Trade Show Exhibits

Have you ever wondered what makes a successful Trade Show exhibit? Displaying your goods and services at a trade show can be a daunting challenge to even the most seasoned veteran of trade shows and conventions.

There are three stages of insuring a successful trade show presence.

1.  Planning – You must know what you want out of your trade show experience in order to know whether it has been successful. Your goals for a trade show can be anything that fits your corporate vision. Before hand, write your goals down and make sure everyone on your team ‘buys in’ to the goals for the trade show. Here are some suggestions of goals for your team:

• Set up 5 appointments with new potential clients.
• Get the name and contact information of each qualified person who visits your booth. Qualification of visitors is vital for efficient use of your time.
• Get 50 business cards per day.
• Investigate 5 new vendors.
• Sell 250 widgets per day.
• Some other things that you will want to take into consideration in planning for a successful trade show experience:
  • Do you have enough brochures, business cards and fliers?
  • Do you have appropriate promotional product to give away?
  • Do you have a ‘team look’? Do all of your team members have a professional appearance? We would suggest your team to wear matching corporate apparel.

2.  Presenting – Energy, Friendliness, Professionalism, Uniqueness, and a bit of Zaniness all combine to form a pretty good recipe for successful trade show vendors. If you have a bit of time before your next trade show, go to a few other conventions in your city and observe. Figure out what you like to see in a trade show booth and what the busiest booths are doing to attract and keep the attention of attendees. Here are a few things that we’ve noticed that successful vendors do:

• Stand for the duration of the show. Many times the event host will provide a table and chairs, get rid of the chairs!
• Move the provided table to the back or the side of your booth (or get rid of it comletely). This acts as a nice blocker and doesn’t allow you to carry on an effective conversation with potential clients.
• Take an active interest in the needs of the attendees. Don’t just start spewing out what you want to sell… ask questions and listen to the answers. You might be surprised how effective keeping your mouth shut can be!
• Have an attention grabber. We’ve seen juggling, putting greens, Wii competitions, shouting contests (eg. whoever can say the name of our company loudest wins a complete software package), magicians, interactive kiosks, etc. Make it yours and make it unique.
• Take copious notes. In our booth we have literature that people can take but we put it in the very back of the booth. We don’t want drive-bys… we want full-on engaged conversations. The result of those conversations is a notebook full of contact information and personal details (Bob’s birthday is next week), so that when you get to the next stage (Follow-up) you can continue your conversation and have a launching point to begin earning their business. For example: Happy Birthday Bob, thanks for chatting with me at the show last week… how about a cup of coffee tomorrow?

3.  Follow-up – Without follow-up, you might as well have not gone to the show. With effective, planned follow-up, you can really determine whether the trade show was a success. Now is when you need your notes from the ‘Presenting’ stage. Copious notes are better and will make your follow-up far more effective. Each night after the trade show and after a relaxing dinner, go through the notes from that day. Categorize them and start planning your meeting schedule. Give people a couple days to get back home and get caught up, but don’t wait too long. Because we don’t make literature easily accessible during the trade show, many of our notes go something like this: Bob Schneider, ABC Corp. (see biz card), expressed interest in vehicle wraps, needs for a promotion no later than July. This gives us the opportunity to pay Bob a visit and bring him some literature on vehicle wraps and start planning with him for his promotion. If he would have just taken our vehicle wrap brochure and left our booth, we’d have no way of knowing who he was or that he had a promotion coming up. Because we engaged Bob in a meaningful conversation we can now begin to meet his needs and provide a valuable service to his company.

Article By:
Casey Valiant
Sign-A-Rama
Evansville
Sign-A-Rama Evansville