Trade Shows & Leads – How Do You Measure Success?

“Tired of going back to your office with only 400 leads from your last trade show? How about 4,000? How about 40,000?! That’s right, the SCAN-EM-ALL 450 is the answer to your dreams!

“Just hold it over your head, press the green button and in 30 seconds you have captured every lead on the trade show floor.  It even works through bathroom doors!

The SCAN-EM-ALL 450. If it has a pulse. We’ll scan it!”

Is this where the industry is heading? By some companies’ current metrics, the Scan-Em-All 450 would guarantee you the most successful trade show ever: 45,000 attendees and 45,000 leads. Pretty great, huh? But what would you do with them all?

This hypothetical may be hyperbolical, but the issue is very real. Many exhibitors right now have two or three crowd gatherers tasked with scanning as many people as they possibly can. It’s an easy way to rack up “leads,” but what will happen when contact is made after the show? Many of these people will say “Sorry, I just stopped by to get the flying monkeys you were giving away.”  What good is analyzing your cost per lead if what you’re calling a lead is just someone filling their backpack with free stuff?

What really does define a lead? Is it just anything with a pulse, or must it be something more?

Which is more successful: a trade show with 300 leads categorized as “HOT,” or 3,000 leads in a metaphorical trade show piñata, where you’ll just whack at it after the show and see what shakes out? Some will say there’s likely more buried value in those 3,000, while others would rather focus on 300 sizzling leads and avoid sifting through random thousands.

So, I’m asking you, the community: What should be the metric for a successful trade show? What technologies do you use to categorize your leads as “hot,” “warm” and “cold”? Should crowd gatherers themselves have a tiered system and be directing traffic based on perceived quality of the lead?

Unless we come together on a clear definition of a successful show, before too long, we’ll ALL be waving SCAN-EM-ALL 450s.

Have an industry-related question? Send “Newman” an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

Tags: booth traffic, crowd gathering, qualified leads, trade show trends
Posted in Booth staff, Lead generation & follow up, Trade show news & trends | 3 Comments »

Top 10 Ways to Guarantee More Booth Traffic and Better Leads

1) Realize smaller can be better
When selecting your booth size, keep in mind that investing in a 20×40 might not guarantee you a more successful show. A smaller booth that is constantly packed is a lot less expensive than a large half-empty booth and will generate much more excitement. Think of your last dinner party. Doesn’t everyone seem to congregate in the smallest room in the house?

2) Make sure your booth staff is ready to talk to attendees
That means don’t sit down. Avoid standing in groups of two or more fellow staffers. Stand near the aisles.  Look out at the crowd and make eye contact. Smile. Don’t say, “Can I help you?”  They’ll say, “NO.”  Instead, look at their name tags.  Use their name. Ask them what their company does. Invite them into the booth. Now you’re getting somewhere.

3) Quickly follow up on leads
Three-quarters of the leads generated at trade shows are never followed up on … and when they are followed up, it tends to be way too late. Those 2,000 leads you got don’t mean anything if you don’t do something with them. You need a way to categorize your leads as “HOT,” “warm” and “cold” — and with hot leads, there’s no such thing as getting in touch too soon. First contact should come within days of the trade show’s end. When weeks or months go by, you just end up lumped together with all the other SPAM.

4) Use giveaways to build booth traffic
BUT, don’t just give stuff away. USE that giveaway item to quiz the audience on what they’ve just heard. Use it to get them to ask questions. You can also use higher-priced giveaways (from thumb drives to HD TVs to wads of cash) as an incentive to get people to the demo stations and get them into the booth. And consider “green” giveaways. Cheaply made swag just ends up in the trash and then in landfills. You want your giveaways to last … so that attendees hold onto your branded item as long as possible.

5) Keep product demos short
Seven minutes is ideal. Ten minutes is the limit. Fifteen minutes … Get the hook! Trade show attendees have a lot of real estate to cover. Don’t feel you have to tell them your entire story. Pique their interest. Get them to want to know more. Get them into the booth.

6) Limit your seating
A seating area with 50 chairs is intimidating. Few people want to be the first to sit down. Also, if you have an audience of 25 people, it still looks half empty. But with a dozen or so seats, you’re looking at a standing-room-only crowd. People walking by will be more interested in what’s going on if all the seats are full. It’s only natural to wonder what could be going on over there.

7) Have at least one crowd gatherer
We are not talking about scantily clad eye candy for your booth. We’re talking about warm, engaging, gregarious greeters. We’re talking about men and women who know how to chat up people in the aisles, ask them questions, invite them into your booth, introduce them to your knowledgeable (and well-trained) staff. These crowd gatherers will continue to invite people to stop and listen even after the presentation has begun. If you skip the crowd gatherers because of the stereotypes, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

8 ) Insist on an “open” booth design
Think about the lines. Think about the traffic flow. And think about how much you enjoyed the last time you couldn’t find your car in a parking garage. Try to design your booth in a way where there are virtually no impediments in any direction for someone coming in or someone going out. Make the booth’s architecture as open as possible to create maximum flow. You want people to just stroll through and almost accidentally find themselves in the booth. Booth layout and thoughtfulness has much more to do with success than booth size and “impressiveness.”

