Uncategorized

Exhibitor Tips, Pavilions, Return on Investment, Uncategorized

Selling at Trade Shows as Part of a Larger Plan

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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

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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

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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.

Exhibitor Tips, Return on Investment, Uncategorized

The Role of Metrics in an Exhibition Success Strategy

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Maximize your trade show ROI metrics by evaluating some of the important metrics that will help you to set and track goals.</> Trade show events require a significant commitment of time and resources. Measuring and analyzing data after you’ve completed an event is therefore critical from both a ROI and knowledge building perspective. Using metrics will help you evolve your exhibition success strategy, create team accountability, optimize event selection and execution, and ensure that you continue to get more and more out of trade shows and events over time. What do event metrics look like? First, event metrics should be aligned with your growth goals. Additionally, if you are reporting to someone else, as may be the case between exhibitors and pavilion hosts, these metrics should be aligned with their goals as well. (See our recent post: Trade Show Strategy ROI for the Greater Good for more on the function of post-event reporting.) Sample metrics may include: Number of leads (the number of customers, partners, channels or distributors) Cost per lead Appointments generated per lead Proposals generated per lead Revenue generated per lead Sales cycles may be long. While twelve to eighteen months wouldn’t be unusual for a B2B sale, it could possibly take two to three years to recruit companies to your region. As a result, it may be difficult to employ revenue per lead for decision-making in the immediate aftermath of the event. Your exhibition success strategy should recognize that while earlier decisions, those you make immediately following the event, will be based on the number of leads, appointments, and proposals generated, over time as you start to build sales and conversion history, additional metrics will serve to better inform your decisions. The best way to collect event metrics is to engage your stakeholders—the various participants in the booth and pavilion—in a post-event survey. Question topics may include: Quality of contacts Booth traffic Set-up Location within the trade show or pavilion Your goal is to get a 360° view of the exhibitors and pavilion performance. Using Metrics to Build Knowledge From a knowledge building perspective, metrics are particularly useful for comparing production capacity across various events. As you begin to plan which events to participate in, you may use this data to approach event organizers, specifically those whose events you would like to attend but demonstrate below average results in your matrix. The beauty of a data-driven approach is that you can relay this information matter-of-factly. From there, you can engage organizers as partners to explore what can be done collectively to improve your metrics. Whether it’s moving your location or lowering the cost of entry, there are a number of ways that organizers can help to improve your results. And again, all of this is measurable. Using Metrics to Build Partnerships In the B2B world, we invest in many types of marketing to get in front of a target customer. The cool thing about trade shows and events is that they do just that—put you right in front of customers. The challenge however, is that your target customers are mixed amongst a sea of other customers that all look the same as they walk by. The right offer will lead them to jump out and identify themselves. Bringing in event hosts as partners will help to ensure that nothing stands between your offer and your target customers. If event hosts are not willing to jump on board with your exhibition success strategy, that should tell you something. In our experience, if you approach event organizers with good information, i.e. clear metrics that they can respond to, it is likely that they will work with you to help achieve your goals.  Event hosts have a great deal of flexibility as far as how they can enhance the experience of each exhibitor and pavilion host. The key is to leverage that. Seeking continuous improvement, negotiating concessions, adjusting strategy and being flexible as you go, these are the fundamental components of an exhibition success strategy. Measuring your results makes them possible. 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, Return on Investment, Uncategorized

