The Exhibit Source Blog

It’s time to change the conversation about trade shows. Stop thinking about monetary ROI from trade shows and move on to more urgent and practical matters.

What do you want to get from trade show spend?

There is a simple answer: Leads and sales.

Exhibit marketing isn’t like the other popular B2B marketing tactics. B2B marketing needs personal selling.

Websites, Webinars, SEO, paid search, e-mail, PR, print advertising, direct mail and social media are all one or more steps removed from personal selling.

Executives demand need evidence of ROI in the above, because they can readily suck up time and money without clearly driving sales.

But exhibit marketing is different.

It’s so closely tied to personal selling that you shouldn’t demand elaborate proof of ROI in it. You can’t demand that sales people prove their ROI with charts and graphs of phone calls, travel, hospitality and gifts.

Judge a trade show, like a salesperson is judged.

In assessing trade show performance, this is what executives want to know:

• Does the show help our company communicate effectively?
• Does it help us establish industry leadership?
• Does it let us identify promising accounts?
• Does it help us educate and develop buyers?
• Does it create valuable relationships?
• And does it, when all’s said and done, produce sales?

To accomplish the above, send the right people and have the right trade show display. For a captivating trade show exhibit, contact The Exhibit Source.
 
Business2Community

You have made the commitment to attend trade shows. You have hired and paid the staff, expensed the travel and in some cases lodging, you have purchased the uniforms and you have a captivating trade show display. Because of it all, you have gotten some great leads. Now you have to follow-up on those qualified leads. This is the challenge.

Trade show lead follow-up has long been a problem. Why go through the effort and expense of exhibiting at a show with no follow-up plans in place. This is such a waste of precious marketing dollars.  However, it is done all the time by companies who must think that this activity is just not that important.

Lead Follow-up Problem Overall

Here is a breakdown of companies overall approach to leads, not just trade show leads.  One statistic shows that the majority of leads are never follow-up.

Does Your Company Qualify Leads for Sales?

• 58% No
• 42% Yes

How to “fix” this problem?

The root of the problem is “accountability.”  Senior management needs to require this information from their staff.  When there is a mandate from senior management, performance measures are normally in place to gauge progress.

Forward thinking exhibition managers tackle this issue with excellent results.  Sometimes they have tied it into calculating a return of trade show performance or they just want to streamline their internal marketing/sales processes.
 
Getting A Sales Person Involved

Have a key sales person in the planning process of the lead qualification form that you will use at the trade show.  Having their fingerprints all over the thinking process and the lead scoring parameters ensures they are more willing to follow-up.  This sales person can communicate to his/her peers the measures which are in place, so the teams knows their time is not being wasted with all of the non-leads.

Business 2 Community

The first thing that comes to the mind of many small and medium small business owners when thinking trade shows is “expensive”.
 
That doesn't mean that trade shows can't deliver a great return on investment. The key to trade show success is how hard you are willing to work.

Many businesses are willing to spend big bucks travelling to and from and exhibiting at trade shows, with little other than a hope of traffic, orders and success. They certainly book appointments, but do they pull out all the stops?

A successful trade show can be measured in less quantifiable ways than orders written on site, such as new leads, enhanced customer relationships, brand building, product demoing, and sales training.

However, as well as these successes, it never hurts to get a show to pay for itself. Here are some ideas:

1. Contact your existing customers with a personalized message asking if they will be attending the show and requesting a formal appointment time. A call to action needs repetition from several methods to be most effective.

2. Contact the trade show association or organization and request a pre-registered buyer’s list for the upcoming show. Then, repeat the first suggestion about contacting customers with an introduction to your key product or service and how it can help run or grow their company. Request a formal appointment time.

3. Offer a free gift with a high retail value that can be acquired by you factory-direct at cost as a reward for showing up on time for a pre-booked appointment.

4. Overcome objections like; “I’m not booking appointments but I’ll stop by” with simple logic: “With all of our key staff on site and best products on display, we don’t want to run the chance of not being able to speak to you when you drop by. An appointment will guarantee you get our undivided attention.”

5. Use an online calendar to make sure no one gets double-booked and independent sales reps, if you have them, can see your availability in real time.

