You’re Ready to Exhibit—Now What?

This is the second in a two-part article for Chief Marketing Officers of B2B organizations that use tradeshows in its marketing mix. The first article focused on the selection of shows and planning, and can be read here.

You’ve done your homework about which shows you’ll invest you time, money and staff resources. Now it’s time to plan your show activities. While all organizations are different and goals vary, some general rules include:

• Define your goals in quantifiable terms. Examples include: How many total new leads do you want? How many presentations do you expect to be made the primary job titles, type or size of company that you want to influence? How many meetings with key major prospect decision makers do you want to conduct? How many of these meetings do you want pre-scheduled?

• Make sure you’ve planned a pre-show marketing campaign to your current customers and most important prospects that may likely attend. Make sure they’ll know you’ll be there, entice them with what they’ll see and attempt to set-up meetings. Use your company’s pre-show advertising to drive prospective customers to your website (set up a request for appointment webpage with a dedicated landing page so you can track results).Your CRM system is key to program success. If you need additional prospects, consider using outside lists. It is critical for your company to be on the “A-list” of your most important customers and prospects that visit at the show. In one event, an exhibitor used a combination of their own customer file plus a highly targeted segment from event organizer’s registration database to create a postcard mailer that promoted a fun special offer. The results were a 300% increase in highly targeted booth visitors.
• Make sure your booth graphics are current and clear. Too many show attendees have just a few hours to see an entire event. If your booth graphics are confusing or cluttered, buyers may be confused and move on without stopping to meet your team. If you reuse the same booth each show, get an independent second opinion and consider refreshing the artwork.
• Ensure your booth team is trained on latest and most important products relevant to the show’s target market. If your products are technical, bring engineers to staff the booth alongside sales people.
• Conduct a short booth selling skills session. Booth selling is not like other sales. Your people need to quickly engage attendees, qualify them and deliver a well considered sales message. If an attendee is not qualified, politely disengage, so you’ll have more time to speak with appropriate potential buyers.
• Record all qualified leads and identify the specific follow-up action items required. A written or digital record is critical, so that you can track follow-up and quantify show results. Inform your sales managers that you’ll be following up with him/her and be looking for detailed updates/insights. Make sure these notes find their way into your CRM system for future follow-up.
• Assign and empower a “booth leader” to oversee the onsite activities. Allow the leader to make modifications if necessary (e.g. change booth schedules, create signage onsite), provide feedback/training on delivery of sales messages, discipline staff that is not engaged correctly, etc. Consider offering a separate incentive to meeting specific objectives that are critical for show success.
• Insist on holding daily pre-show and end-of-day meetings to share experiences, issues, opportunities, show gossip, competitive intelligence, etc. You’ll build team-work and share valuable insights.
• Provide your booth team incentives for achieving your goals. Even modest incentives give your team a chance to demonstrate their abilities and ingenuity. Examples might include qualified leads per hour, requests for follow-up for important prospects, most leads from your 25 top prospects, etc.
• Schedule rest breaks to keep your booth team fresh. Shows are hard on the legs, voice and back. Your team will be much more effective if they can have some down-time.
• Banish cell phones from your booth. You have but one chance to engage buyers. Don’t allow your team to miss these attendees that walk by your booth. Also, consider eliminating chairs–it increases the approachability of your booth team. I recently observed an unfortunate situation–all of one exhibitor’s 6 member booth sales team on cell phones at the same time. In just 5 minutes, 60 prospective customers walked by without once being engaged by the sales team. Have your team use break time to make telephone calls.
• Never break down your booth before the show ends (even if your team is bored and the show seems dead). One exhibitor told me that in the last 15 minutes of a recent show, a prospective customer who never had time to return telephone calls stopped into his booth with a $1 million dollar purchase order. The client had only been able to get to the show in the last 2 hours of the final show day because his business was so busy.
• Use the “slow times” to meet with other exhibitors. You’ll be surprised at the number of deals and alliances that are created at shows. Your team may also be able to gather competitive intelligence that might otherwise be difficult to obtain.

Critical Post-Show Follow-up

Post-show follow-up of qualified leads is one of the most important activity you’ll do—and where many exhibiting companies limit their success.

• Send (or email) specific product information to qualified leads no later than 48 hours after the show closes. Input the follow-up into your CRM system with a planned follow-up with a phone call within a week. Nothing delights prospective customers more than responsiveness.
• Make sure that all new leads are added to your CRM system with a measure of interest and probability of closing. Plan to drill down with your sales leaders for an update on sales follow-up to make sure that leads don’t become “stale”. Your focus on sales productivity will demonstrate commitment and improve the measurability of the show’s productivity.
• Hold a post-show meeting with your sales and marketing team to identify: what worked, what didn’t and what you’d do differently next time. Ask for comments in writing, so that you can revisit the insight for future events.
• Don’t automatically renew booths at shows that have failed to meet your stated business goals. Convenience and inertia are not good reasons to repeat ineffective shows. As the Chief Marketer, consider how you might better use face-to-face marketing funds that DO deliver. Increasingly, sophisticated marketing companies are using private meetings with large customers and prospects for intensive product training and business networking. While you may give up finding some new leads, you can more than overcome this shortfall by driving more business with existing customers.

Summary

Face-to-face marketing at tradeshows enable marketers to put a human face on their company. Your investment in tradeshows can also shorten the sales cycle and enable you to meet hundreds of customers and prospects at one time. By leveraging the intensity of the experience, marketers can complement more impersonal web and print media. If you use these planning guidelines for pre-show marketing, create an exceptional onsite presence, and follow-up appropriately with interested buyers, your tradeshows will provide extraordinary results.

Howard Friedman is a former vice president of Reed Exhibitions, group director of Nielsen Business Media (formerly VNU Expo), and is now the principal of his own tradeshow marketing strategy and business development consulting practice near Los Angeles. For additional helpful tools, visit http://www.hftradeshow.com. He can be reached at [email protected].