trade show strategy plan

When we think of a trade show strategy plan, the words of Zig Ziglar often come to mind: “a goal properly set is halfway reached.” At MEET, we believe that setting clear goals around how to identify and reach target customers is half the battle to successfully growing your company. For companies looking to expand to the U.S. market, trade shows represent a vital opportunity to get face-to-face with target customers, test value propositions and offers. A good U.S. trade show consultation strategy can help to set market entry goals, minimize risk and maximize the opportunity and potential for reward. Goal Setting Step 1: Know Your Target Every trade show strategy plan should be focused on a target customer, or what we refer to at MEET as a buyer persona. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers—their wants, needs, and profile. You may identify two or three buyer personas by product or service, and that’s fine. Buyer personas are developed based on your existing knowledge, research, and conversations with customers, partners, and mentors. They represent a hypothesis based on the market you’re in for the purposes of entering a new market and therefore need to be tested. The first goal to set within your trade show strategy plan is to identify the two to three buyer personas that you are aiming to meet. Prior to exhibiting in any particular marketplace, it’s important to prioritize these buyer personas based on who is most likely to attend a given event. Goal Setting Step 2: Bet Small and Frequently At MEET, we’ve noticed a tendency for companies looking to expand to the U.S. market to place all their chips on one big event. While there’s certainly a place for big events in a trade show consultation strategy, we don’t recommend them as a starting place. Here’s why. In the first 6-12 months of a market expansion, your goal should to maximize exposure (i.e. take advantage of as many opportunities as possible to meet customers and partners) and test your hypotheses, all while minimizing your costs. Identifying small, frequent event opportunities within a 100-mile (160 km) radius of your new hub are ideal, and you’ll find within almost every industry and discipline a wide array of trade associations and organizations facilitating a monthly meeting for you to attend at very little cost. Focusing your goals around building strong intimacy with key groups in your new geographic area will rapidly increase your knowledge and your network while decreasing your risk of investing in events that do not deliver quality prospects. Small events allow you to iterate and evolve quickly, setting you up for success at national and global events in year two. Setting the goal in your trade show strategy plan to attend one to three event each month delivers results without breaking the bank. (Check out our webinar: SCALE NOW: Entering the U.S. Market through Trade Shows and In-Person Events for more high leverage strategies for success.) The value of a good trade show strategy plan for any company cannot be oversold.  Setting clear goals and investing resources in preparation minimizes both risk and waste, which in a new market is at least half the battle. 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, 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.