trade show strategy

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.

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.

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.

If you have Product to sell at trade shows we will help to get sell more. Our experts will guide to how to sell your products at trade shows. You come back to work after a trade show marketing event. You’ve been gone for three days and, unlike the renewed sense of energy you might feel after a vacation, you’re exhausted.  You’ve got hundreds of emails to sort through; your current customers have left you a ton of voicemails. And now, a stack of new business cards sits on your desk. Sound familiar? If so, we suggest you link back to one of our earlier blog posts, Winning the race before it begins, because the key to avoiding that overwhelming feeling we just described is to prepare your post-trade show marketing strategy before the event takes place. Just like fruit, all of the contacts that you make at trade shows are perishable. If you don’t follow up well or quickly, that fruit will essentially go bad. The opportunity won’t necessarily be gone, but the value of those contacts diminishes greatly over time. You can always fall on the sword and follow up a year later to say “I’m so sorry…” but recall that you identified people who have a need, adequate resources, and a sense of urgency such that your solution is precisely what they are looking for. If you don’t follow up quickly, they’re going to find another solution. So strike while the iron is hot. At MEET, we assure that our clients have a strong methodology for nurturing, converting, and tracking prospects in the post-trade show marketing period. One of our tools the marketing funnel. Like a sales funnel or buying process that customers are led through when purchasing products or services, a marketing funnel is focused on how to identify and capture high-quality leads and deliver them to the sales process. The goal is to identify different modes of marketing that when integrated, will seamlessly be delivered to new prospects and convert them from your marketing to sales funnel and eventually to long-term customers. We want your sales team’s day to be filled meeting with prospects that have the most value and highest likelihood to close. At the top of your marketing funnel are the marketing activities you do to identify high-quality prospects. The goal is to build awareness in a way that has each prospect self-identify their need and opt-into your follow-up and funnel. These are people that meet your team at trade shows and events, come to your blog, visit your website through SEO or SEM, or respond to your ads on social media. That is the top of the funnel. Through exposure to these marketing modes, your prospect moves down the funnel from awareness to more intimacy with your services. Through executive briefings, hospitality events, regular association event attendance, webinars, whitepapers, e-news briefs, prospects move from intimacy to trust. When prospects trust you, they are ready to agree to a meeting to discuss and be candid about their needs. At the point of 1-on-1 meeting agreement, the prospect transitions to the sales funnel. Following up on trade show marketing with prospects requires looking at how to utilize early-stage modes of marketing to move these high-quality candidates to the next level of the funnel. Moving down the funnel will require several interactions, conversions, or intimacy building events before many prospects are willing to agree to a sales meeting. The key is to make sure that all your marketing efforts are driving these high-quality prospects to the middle of the funnel, and from the middle to the bottom. Each mode in a marketing funnel is measurable. You can easily track how many people participate in your webinars, how many agree to sales meetings, etc. and putting these metrics to work will help you determine which marketing strategies generate the greatest number of conversions to sales meetings and ultimately to becoming new customers. Returning from a trade show doesn’t have to be exhausting. Depositing your prospects into a marketing funnel that immediately engages them through pre-drafted follow-up emails, an attendee survey, or scheduled webinars will ensure that every trade show marketing minute was time 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.  

