Trade shows can be very profitable. Many companies find that they are the most cost-effective part of their whole marketing mix, delivering the highest return on the marketing dollar. When a show is done right, the couple of months after it are the busiest – and the most rewarding – of the year’s sales activity.
The basic reason is simple: if you are in a good show, you have access to a large number of potential buyers.
But how is it that some companies have a great show, while others have a mediocre one, or even a disaster? The answer lies in how they approach it.
A successful exhibition strategy – using a show as a filtering process to gain new clientsOver the past 16 years of working with hundreds of companies, we have found that the most useful approach to exhibiting is to treat it as a process of filtering new clients out of the passing parade.
The four levels of filteringThe filtering process can be split into four parts:
- The organiser
- The stand
- The stand staff
- The post-show follow-up.
The first level of filtering is the organiser - Though promotion, the organiser attracts through the doors those people who are interested in the show’s focus and, by extension, in individual exhibitors. As a result, there is a high concentration of potential buyers walking around in the aisles.
However, not every visitor is a potential customer for every exhibitor. If a show has 10,000 visitors, 1,000 could be potential buyers for a particular exhibitor. Or it could be 500 or 5,000.
But, as they walk past the stand, they all look the same. How do you filter your target market out of that stream?
The second level of filtering is the exhibition stand - The primary purpose of an exhibition stand is to filter
on to it those people who are prospective clients, and to filter
off it those who are not.
There are many ways to make your stand attractive to potential buyers. The main one, obviously, is to display the products or services that the company is selling, since some prospective customers will see them and stop, giving the company’s representatives a chance to speak with them and, hopefully, make a sale or get a lead.
The second most effective way of attracting genuine prospects is to demonstrate your product or service. By this is not meant one on one demonstrations, but a public demonstration on the aisle. The big advantage of this is that it attracts a high proportion of people who have a genuine interest in your products. They are the ones most likely to stop to listen to a detailed explanation. Those who are not interested keep walking, which is what you want.
The third level of filtering is the people who are staffing the stand - So, if your stand is doing its job, you will have a higher concentration of potential customers on your stand than are in the aisles. But not all your stand visitors will be potential buyers. The role of the stand staff is to filter out those who have a genuine interest in your product.
They do this by interviewing stand visitors. It is important that your staff understand that their first duty is to interview visitors in order to identify those who qualify as potential customers, and not to launch immediately into a description of your products and services. Time at a show is limited – you want to make sure, when you go into detailed explanations, that you are talking to potential new customers.
Once your staff see this as their strategy, the conversation can move in one of three directions:
- Say goodbye: if the visitor does not qualify as a buyer, your staff member bids them a pleasant goodbye, and moves on to another visitor.
- Make a sale: if the visitor does qualify as a buyer, the staff member moves on into product demonstration and tries to make a sale. If he or she is successful the company has a new customer.
- Get a lead: if the visitor qualifies as a buyer, but will not make a purchasing decision at the show, the staff member records the visitor’s details, so they can be followed up after the show.
This last point is generally the most important. Since most companies make few or no sales on the stand, but make them after the show, getting leads is their primary purpose at a show. It follows, therefore, that staff members’ most important activity is to collect leads.
For this reason it is crucial that a company always has lead forms on the stand, and that staff are trained to use them.
The fourth level of filtering is the post-show follow-up - At the end of the show, if it has carried out a sensible strategy of filtering potential clients out of the show visitors, a company has a number of qualified leads. While, again, not all will be buyers, a high proportion will be. These leads contain gold, yet most companies stop prospecting right there. They do not follow up. As a result, they are missing out on a lot of business.
Genearally speaking, the most effective way to follow up is for the salespeople to personally contact the leads. These should be done in order of importance and this is determined from the information the stand staff recorded on the lead forms at the time of the conversation.
The importance of custom-designed lead forms, that prompt for the imformation which is important to you, and that are properly filled out, cannot be overemphasised. In order to follow up effectively you need a detailed, written record of what was discusssed on the stand. Relying on business cards and memory is ineffective. If you do not have qualified leads you cannot follow up – it is as simple as that.
Practical actvities for show successWhat has been outlined above is a strategy of progressively filtering show visitors in order to gain new clients, and it has proven very effective over the years. However, a strategy is carried out via practical activity, and below are outlined further practical steps that will improve the results.
- Invite protential clients
Before the show, make a list of those people you want to turn into clients and invite them to your stand. For the most important potential clients, you may have your salespeople ring them personally and make an appointment to meet them there.
- Train your staff in product knowledge
Before the show, conduct a training session for your staff in which you refresh their knowledge of your products and services, and in which
you also do a comparison between your services and your competitors.
- Train your staff in how to handle show visitors
In the week or two leading up to the show, train your stand staff in how to manage visitors. Focus on who is your target market for this show, how to interview effectively, and how to record visitor details on the lead forms.
- Qualify show visitors and take written leads
During the show, interview exhibition visitors in order to identify potential clients. Then either sell them your product on the spot or record their details so that you can follow them up after the show. Have custom designed lead forms on the stand.
- Follow up using a system
After the show, follow up the leads systematically, in order of priority. You will be able to judge priority if you have detailed information on your lead forms.
The end result of a systematic process – success! It is clear that to implement a system like this requires more work than many companies are currently putting into their exhibition activity. The questions then become: Does it work? How much difference can it make? Is it worth it?
The answer is
‘Yes!’. Companies routinely report multiples of the leads they were getting previously (a six-fold increase, for instance, from one hundred leads to six hundred leads). And, importantly, these are
qualified leads, not unqualified
put-your-card-in-the-fish-bowl-and-win-a-trip-to-a-holiday-resort leads. Consequently, companies achieve results of the order of two-and-a half times increase in sales and 30% increase in market share. As it does in so many areas of business, a systematic approach yields better results.
How much of an improvement can it make to your own exhibition activity? You can only find out by trying it, and I would urge you to do so, because you will see the results in the bottom line.
An extra, important bonus of a systematic approach But the bottom line is the very thing that presents a problem for many companies when it comes to trade shows. One of the biggest reservations managers have about trade shows is that they cannot quantify the benefits in hard dollar terms.
Given the limitations of space in this article, it has only been possible to focus on the broad outline of how to win extra new customers from a trade show. But there is a huge bonus that comes out of this approach. It gives an exhibiting company the ability to measure the results of show attendance in dollar terms. And it is only then that a manager can make a rational decision whether to continue spending the marketing budget there or to put it somewhere with a better return.
Because seventeen years of working in the industry, advising hundreds of companies, has taught me one thing – in the end, the only way to judge the effectiveness of a show is by the bottom line.