Create Trade Show Strategy ROI for the Greater Good

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To know about how to plan a trade show, you should check once MEET ROI.</> It is the event planning company which helps you in generating best returns. As a pavilion host, your exhibitors are a reflection of you. The better they perform, the better your pavilion will perform overall. Not only because exhibitors are generating sales, but because their positive performance reflects well on your region, making it more attractive to businesses that are looking to open new offices, find new suppliers, or build new manufacturing facilities. In our webinar on Pavilion Pitfalls, we talk about trade show strategy ROI and how to ensure that client companies or exhibitors are both high performing and highly invested in the pavilion. At MEET, we recommend a co-investment and training strategy that not only raises the bar for exhibitor performance but offers capacity building resources that raise the tide for all boats. A common complaint we hear from pavilion hosts is that it’s hard to find enough enthusiastic exhibitors to fill all the booths. As the event approaches, hosts find they need to cut prices in order to fill slots or even give booths away for free just to fill them. One way to ensure that exhibitors are invested in the pavilion is to promote it as a cooperative marketing opportunity. Not only is the cost to participate in a pavilion booth significantly less than exhibitors would have to pay for an independent booth, the leverage and promotion capabilities represent unrivaled added value. Similar to the envelope you receive in the mail containing many different store coupons, cooperative marketing offers a less expensive, less risky trade show strategy ROI. Beyond how you promote the booth to exhibitors, pavilion hosts can use a number of co-investment strategies to help guarantee high performance. Here are three co-investment techniques to consider: Direct cash investment The more (and we want to emphasize that more is better) that exhibitors are willing to pay for a booth, the more value they are likely to derive from it. Assigning a high price to join the pavilion sends a message about the value of the event. Setting a low price has a similarly negative effect. 2. Minimum standards Setting a minimum standard for participation in the booth sends an important message about expectations and sets a performance threshold that exhibitors can use for goal setting. By joining a pavilion, exhibitors are representing themselves as well as the region or industry. As such, they need to perform at a much higher level. Their ability to meet some of these minimum standards in advance can help to enable their acceptance as a pavilion exhibitor. Meeting all minimum standards be used to determine future participation. 3. Post-event reporting Creating accountability through post-event reporting is fundamental to trade show strategy ROI. Ways to incentivize this may be through a money-back scheme whereby exhibitors who complete all required training, meet minimum standards and submit post-event reporting receive a rebate on their investment. There’s no one size fits all; figuring out what works best for your participants is key.  The MEET team spends a lot of time strategizing with its clients to customize the pavilion exhibitor system, optimizing the approach for specific audiences and goals. Finally, there’s capacity building through training.  Offering a comprehensive training that sets expectations for exhibiting teams will boost performance on an individual booth level and for your region as the pavilion puts out a more energized and synchronized vibe. Sample topics include pre-setting appointments, the role of the sales and booth teams, networking, and how to support peer exhibitors, in addition to basic ground rules such as dress codes and cell phone use. When pavilion hosts employ trade show strategy ROI that is focused on investing in and building the capacity of exhibitors, everyone wins.  That is a greater good. 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

Three Challenges, One Solution: Strategic Partnerships

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Your event should always leave an impact to the audience. MEET ROI are one of the experienced trade show planned to help you with all your needs We were recently inspired by an article released by Octopus Ventures (a London-based VC firm) highlighting the most common challenges faced by European CEOs while expanding to the U.S. market.  Through interviews with 50+ VC-backed CEOs, they uncovered a number of challenges shared by many of our clients. At MEET, our aim is to improve trade show and event participation ROI while establishing a methodology for benchmarking and continuous improvement. In other words, we aim to address the most pressing challenges of today while minimizing the risk of future challenges tomorrow. Here’s a great example of how MEET’s services address several of the challenges highlighted in this article. According to research from Octopus Ventures, three major challenges (among many) identified by European CEOs who recently expanded to the U.S. market are: High set-up costs Timing of market entry, and maintaining stability at home during the expansion. Selecting local talent capable of keeping pace with growth goals. As the article rightly suggests, the cost of U.S. market entry is often underestimated. In addition to obvious startup expenses, there are the costs associated with senior management’s need to juggle responsibilities and the time it takes to perfect one’s strategic plan. Support for CEOs leading an international expansion is not readily available, and effective penetration into the U.S. market relies upon a certain set of skills that can effectively sustain growth at home and abroad. Finally, making the right decisions in a foreign office, such as hiring new talent, can be a challenge due to intense competition from American companies: “The job market is very liquid, driving up prices and lowering retention. Meanwhile, customers expect a local presence and local services. Strong local partners — experts, service providers, strategic partners — are impactful for success.” We couldn’t agree more. At MEET, our solution to addressing all three of these major challenges is through key, on-the-ground strategic partnerships. These relationships, with channel partners, referral sources, and other companies and individuals that have some type of cooperative alignment, allow the core team to stay focused on the primary deliverables, better control costs, speed learning, and reduce risks associated with expanding to foreign markets. The power of strategic partnerships is perhaps best illustrated by example. Back in June, MEET staff participated in the 2018 SelectUSA Investment Summit, an event hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce to attract and facilitate foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United States. There we met a Polish company looking to find a manufacturing partner in Florida. As a means of facilitating this process, controlling costs and reducing risks associated with expansion into the U.S. market, MEET partnered with this company to offer several services. These include attending several manufacturing industry events in Florida on their behalf, and use of MEET’s vast network to build a list of the top-flight finalists from which they can select a local manufacturing partner. In doing so, MEET will also build a manufacturing partner identification and selection process to improve and streamline the selection of additional manufacturing partners as the company expands further throughout the U.S. over the coming years. By having a local manufacturing partner, our client will be able to leverage their years of market experience and sales network to create some initial success all the while not over-committing their own resources, i.e. people, time, and money. MEET will also be performing a variety of pre-market-entry tests at trade shows and events for the Polish company. These tests will validate the best early buyer personas, value propositions, and offers. The goal will be to ensure early traction and sustained growth. We have found that early traction is a critical element not only to the venture’s success but also to retaining key team members and investor support. Three common challenges faced by CEOs seeking success in the U.S. market; one solution that gets the job done. Expanding your business into a foreign market is never an easy task. Finding strategic partners ensures you won’t have to do it alone. 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