Our mission is to build growing dynamic exhibition management company with a global customer experience. We are involved in all sort of trade shows services Trade show exhibiting is neither one size fits all, nor end-all be-all. In fact, trade show exhibiting is quite the opposite. It is a customized, dynamic process that requires extensive preparation. Additionally, it represents a relatively small segment of a much larger marketing and sales opportunity. In this blog post, we’ll unpack three common challenges that exhibitors face when developing a trade show exhibiting strategy: ensuring communication is localized and audience-centered; effectively preparing the team for execution; and leveraging the full value of the event For more information on the 8 keys to improving your exhibiting ROI, check out our webinar series. The capacity to customize your trade show exhibition strategy based on where your event will take place and who will be in attendance is critical. It is common for exhibitors to think that developing a single script and employing it through a one-dimensional mode of communication will drive sufficient ROI. The reality is quite the opposite. Exhibitors must revisit their buyer personas before each trade show to ensure that language, materials, and offers—everything—is congruent with the audience. Being audience-centered encourages exhibitors to think of each event as a unique set of intended buyers. Developing a customizable trade show exhibiting strategy requires preparation. As you’ll hear us say over and over again, 90% of the race is won before you cross the starting line, and the more exhibitors can do to guarantee value from an event before it takes place, the better the results will be. That means preparing materials, but perhaps more importantly, preparing the team to execute. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” The effectiveness of sales people should not be judged by how busy they are during the event. Ultimately trade shows are finite opportunities and the people that attend a given event on a given day, given month, or given year, will not be the same the next time around. Each trade show event represents a perishable opportunity and the key to leveraging absolute value is to prepare one’s team for absolute success. That means making sure they are oriented to who will be in attendance, empowered to execute on strategy, and able to self-direct when opportunities present themselves. Finally, we’d like to acknowledge that it’s actually quite hard to leverage all of the value offered at a trade show event. Think of how hard it is to focus your attention at a three-ring circus. Trade shows are more like ten-ring circuses. Maximizing your leverage capacity requires first, understanding the full value scope available, and second, having a plan to execute on that full scope. At MEET, we recommend doing less, better. In other words, commit time and resources toward fewer events, and ensure you are extracting maximum value.  Here are a few ideas for how to do this: Engage in pre-event marketing—offered by host and/or self-generated Sponsor a feature—it is rare that we recommend sponsoring but when we do we suggest sponsoring a feature that allows you 2-way participant interaction Speak at a session Walk through and visit hospitality events Engage in cooperative marketing either with vendors or other marketers Volunteer to join the organizing committee Invite customers and partners to the event Host a post-event marketing event Trade show hosts offer an array of assets to exhibitors that often get left on the shelf. Be sure to take full advantage of each event opportunity—we can help. Trade show exhibiting is far from one size fits all, or end-all be-all. Each event requires a unique execution strategy, careful team preparation, and a wide-angle lens to capture the full excitement in every ring. 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.

Let’s discuss Trade show tips for exhibitor to maximize ROI. We will guide you how you can pull the public to your trade show booth as well as engaged them. Clients come to us all the time again asking: “How can I maximize my trade show ROI?” We hear the frustration in their voice. They know they’re in the right place at the right time to generate sales, but something is getting in the way.  At MEET, we believe there are 8 key ways to improve your exhibiting ROI. Overcoming these common challenges will immediately boost your return and fundamentally change the way you approach each trade show opportunity. Here we’d like to address Challenge #4: Putting the Wrong People in the Booth. Who are the wrong people? Believe it or not, it’s the exact people you hired to grow your business—your sales people. (Click here for more tips on improving your trade show ROI) Walking through trade shows, we find that more than 90% of the booths are staffed primarily by sales people. The truth is, sales people have a higher and better use. That’s not to say that what is happening in the booth isn’t valuable. It’s exceptionally valuable. But despite your inclination, sales people are not those best suited to drive exhibit booth ROI. Understanding how to drive trade show ROI requires distinguishing between the purpose of the booth and the rest of the trade show floor. The purpose of the booth is prospect identification. The rest of the trade show floor is for richer, deeper conversations with people who are already customers or in your sales pipeline. These may be individuals your sales team is already working with, or even strategic partners. Now for some math. Assuming your sales team works an 8-hour day, and a typical sales conversation in the booth takes about 15 minutes, that means that each salesperson can generate a maximum of only 32 potential prospects each day. 8 hours/15 minutes = 32 potential prospect Now let’s see what happens when we move these conversations outside of the booth and how it impacts your Trade Show ROI. Off the trade show floor, you ideally want your sales team in pre-set one-on-one meetings with potential and existing prospects, existing customers, or even building new relationships in the workshops. In the booth, you have transaction professionals, people whose focus is merely to serve the offer. Remember, these folks are not engaging the guy who is attracted by a free pen, or the lady who wants to try her chances at winning a free iPad. (Check out our previous blog post to find out why you should never give away an iPad). These transaction professionals are engaging with qualified prospects that have opted in to an offer that is uniquely tailored to their needs. Now time for more math. Again let’s assume your transaction team works an 8-hour day, and a typical offer in the booth can be served in one to two minutes. That means that each transaction professional can generate a minimum of 240 contacts per day with qualified prospects. 8 hours/2 minutes = 240 qualified prospects. These are much stronger prospects as they have opted in versus been coerced into the booth. That’s almost eight times more contacts than would have been generated by your sales team. And because these are individuals who have opted in to an offer, they’re not going to waste your sales team’s time when they call to follow up. The goal here is to meet people who have the highest likelihood to convert to paying customers. When exhibiting at an event, the first steps are to identify the right buyer persona, and offer the right bait for them to opt in. From there, driving trade show ROI requires putting the right people in the booth to serve that offer, triggering the lead nurturing process where prospects are exposed to other forms of the company’s marketing and sales infrastructure until they convert. So when clients ask us how to maximize their trade show ROI, our answer is always the same. Start by doing the math. 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.

