Common Challenges to Identifying Your Best Trade Show Selection Process

/

Determining the best trade show selection process for your B2B company takes time and resources. At MEET, we often witness companies making a good effort to survey the market of available shows, however, when it comes time to make a selection, they fail to identify a process that is reliable, repeatable, and has future value in guiding their ongoing event selection decisions. The best trade show selection process is one that maximizes ROI. To use our favorite fishing analogy, it places you in the right body of water, at the right depth, with the precisely the right bait to catch the exact fish you set out to catch. And because you have employed a strategy, you’ll catch more than one today and several more the next time you go out fishing. At MEET, our goal is to help companies eliminate the guesswork in achieving their best trade show selection process. We help growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively exhibit at trade shows, a process which starts with determining which shows will deliver the best ROI. Why exhibit at trade shows? Companies that exhibit at trade shows typically do so for the following four reasons: Identify new prospects Engage with existing prospects Market knowledge and competitive intelligence Hypothesis testing First and foremost, companies attend trade shows to identify new prospects—ideal customers who match their buyer persona. (Check out these posts for more on defining a prospect and buyer personas.) Trade shows are also excellent opportunities to efficiently connect with and nurture relationships with those already in your sales funnel, moving them closer toward closing a deal or elimination. Trade shows also put you in an ideal space to assess the market, evaluate your competitive advantage, and test your value proposition with potential customers. Particularly for early-stage companies, the ability to engage in rapid-fire testing of different offers will deliver valuable insight into the needs and desires of your target market. In fact, doing this right will evolve your customer communication and engagement that would not otherwise be possible. 5 Common Challenges Even for companies with a strong commitment to exhibiting at trade shows, determining the best trade show selection process may be challenging. Here are the five challenges we see most often. FOMO Companies tend to stick to the shows they have done in the past for fear of missing out (FOMO). We notice many companies getting stuck in a pattern with particular shows even though they may not deliver the best ROI. Avoiding the herd mentality is not easy. 2. Failure to Update Many companies fail to refresh their view of available events in the marketplace. Events may not necessarily be repeated each cycle; likewise new events enter the market all the time. It is important to know which events are emerging as some may offer special features to attract your ideal prospect. A full review and good evaluation metric is key. 3. Lack of Focus Whether it’s due to a fear of missing out or poorly defined buyer personas, some companies tend to apply an overly broad focus to their event selection process, which in turn delivers mixed results and wasted resources. 4. Persona Creep Companies work hard to map their buyer personas (semi-fictional representations of their ideal customers). However, despite their best intentions, when it comes time to apply these personas to particular events, we notice that the persona tends to broaden. We call this persona creep. It takes discipline to honor those personas even if it means fewer prospects. 5. Go Big vs. Specific Many companies fall prey to a misguided attraction to large events where they will meet high volumes of potential prospects. The challenge is that many large events tend to be more general. That means a lower ratio of prospects to attendees when compared to specific, smaller events that attract higher numbers of ideal prospects. It’s important to analyze the ratio # of prospects/$ spent, plus take into account the dilution factor—your prospect may never even find your well-curated offer on a very crowded floor. Big is not always bad, but you have to assess this ratio when making an evaluation of the opportunity. Identifying your best trade show selection process requires time and resources. Choosing events that truly deliver ROI make it worth every penny. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Exhibitor Tips, Pavilions, Return on Investment, Uncategorized