Looking to Expand into the U.S. Market? Invest Early

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We offer due diligence services that empower CEOs to make their best decisions, which make them easier to expand into the U.S. market CEOs looking to expand into the U.S. market have layer upon layer of critical questions to ask themselves before pulling the trigger. On top of logistics—regulatory compliance, shipping and translation costs to name a few, there’s identifying suppliers and vendors, staffing and leadership capacity. And on top of all that, there are the unique dynamics of the U.S. market—regional demographic, economic and consumer-related factors that impact growth strategy both in terms of scale and sequence. We recently came across some insightful takeaways concerning these challenges in a post: Irrational “inevitability” & other confessions of venture backed European CEOs who launched in the US, by London-based VC Octopus Ventures. In interviews with over 50 VC-backed European CEOs, they found that among the most common challenges for those who took the plunge into the U.S. market was that, despite its massive scale, CEOs underestimated (or were unaware of) their fellow foreign or U.S.-based competitors. As the article explains, companies find it challenging to adequately comprehend the breadth and depth of the U.S. market, its regional differences and the full competitive landscape. The ability to successfully expand into the U.S. market relies on one’s capacity to a) understand the unique dynamics of the market and b) execute on this knowledge. At MEET, we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of buyer personas when crafting and executing growth strategy, including international expansion to the U.S. Too often we watch CEOs apply an overly broad definition of their target market for fear of missing out on potential future prospects. Without the ability to demonstrate a bona fide, self-realized need; the resources to satisfy that need; and a sense of urgency in the market (how we define a current prospect – NEED, MONEY, NOW), CEOs are really just casting nets and crossing fingers. And in unknown waters, that’s extremely risky. When seeking to understand the dynamics of a target market and develop a well-informed growth and marketing strategy, we recommend two things: pre-market research and pre-market sales. Pre-market entry competitor, partner, and channel research, potential partner screening, and connection, allows CEOs to map out the landscape while building key strategic relationships and respected influencers before market entry, and use this data to build knowledge and ensure future sales efficiency. Engaging in pre-market entry sales tests give CEOs critical data that supports location selection, competitive landscape knowledge, the best initial target buyer persona, value proposition and offer, staffing and training needs, not to mention the ultimate decision of whether to enter the market—or not. The revenues from these sales will not only fuel the business and maintain investment, but customer-acquisition success retains and attracts the best team members and partners. Companies looking to expand into the U.S. market or any new market for that matter, often make decisions based on emotion or on the statistics supplied by economic development officers, which may or may not apply to their specific situation. At MEET, we offer due diligence services that empower CEOs to make their best decisions, including pre-market research. We call this “winning the race before it begins,” or getting to know your target prospect before laying the groundwork for expansion. When companies have narrowed their list down to a few finalist cities, MEET will develop and execute a variety of lead-generation tests with the goal of separating fact from fiction and to determine which market will actually provide the best beachhead for market entry. This is also a good way to test the introductions and support that each economic development officer makes when they are trying to convince a company to invest in their city. Pre-market entry sales are one key element of de-risking market entry decisions. Many companies don’t get more than one chance at the U.S. market. Take the steps that count by making early investments that better inform decision making. 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