As Event require extensive management you should hire the best.We Provide you the best corporate event planning to succeed in all segment of trade shows. We started our discussion of trade show strategy and the 8 keys to improving your ROI by exploring the importance of buyer personas. In our post Trade Show Marketing Challenge #1: Prospects Don’t Wear Name Tags, we highlighted how challenging it can be to identify high quality prospects amongst the sea of trade show participants, and the importance of overcoming scarcity mentality when devising a trade show strategy that targets prospects with truly aligned objectives. In this post, we’re going to tackle Challenges #2 and #3: Identifying and Selecting Trade Shows; and Misaligned or Missing Calls-to-Action. Now that you understand your buyer, it’s time to make sure you’re in the right place with the right offering to secure the deal.   For many growth companies, identifying trade shows that effectively and efficiently connect you to your audience can be challenging. Marketing managers and business executives will often come to us and say, “I just got an email about this event, should we go to it?” With the vast array of trade show events taking place at any given time, it is important that you avoid what we refer to as the “Lazy Susan Approach”—taking what is served up in front of you and simply waiting for the next offering to come around. Looking at an event or marketing opportunity from an abstract perspective makes it difficult to determine its value. Ultimately, you want to put each opportunity into multidimensional context, specifically how you will optimize your buyer persona, and how this opportunity relates to others in terms of location, size, timeframe, cost, and potential. As we’ve mentioned previously, developing an annual trade show strategy will help to ensure that each investment of time and resources feeds your customer pipeline.   At MEET, we’ve come up with a tool for measuring the value of each trade show event opportunity. Using a numeric rating system, we’re able to recommend the best events to go to and how to participate based on your buyer persona and growth strategy. Please feel free to contact us if you’d like help with your plan. Challenge #3: Misaligned or Missing Call-to-Action Also known as an offer, a call-to-action is the marketing mechanism that compels prospects to stop and opt-in. The most typical one we see at trade events is the “Enter to Win an iPad” offer. Similar to your company’s white elephant holiday gift exchange, exhibitors are looking to offer the thing they imagine almost anyone in the room would want. While high in value, it is an offer that appeals to the lowest common denominator.   Is the iPad offering effective? Unfortunately that feeling of satisfaction you get while thumbing through a thick stack of business cards will quickly dissipate when you and your sales team discover that many of these individuals were more interested in winning a free iPad than your company’s products or services. Many business cards, few to no prospects. Hooking the right prospect requires precisely the right offering. Once you’ve done the work to identify your buyer persona, make an offer that is congruent with the person’s values and desires. Prospects will stop in their tracks to self-identify because unlike the chance to win a free iPad, your offering is something they came to the event looking for such as a timely, specific, relevant webinar, whitepaper, or assessment. To be effective, the offer should only be valuable for your prospects. You want the other fish to keep swimming by. Selecting the right events and making the right offer will not only minimize your frustration around wasted time and resources, it will change the way your marketing and sales teams approach trade show opportunities. An effective trade show strategy builds knowledge and leverages it at every turn. 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.