9) Do your pre-show work!
Promote in advance using social media. Send e-blasts to prospective attendees. Offer up a promotional tease to get people into the booth before the show even starts. Tweet from the trade show floor with your latest news and special offers. Utilize video. Do a “Live from the Trade Show Floor” spot and a daily wrap-up. Announce news and promotions with all the fanfare a live recording can offer. Make it short, interesting and something to get people excited in anticipation of your event.

10) Utilize a professional presenter
Bippy the Mime making a workstation out of balloons may be impressive, but it’s not likely to ensure you qualified leads. Have someone represent your company who is engaging, knowledgeable and will interact with the audience. Most trade show demos seem to be staged readings of marketing white papers. Whether you hire a professional presenter or not, don’t do this … under any circumstances.  Everyone talks about “24/7, valued-added solutions.” Your audience will tune out. Say it in layman’s terms, and say it with passion. Find a reason to truly care about your subject matter.

This article originally appeared as a guest contribution on the ChoiceVendor.com blog. We’ll return next week to the usual Q&A format. If you have an industry-related question, send “Newman” an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

Tags: Booth design, Booth staff, crowd gathering, lead follow up, targeted giveaways
Posted in Booth design, Booth staff, Going green at trade shows, Lead generation & follow up, Trade show giveaways, Trade show news & trends, Trade show presentations, Trade shows & social media | No Comments »

At Trade Shows, Say It In Seven Minutes

Hey Newman, we’re in the midst of scripting our next trade show presentation.  It’s coming in at 21 minutes.  Is that too long? –Walter in Las Vegas

No problem, Walter.  As long as you can talk three times faster than normal and bring it in at SEVEN.

Seriously, here’s a question for you:  If you only had that seven minutes to tell your product or brand story, what would you say?

Imagine you’re the point person at a big trade show presentation. You’ve set up a small theater in your booth. You don’t have a professional presenter, so it falls on you to entertain, stimulate and inspire this throng of attendees that’s formed around you. The microphone has just been placed in your hand and you have to go … now! You have only seven minutes and then the mic goes dead. That’s it. You take a deep breath and step in front of the crowd. With such limited time and so much on the line, what do you say?

This is the essence of a compelling trade show presentation. It’s not how much you can say; it’s how little. What actually is your message when you’re “forced” to distill it down? The reality is those people in your audience are visiting 25-30 booths a day. They will only walk away remembering two or three key points, along with the “feeling” they got from the message and from your energy and enthusiasm. So, what are those two or three points they cannot leave without?

If you’re finding it difficult to answer that question, there’s an approach that can help: If you had to offer up all your messaging on just one piece of paper, what would you say? Many of my clients have 200 products and a worldwide audience. They deserve at least 10 pages, right? It doesn’t matter. No one is going to listen to that. It has to be ONE page — and not 2pt type!

Try to challenge yourself on that single page. Make a list of all the corporate jargon you’ve ever heard, read it over carefully, and then toss it. There are immense benefits in brevity, and even greater benefits in originality.

Now it gets even harder. Cut that in half, and give it to your booth staff as a guide for talking with attendees. Condense it even further and give it to the crowd gatherers as an elevator speech. For them, it’s perhaps one great phrase that encapsulates what you do and what your presentation will be about.

Many years ago when I began producing trade show presentations, I would have my client tell me their story. Their WHOLE story. That typically ran 45 minutes or so. Armed with that and a FedEx package filled with white papers and product brochures, I would craft what I believed was a tight, entertaining seven-minute draft. I’d present it over the phone and await my client’s response.  Often they would rave about the comic framework, tell me that it really “moved well,” but then mention that unfortunately, I had extracted the “wrong” seven minutes. My heart would sink and they would say, “What we really want to talk about is ‘this.’” It was one of the things they’d mentioned, but there was no way for me to know that this was where the emphasis was supposed to be. The client didn’t know at the time, either. It proved to be a clarifying exercise, but not a particularly efficient one.

Now, I work with every client to first find out what they care about.   And then I keep at them until we can fit that on a single page. We talk about the big deliverables. We talk about the key messages. We talk about how this product/service/brand will make people’s lives better. With this, I can begin structuring the routine and build the “right” seven minutes.  I add in the entertaining elements, and this time, when I do the read-through, it’s 95 percent of the way there.

This may be more work up front, but it pays off in fewer iterations and a much better (and tighter) script.

Oh, and on the off chance you think it’s impossible to get your message across in only seven minutes, take a look at what professional trade show presenter, William Hall is able to do in just a One Minute Presentation.

