Author name: Mollie Ring

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.

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.

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.

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.