Selling at Trade Shows as Part of a Larger Plan

/

When done well, selling at trade show can easily be your best opportunity to get face to face with your ideal and potential customers. Selling at Trade a Show is not an activity to take lightly. It is a marketing and sales opportunity that requires extensive planning and preparation. When done well, selling at trade shows can easily be your best opportunity to get face to face with your ideal customers. Maybe hundreds of them. In our recent post: Personalizing Your Trade Show Business Strategy, we talked about buyer personas and how to assemble them using customer interviews. The purpose of developing a buyer persona, or semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, is to drill down on the precise goals and challenges of the individuals in your target market. While target customers will inevitably shift over time as both your company matures and the market changes, maintaining a well-informed trade show business strategy requires that you hone in on precisely who it is that you are aiming to meet prior to each and every event you participate in. In this post, we’d like to focus on how to apply your hard work in developing buyer personas to annual and individual event plans. Using Buyer Personas to Guide Your Annual Trade Show and Event Plan Rather than employing a “Lazy Susan” approach to selling at trade show, i.e. taking advantage of whichever opportunity is offered in front of you, we recommend devising a data-driven annual plan. Referencing your buyer personas should inform you of which type of events your prospects are most likely to attend, and whether they are focused locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. Data from your buyer persona should also inform your participation strategy based on how your ideal customer typically engages with fellow participants. Do they generally spend time listening to speakers and opinion leaders or do they spend most of their time on the floor with exhibitors and sponsors? Finally, buyer persona data may inform your decision of whether to join industry groups or associations. Particularly for young companies in growth mode, participation in local or regional associations can help to develop strong customer density within a region, industry, or customer type that will help your company grow faster and more efficiently. Using Buyer Personas to Guide Your Individual Trade Show Plan Selling at trade shows that you’ve hand selected based on buyer persona data offers an array of opportunities for customization. You may use buyer personas to determine how you will participate in the event—as a speaker, exhibitor, or sponsor, as well as where is the optimal place for your booth on the show floor. Buyer personas are also critical to informing your offer strategy. Your booth offer must speak directly to the prospects you are aiming to attract. For example, at an event of 10,000 people, your buyer persona data may project that 200 prospects will be in attendance. Your goal in designing your offer should be for 9,800 people to walk by without stopping. Only your prospects should be attracted with the right offer. Design your offer to speak directly to your ideal customers and only your ideal customers. The more shiny objects, be they candy, pens or iPad offers, that you have in your booth that attracts the general attendee, the less of your prospects will see you. The 200 that stop to engage with your team—they are high-quality prospects. Selling at trade shows requires exhibitors to make a number of decisions prior to hitting the floor. Using buyer personas to develop annual and individual event plans are an excellent way to ensure that each of these decisions will get you one step closer to your ideal customer. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Uncategorized

Personalizing Your Trade Show Business Strategy

/

You can depend on us as your best trade show management brand . We believes that strong relationships play a vital role in growth of your company. Personalizing your trade show business strategy means designing and producing an offer that meets the unique, individual requirements of your target buyer persona.Basically, it is a trade show management for which, you must know who your ideal customer is, what keeps them up at night, and what it is they desperately need a solution for. In our recent post: Selling at Trade Shows: How to Discover your Ideal Customer, we talked about the steps that both B2B and B2C companies take to uncover the variety of attributes that make up their target market. The next step is determining how to use these attributes to develop buyer personas. What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. In essence, it is a personality that you can use to evolve your trade show business strategy, communications and marketing around so that when you are in front of the right audience, they are immediately drawn to your offer. Assembling a Buyer Persona Once you have identified your ideal customers (again, check out our most recent post on how to go about this), it’s time to assemble your buyer persona. By “assemble” we mean catalogue and create the archetype that will inform your trade show business strategy. To ensure accuracy, while retaining your ideal customer, we recommend setting up brief interviews. Whether it’s via Skype, phone or in-person meeting, ask your ideal customer a variety of questions such as: • Why do you buy this product/service? • Why do you buy it from us? • What was your world like before you bought this product from us? • What challenges does our product or service alleviated for you? • And what changed since you bought our product? • How could product better serve you? • Are there additional opportunities to improve? • What other challenges do you face in this area? Next, you want to use this interview data to drill down on the demographics, goals, preferences, interests of your ideal buyer, and inefficiencies that challenge them. In the B2B world, personal information may include compensation, and past work history. The role they play within the company both in terms of responsibilities and reporting structure will improve your ability to craft an offer that will appeal to them and speak directly to their unique needs. In the B2C world, your buyer persona will focus more on the customer’s frustrations and motivations, honing in on how she defines convenience and ease. The more knowledge acquired, i.e. the tighter your buyer persona, the more effective your trade show business strategy will be. Whether your ideal customers are young working mothers with children or small and mid-market manufacturing companies that have recently gone through a product recall, engaging in the process of personalizing your trade show business strategy requires a concerted effort to drill down on the personal goals and challenges faced by individuals in your target market who have critical need and make buying decisions. These target customers will inevitably shift over time as both your company matures and the market changes. Keeping a pulse on your ideal customers and using this data to constantly refresh your trade show business strategy with new buyer personas will ensure that each event you invest in will be time and money well spent. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Return on Investment, Uncategorized

