Sure, trade shows can be a great way to get your company's wares in front of a live audience. But travel and booth costs can get expensive, and prospects are easily distracted on the exhibit hall floor.
Communications technology firm Mitel decided to take a more direct route and meet customers on their own terms, taking a bus outfitted with demonstration-ready Mitel products directly to customer locations.
"We thought we could see more customers that way," says Stephen Beamish, Mitel’s vice president of Business Development. "We'd get a freedom you don't have with trade shows and would know exactly who’d be coming on the bus at a given time. And we thought that would make it easier to see which conversations were leading directly to revenue."
To set up its road show, Mitel worked with the Borden Agency, a firm that specializes in mobile marketing tours for B-to-B firms. Borden has launched 30 such shows within the last year.
"Mobile tours are one of the most underutilized and misunderstood of the B-to-B marketing tactics," says Larry Borden, founder of the agency. "B-to-B companies are less about marketing the brand image and more about generating sales. In that respect, a mobile tour can accomplish a lot more, and more quickly, than traditional media advertising."
So, why aren't road shows more commonly used by B-to-B marketers? "Fear of the unknown," Borden says. "They get caught up in a lot of the details, and they aren't sure where to start."
Road Show 101: First Leg of the Trip
Before hitting the road, marketers should ask themselves a few basic questions, says Borden:
1. What do you want to accomplish?
2. What size bus do you need?
3. How long do you want to be on the road?
4. Do you need the full support of a partner, or are there some things you want to do yourself?
5. How much are you willing to spend to get started?
Road shows are not inexpensive. Any bus needs to be customized and decorated to a particular client's needs. "The biggest cost is the upfront cost to retrofit the bus with our gear, but after that, the bus is ours," says Mitel's Beamish. Ultimately, a road show of several months could cost $500,000 or more, though many variables figure into the final price.
If you decide you don’t need a planning partner and want to go it alone, you can buy a bus on your own and slap on some signage, but Borden said most buses will need some interior remodeling and power upgrades. And even when the bus is ready, the job isn’t complete: You will still need to organize all the logistics involved—getting a driver, planning routes, duration of stays at different stops, licensing requirements fueling costs, for example.
For Mitel's initial road show, it committed to a four-month circuit to gauge the benefits of going on tour, but it eventually extended its tour to nine months. Borden recommends that B-to-B companies commit to at least six months worth of mobile tour stops to ensure a return on the upfront set-up costs.
Road Show Benefits: What's in it For You?
Borden offers a few thoughts on what B-to-B marketers can gain from running a road show:
- Meeting clients in person can often help shorten the sales cycle.
- A road show can give valuable brand exposure, getting your name in front of clients, in a variety of locations.
- Public relations and integrated marketing abound. Staff on the road show can blog from the bus, and you can time product announcements to the road show.
- Marketers don't have go to it alone—you can bring potential channel partners and new dealers on the bus, too.
- There's always the possibility of a return trip: You can offer to bring the bus back to provide training and follow-up support.
- ROI is easier to measure, because you have come to the location where all of a buyer's decision makers and influencers are.
Borden sets goals with the clients and creates key performance indicators to measure success. It has surveyed road show clients, and 85% of the sales people involved said mobile tours had a significant impact on their ability to close business. Another 22% said it helped them close 15 deals or more, according to Borden.
Mitel analyzed sales that it closed while on the mobile tour to judge how many of them it would have closed without the bus. Beamish said Mitel's average sale overall is in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Total sales associated with the road show have gone well into the millions of dollars. "We were conservative in our measurements, and the bus still more than paid for itself," Beamish says.