Looking for a Trade Show Staffing Strategy? Try Divide and Conquer

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Booth staff are always critical to any trade show. Reach to us if you need professional trade show staffing strategy for all your pre event activities. Peter Drucker, known as the father of modern management theory, once said: “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” At MEET, we talk a lot about solutions to the common challenges faced by trade show exhibitors and pavilion hosts. Our goal is to help company executives and economic development professionals skillfully utilize trade show exhibiting opportunities to find high-quality prospects, then lead, nurture and convert them into their sales pipeline. After 40 years, we’ve seen a lot of inefficiencies on the trade show floor, and a lot of ineffective staffing strategy. By helping our clients do the right things, the right way, we all come away winners. Up at the top of our list of inefficient and ineffective practices is the tendency of many exhibitors and pavilion hosts to put their salespeople in the booth to engage with prospects. After all, who better to sell your product, service, or region to potential customers than professional sales people, right? Wrong. At MEET, we argue that sales people and business development professionals are not those best suited to work in the booth, at least not as their primary function during the trade show event. When determining a staffing strategy, we recommend the divide and conquer approach. Maximize your efficiency and your effectiveness by making sure that everyone is using their skills and resources in a way that is best suited to achieve your goal. Recall in our discussion on how to determine the right offer to identify target prospects among the hundreds and sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of event attendees, that the key advantage to having the right offer is that salespeople do not have to be the ones to deliver it. Ideally, your offer is so well crafted that only qualified prospects are approaching your booth to opt-in. At that point, the engagement can be left up to transaction professionals—those whose sole job it is to deliver the well-crafted offer and retrieve the prospects’ contact information for future follow-up—an interaction that should take no more than two minutes to complete. What then do the sales and business development people do while your transaction professionals are engaged in these 2-minute conversations? You want them out of the booth, engaged in one-on-one meetings with trade show attendees who are deeper in the sales funnel like current prospects, current customer, partners and potential partners, and other strategic contacts. Allow your sales people the time and space to engage in richer, more substantive conversations than what takes place in the booth. These conversations may take place in a coffee shop or even a rented room. The sales team’s goal is to actually close business, sign contracts, penetrate existing accounts further, and develop new sales channels and referral sources. The beauty of the divide and conquer approach is that when each member of your team has their own mission, your overall results improve significantly. Bogging down your sales people with booth transactions is as harmful as bogging down the booth with these longer, more substantive conversations. Every long conversation that takes place in the booth equals 50, 100 or even 1,000 potential prospects that could not be engaged because there was no one to talk to. The goal of those working in the booth is to separate prospects from general attendees, in a matter of minutes. Helping your team deliver results while giving your audience exactly what they want requires a divide and conquer approach. Done right, it is also the most efficient and effective way to fill your pipeline with new prospects. 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

Booth Strategy 101: Save the Candy Until the End

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Secure your exhibition success with highly customized Exhibition booth design ideas that will transform your brand. Get more Exhibition booth design ideas At MEET, we talk a lot about booth strategy. Forty plus years of event experience has taught us that 90% of the success that comes out of trade shows happens as a result of the work that is done before the event ever takes place. Defining your target persona, selecting which shows to attend, identifying the right offer to attract quality prospects, and designing the most effective staffing model are all encompassed in a precise yet flexible booth strategy that is developed prior to the event. Forty plus years of experience has also taught us that in the absence of booth strategy, many exhibitors rely on free gifts to entice audience members to their booth. Who doesn’t care for candy, or a free iPad? Your prospects, that’s who. Today we’d like to focus on how to make sure that your offer aligns with your target persona or ideal prospect, and how to avoid common pitfalls associated with booth offerings. Once you’ve identified your buyer persona and determined which shows to attend, you want to find an offer that is clearly aligned with these target prospects. (Check our recent post: The Value of Logic in Trade Show Exhibiting Strategy for more on how pavilion hosts use criteria-based models to identify target personas). IPad giveaways are most common, sometimes flat screen TVs. If you’re in the business of electronics then maybe this makes sense, but even then you won’t be attracting early adopters. At the very best, an iPad giveaway is going to clog up your card bowl with a majority of people who aren’t prospects. Your salespeople will be the most frustrated by this when they discover these individuals are not interested in your product or service because of how they were recruited.  They don’t have the need, they don’t have the money, and they aren’t urgent—in fact they’re not a prospect at all. At least not right now, and right now is when you need them. Rather, booth strategy specialists need to ask themselves: “What is my target persona’s biggest concern or challenge? What keeps them up at night?” Your offer should deliver on their greatest need. It might be information on recent government regulations pertaining to their business, an invitation to a webinar, or an opportunity for an assessment. Whether it is information, knowledge or skills, you are delivering a path to solving this concern or challenge. That is what draws them in. The primary goal in booth strategy is to remove as much as possible from the booth except for the offer that truly appeals to your prospect’s needs at this moment. In thinking about how you will promote this offer, it’s helpful to compare this to how you experience billboards.  There’s a rule in billboards that you don’t want to have more than seven words. Because whether you are traveling at 20, 30, 40 or even 50 miles per hour, you have to be able to absorb the message no matter how fast you’re going. This billboard scenario is a lot like what happens at trade shows. Audience members are bombarded with sometimes hundreds of messages as they walk down the aisle. As many people are introverts, they may not be making eye contact with booth staff and when they do, their eyes are not on your booth for very long. So put away your free pens and candy until after your transaction professional has successfully engaged with your prospect. Distinguishing these gifts from your offer will mean the difference between a bowl full of dead-end contacts and a stack of true high-quality prospects. 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