Selling at Trade Shows and How to Discover Your Ideal Customer

/

MEET ROI provides brief details about the event planing to make your event effective. Hire us as the best trade show consultant to generate high returns. Selling at trade shows is an opportunity that cannot be compared to any other type of marketing. While most marketing dollars are spent with the hope of someday getting face-to-face with your target prospect, trade shows deliver the most efficient way to this objective. Unfortunately, most salespeople would not agree. At MEET, we hear from sales teams all the time about their anguish when it comes to selling at trade shows. Why? Because after committing time and resources to attend an event, they simply feel it does not deliver quality prospects. In others words, selling at trade shows feels like a big waste of time. Forty years of event experience has taught us that there are many reasons why salespeople feel disenfranchised after trade shows. (Check out our recent webinar EVERYONE is NOT a PROSPECT: How to Focus and Win at Trade Shows for these lessons learned). Among the chief reasons is that organizations or companies fail to take the necessary steps to identify their ideal customer. An ideal customer is a buyer that you want to replicate over and over and over again. “Ideal” is not a qualifier that can be superimposed; it is not who you aspire to be your best customers. It is quantifiably defined as those who have the most NEED, the most RESOURCES, and the most URGENCY for your product or service. We say, to be a prospect someone must NEED, MONEY, and NOW. Here are three steps to discovering your ideal customer: Step 1: Identify your best selling product or service If you have multiple products or services, select one based on the best selling, the largest, or the one you want to grow the most. Step 2: Use historical data analysis and institutional knowledge Use the information that is available to you to uncover trends. Are there groups of customer types that rise to the top? Are there individuals within those groups you consistently sell to? Step 3: Characterize your ideal customer Uncover an archetype of your ideal customer. Who is performing best for you based on your organizational goals—growth, profit margin, etc.? Selling at trade shows as a B2B versus B2C company will determine whether you are seeking to identify a specific individual or groups of individuals through this process. It will also determine the variety of attributes you will use to develop your buyer personas. Attributes you might use as a B2B company include: • Industry • Market segment • Size • Revenue • Profitability • Location • Mode • Unique dynamic What industry is your ideal customer in? What market segment are they coming from and how big are they? What’s their annual revenue? Profitability? Are they geographically centered somewhere or are they distributed? Mode refers to their stability as a company. Are they in tough spot, are they growing, are they laissez-faire or even keel, or are they over-confident? Finally, unique dynamics that help to define a company are situations that make them in need of your solution, for example a new regulatory challenge or recent IPO. B2C will look at a different set of attributes, though some are overlapping. B2C • Age • Gender • Ethnicity • Income • Net worth • Location • Mode • Unique dynamic Discovering your ideal customer requires that you work to define these individuals or organizations as tightly as possible. In doing this work, you may find that one or two or three of these attributes are most telling. Moving through these simple steps will get you there. Selling at trade shows is an opportunity to get face-to-face with your ideal customer. Design your booth to speak directly to these individuals and watch as your sales team changes their tune. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Scroll to Top