Do you have an industry-related question you’d like answered on “Hey Newman”? Send him an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

Tags: Booth staff, crowd gathering, live presentations, storytelling
Posted in Trade show news & trends, Trade show presentations | 3 Comments »

Passion vs. Jargon – A Trade Show Battle That Must Be Won

Hey Newman, at the last trade show I attended, it seemed like every presentation had been written by the same committee. Is it just me, or do I need to look for a TradeShowSpeak/English dictionary? —Steve in NYC

We all know that digitized scalable monitoring can offer a compatible WYSIWYG Intranet or a horizontal, even-keeled knowledge base. But for an extended fault tolerant matrix or for ameliorated scalable process improvement, you really need extended systematic software. In fact, a vision-oriented actuating migration or a right-sized, bottom-line help desk can provide the kind of eco-centric customer loyalty for which we all clamor.

Something tells me that opening paragraph didn’t do much for you. In fact, if you were a trade show attendee listening to THAT presentation, I suspect you’d fake an “important phone call” just so you could get up and leave. Yet, many trade show presentations sound just like this.  Many of them (most?) are little more than a staged reading of a marketing whitepaper — without any emotional connection at all.

Specs and high-tech talking points don’t sell products and services; enthusiasm and passion do.

Connecting with your audience is key. They need to hear the passion and energy in your voice, and they need to hear how that product will change their lives (or the world at large). How is this going to help people? Why should they care? What are the benefits for them? And why are you so excited about it? For some reason, answering those essential questions is most often lost in the development of the presentation script.

Whether it’s an enterprise-class server or a new baby formula, you MUST find a way to be passionate when you’re talking about it.

I recently represented a solar power company at a large home and garden show. The company had given me the basic data points about solar panels, which I incorporated into my presentation. After just a few shows, it became very clear to me that attendees weren’t paying much attention to those details. What they responded to was the way I talked about solar power. They could tell that I really believed in this technology — that it was good for the homeowner and good for the planet — and they flocked to me after the presentations with their technical questions.

They just figured if I was that passionate about the product, I must know all the nitty-gritty details. So, clearly what stayed with them wasn’t the technical info. It was the way they connected with me and my presentation OF that information.

I was getting qualified leads and signing people up for free in-home consultations based on the feeling the people had about the product and how it could help them … and the feeling they had about the “energy” of the presentation.

That energy — that passion — needs to be there all the time. If you’re the presenter, you have to find something about that product or service that you can really get behind. As a presenter, you owe it to yourself and to your audience to be genuinely passionate about your subject. The audience will pick up on that … or they’ll just be lulled into a coma by a barrage of corporate jargon.

If you’re not hiring a professional trade show presenter, then find someone in the company who is genuinely passionate and has the facility to deliver that passion on stage. Eight minutes is long enough, so long as that enthusiasm comes through. More than the size of the booth, more than the thickness of your carpet pad, this passion level really matters. The alternative isn’t pretty:

“We offer you a 24-7, mission critical, best-of-class, paradigm-shifting solution that will proactively enable cross-platform deliverables in a synergistic, distributed LAN/WAN environment.”

Tags: connection, crowd gathering, passion
Posted in Booth staff, Lead generation & follow up, Trade show presentations | 1 Comment »

The Great Debate: Qualified Crowd Gatherers or Mere ‘Booth Babes’?

Hey Newman, do “booth babes” actually make a difference at a trade show, or are they just a financial drain? -Richard in New Jersey

Richard, I have really strong feelings about this topic. First of all, I don’t like that term. I resent references to “booth babes” or “booth bunnies” or “booth bimbos” … really “booth anything” other than booth assistant or booth hostess.

But I do understand where you’re coming from. All too often you have a fashion model just sitting on a high stool with her legs crossed, checking her nails and handing out literature. That is not a particularly valuable investment for a trade show.

But a real booth assistant can be a substantial asset for a relatively small amount of money. I’m talking about a skilled, experienced person who goes out into crowds and asks the right questions and can deliver a killer 30-second pitch on your behalf. I’m talking about someone who knows what to do if an attendee asks, “Is your marketing director here?” … And here’s a hint: It’s doesn’t involve just pointing to the opposite end of the booth.

That person has real value at a trade show for about $400 a day or less. But a lot of people feel “we don’t need that.”

In fact, they do.

Otherwise, they’re not going to have any one person who is dedicated to that “crowd gathering” task. Booth staff should be engaging people at a deeper level and getting involved in potential sales and qualifying leads and showing off technology.

It’s the job of the booth assistant to bring people into striking distance for a trade show presentation or booth demo. That being said, you can’t just go to a modeling agency and select someone 6-feet-tall who looks like Angelina Jolie.

The value is in selecting someone with years of trade show experience who knows how to behave when an attendee brushes them off. You want someone who can smile in the face of trade show adversity. Those are the types of people you look for, and those are the types of people we have worked with at Magnet Productions for at least 10 years. They are real trade show professionals who deserve respect and have an important role in delivering a highly successful trade show that brings in lots of qualified leads.

So, before you dismiss them as mere “eye candy,” consider all there is to be gained from professional booth assistants as part of your trade show presence.

Do you have an industry-related question you’d like answered on “Hey Newman”? Send him an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

Tags: affordable options, booth assistants, booth buzz, crowd gathering, trade show opportunities
Posted in Booth staff, Trade show news & trends | 2 Comments »