Book Excerpt

How to Read This Book

I know you are busy, and the only way you will probably be able to read this book from cover to cover is if you are sitting on a beach on your summer vacation.

In that case, I advise you to put the book down and enjoy yourself. I’ll still be here when you get back.

There are 1,001 things to do when you exhibit at a trade show. That’s why I have decided that you should choose how to read this book.

As you can see in the Table of Contents, I focus each part of this book on a different stage of exhibitor management and each chapter on a specific topic within its respective stage. This is intentional.

I want you to be able to quickly find what you’re looking for, get the answer, and move on to managing your event participation.

Are you trying to understand your lead capture options? Turn to chapter 21.

Want to know what to include in a post-show analysis report? Turn to chapter 29.

You can read the other chapters as time permits.

If you want a thorough understanding of the essential trade show exhibitor management components, read this book from cover to cover.

— — —

You should never think of a trade show as simply those three or four days when you are on-site at the show.

Trade show management starts many months before a show begins and is not over until long after you have taped up your last box at the end of the show. That’s why I divided this book into six individual parts.

Part 1: Trade show strategy

Before you can design your booth, capture leads, and close sales, you need to establish goals and objectives, make sure you pick the right show for your business, and set your budget. In this part, I’ll lay the groundwork for you to be successful.

Part 2: Pre-show tips

Preparation for a show starts months before it actually begins. In this part, you'll discover how to get free money to offset your expenses, uncover a gold mine of potential booth visitors, hand-pick the perfect booth staff, and so much more.

Part 3: On-site tips

It’s showtime! This section discusses on-site challenges like distributing food in your booth, incurring hidden drayage costs, overcoming bad manners that turn attendees off, and unleashing your lead management plan.

Part 4: Post-show tips

The show may be over, but your marketing and sales efforts must continue. Successful exhibit managers know that now is the time to convert leads to customers and calculate the actual return on this significant investment. Determining the true success of a show requires post-show follow-up and analysis.

Part 5: When your trade show gets turned upside down

What happens when your trade show is canceled, and the event organizer is uncertain about the new date? In this part, I’ll reveal how you can stay on track without going insane.

Part 6: Essential terms you should know

Finally, I include essential trade show terms. This part is so important to me that I ripped it out of its typical location in the appendix and gave it its own chapter. Whether you are speaking with someone from a trade show sales department, reading the exhibitor services manual, or writing your post-show executive summary and evaluation report, you need to know what these terms mean to be successful at your job.

Part 1
Trade Show Strategy

Chapter 1: Remind Me Why We’re Doing This
Exhibitor Goals and Objectives

Exhibiting at a trade show without goals or objectives is like going on a trip with no GPS or pretravel planning. You’ll probably get there in the end, but it will cost you more than you expect, take longer than you expect, and you won’t get as much out of your experience as if you had set specific objectives for what you want to see and do. The same is true when exhibiting at a trade show.

What is the reason you plan to exhibit? Common reasons to exhibit at a trade show include:

• Speaking directly with potential customers

• Taking the opportunity to meet current customers in person

• Generating new sales leads

• Increasing awareness of your company and products among potential customers and business partners

• Scoping out your competition

• Researching a new industry you may want to target

• Launching a new product or service

• Expanding into a new market

• Identifying new suppliers to resell your product or vendors whose products you can resell

• Networking with industry influencers

• Looking for new employees

Determine your exhibitor goals

I'm sure you could develop a list of ten exhibitor goals for the coming year, the next six months, or the next quarter, based on your company’s business goals. However, to be most effective, you should have no more than two goals for a single event. You will be able to narrow down the most appropriate trade shows to participate in based on those very specific goals.

Suppose your company’s goal is to sell your products or services in a new industry like manufacturing, aerospace, healthcare, retail, financial services, legal, education, transportation, or another, and you want to generate new qualified leads from buyers in that industry. You should seek out a trade show that attracts attendees who are focused solely on that industry.

An industry association often runs this type of show.

For example, if your company is interested in selling software to healthcare providers, hospitals, doctor's offices, insurance companies, or other health-related organizations, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference should be at the top of your list. HIMSS runs this conference, and exhibitors have access to forty-five thousand attendees over three days. Where else could you meet a large quantity of high-quality potential customers who are specifically interested in healthcare technology and be able to talk to them directly over such a short period?

Here is a second example. Your CEO may want to partner with companies that have very different products than yours, selling both products to your customers. Combining both products and selling them to customers as one solution will differentiate your business and may help you sell more than you would if you try to sell your product on its own. In this case, you want to exhibit at a show or conference that attracts corporate attendees and exhibitors who are open to signing a business partnership agreement with your organization.

By limiting your goals to a maximum of two, you can target the ideal trade show or conference, which provides the specific audience you need to help you achieve those goals.

Understanding the difference between goals and objectives

A goal is something you want to achieve. For example, your trade show goal might be to:

• Generate more qualified leads.

• Launch a new product or service to your target audience.

• Establish strategic business partnerships with similar companies in your industry.

• Cross-sell more services to existing customers.

• Gain a deeper understanding of your competitors’ products, messaging, positioning, and marketing strategy.

• Identify new channel partners who may be interested in reselling your products and services.

• Attract new employees.

While a goal is a wish or desired outcome, it's essential to quantify your goal with specific, numbers-based objectives.

Let's use the goal of generating more qualified leads as an example.

An objective is a specific way in which you are going to achieve that goal. For example, if your goal is to generate more qualified leads, how are you going to do that? The answer to that question is your objective.

In this example, your objective may be to speak with at least twenty-five booth visitors per day and label each visitor as a marketing qualified lead (MQL), a sales qualified lead (SQL), or a potential lead that needs long-term nurturing.

Let’s take it one step further. Now that you know what you want to achieve at this show and you have an objective of qualifying at least twenty-five booth visitors per day, what tactics are you going to use to make this happen? These are actual actions you and your team will take.

While I am not going to speak about trade show tactics this early in the book, setting specific tactics is the next step on the road to being a successful exhibitor.

A tactic is an individual step or action that you can take to help achieve an objective. Since our objective is to qualify twenty-five booth visitors per day, how will we do that?

Your tactics may be:

• Write a series of qualifying questions booth staffers can ask of booth visitors.

• Educate booth staff on the answers they should expect to receive. These answers will enable them to determine if a visitor is an MQL, SQL, not yet a lead, or will never be a lead.

• Enter questions into the lead retrieval device for use by booth staff. The device will enable all answers and contact information to be collected in one central hub and quickly and easily transferred to your internal customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems.

By evaluating these quantifiable objectives after the show, you can see how close you came to achieving them. It will also help you determine how future event tactics might need to change to achieve your goals.

Excerpt from Trade Show 411: The Essential Guide to Exhibiting Like a Pro by Lisa M. Masiello.
Copyright 2022 by Lisa M. Masiello. Excerpted with permission of Gate City Media Group.
ISBN: 978-1737487807
Print length: 292 pages