The Value of Logic in Trade Show Exhibiting Strategy

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Looking to generate high return with trade show? Hire us the great exihibition management skilled professionals for all your such needs. Does your trade show exhibiting strategy determine which shows you choose to attend? Do you find yourself employing the “Lazy Susan Approach” with trade show selection, i.e. taking advantage of whatever is offered in front of you, or do you put each opportunity through a rigorous criteria test and look at your strategy as a system of complementary events? In our July 31st post: Trade Show Pavilion Strategy that Attracts Economic Growth, we talked about some common challenges faced by pavilion hosts, such as too broadly defining their prospects, or failing to fully leverage their exhibiting companies. Picking up on that theme, we’d like to spend some time exploring how to select the most promising events. As an economic development leader, what steps should you take ahead of time to ensure that each opportunity you invest in will deliver excellent results. Economic development agencies have broad mandates, but at the end of the day their primary goal is to foster growth in their region. Whether it’s through attracting new businesses, or expanding and strengthening existing ones, these agencies spend a significant amount of time promoting their region to entrepreneurs and companies who may be interested in making an investment. How you identify these individuals, also known as target personas, should be the number one determining factor when selecting which trade shows to attend. Target personas for economic development agencies are those who will be the most likely and most well-suited to open locations or move their business to your region. Well-suited companies are aligned with your labor pool. i.e. what type of employee base you have, the type of industries you are targeting, and your broader economic growth goals. Some questions you might ask when formulating your target personas include: What is our history of recruiting? What products, stage or size company is typically attracted to our region? Who is the best fit? What have been some of our success stories? If we don’t have a history or success stories, what is our hypothesis of who would be most attracted to doing business in our region? Are there supply chain needs or other demand-based indicators that inform our hypothesis? What type of dynamics might be going on for a company that chooses to expand to our region? If they are expanding, why is our region a logical next step? Publicly available indicators will help you determine answers to many of these questions, such as when companies may be interested in expanding and any unique offerings based on their supply chain. Check out this Harvard Business Review article to learn some of the indicators, “Does Your Business Have What It Takes to Go Global?” The key is to help you identify 10 or 20 out of 100 or 1,000 trade show attendees who match your target persona. Attracting them will require using precisely the right bait. (For more on determining the right bait for your target persona, check out our post: A Lesson in Trade Show Strategy, Use the Right Bait.) Defining the profile of a well-suited company will determine the exact persona you are looking to target through these events. The goal is to make this target persona as narrow as possible. For example, it is not enough to determine types of industries or types of companies, but who within those companies is your prime audience. Ultimately, your decisions about which events to attend should be criteria based. At MEET, we have developed a matrix scoring mechanism for our clients, weighting each criteria to form the basis of their trade show exhibiting strategy. Over time as more experience is gained, the criteria will be refined, become more focused, and deliver better results. Putting each opportunity through a rigorous criteria test will allow you to carefully track and test your hypotheses over time. In order for a trade show exhibiting strategy to deliver consistent results it must be logic based. The value of putting in the time to develop this logic will only grow, but you must plant the seed. 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.

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