6. Advertise in a daily show magazine if there is one published on site. This is as captive an audience as you are going to get and the most likely chance that a print ad will translate into immediate action.

7. Offer show only specials.

8. Offer a daily prize in exchange for business cards dropped at your booth.

9. Rent the bar code scanner that some trade shows offer so you can scan the badges of buyers at your booth to ensure you get the most up to-date customer data. That’s your key to post show follow-up.

10. Deliver annual awards for “dealer of the year” or “distributor of the year” so that lesser-performing customers have something to aspire to.

11. Capitalize on celebrity endorsers, if you have them. Have them come for a picture and autograph signing or a meet-and-greet to draw attention and reward clients.

If this all sounds expensive, it is likely a still a fraction of what you are paying for floor space, flights and accommodations. A lot of it requires sweat equity more than dollars.

Using these ideas will allow you to book a couple hundred or more meetings over a four day show.  That kind of result practically guarantees the show’s success and return on investment.
 
An “if we build it, they will come” attitude is no more likely to work at a trade show than it is with a business idea. Exhaust your opportunities to confirm success before you get there.

Original article – The Globe and Mail

There are quite a few Boston Area trade shows coming up. Are you participating in any? If so, make sure it is money well spent. How? By having the right trade show displays.

If you are participating at any trade shows this year, maximize your ROI by attracting new potential customers to your trade show exhibit. How? By having an exhibit that is different and captivating.

An interesting and memorable trade show exhibit does not need to be expensive or wasteful. Consider renting. From table-tops to 10' exhibits to full scale custom modular trade show displays, The Exhibit Source offers a wide range of affordable rental trade show booth display options. Looking for a green option? The Exhibit Source is proud to be New England's exclusive distributor of the full line of environmentally-friendly displays.

The Exhibit Source provides a complete selection of event and trade show exhibit solutions for clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Our concept-to-completion suite of services includes exhibit design, construction, shipping, install and dismantle, graphic design, and signage. Want an effective trade show display? Contact us.

When you exhibit at trade shows, it is important to have a well-place dynamic trade show exhibit that draws people. For companies investing money in trade show exhibits, it is important to do it right.

Trades shows are a great way to meet new potential customers, and interact with existing customers. But first, they need to be able to find and be attracted to your trade show booth.

Picking a great spot for your booth is important too. An attractive trade show booth and the right location within the trade show is a solid exhibit strategy, especially for a smaller company. The opportunity for face-to-face contact that a trade show offers cannot be replaced.

A small or medium sized company can attend a show with a memorable trade show exhibits without breaking the bank. It is surely possible to outfit a 10x10 trade show booth display on a small budget, small enough to make a attending a trade show a great decision for many businesses.

For information on designing your trade show exhibit, contact The Exhibit Source.

Here are some steps on measuring your trade show ROI:

Get Your Leads:  Gather up your list of trade show leads from each show. At least do the shows you really want to track first, like the expensive or largest shows. Find out who came to your trade show booth and put the list in Excel. You’ll need the spreadsheet for extra columns and calculations.

Get Your Customer List: Somewhere in your company is a list of all your customers and what they bought. It may not be neat and tidy and available, but it is there somewhere. It may be in a database, it may be invoices…you may need to look and compile.

Compare Leads to Customers: Look up every company listed as a lead that visited your trade show booth to see if they are also in your customer database. Are they there? If yes, add in your leads Excel file a column that says “bought” and mark them as Yes. Then add a column and type in how much they spent.
 
Calculate ROI: When you total up the sales you can attribute to the trade show, compare that to the cost to exhibit at the show. So, if your sales were $100,000 and your costs were $10,000, then you've got an ROI of $100,000/$10,000 = 10 to 1. Now you have a yardstick to compare which trade shows to exhibit at and which ones to drop. And you have a metric to compare trade shows to other marketing media.

Bonus No. 1: Tracking New/Repeat Business: Keep track of the date of all sales from leads from the trade show. Were they already a client before the show? So, you helped influence a repeat client. Did they buy repeatedly after the show? Then total up all those sales, not just the first one. Did they buy for the first time after the show? Then your trade show lead became a new client.

Bonus No. 2: Tracking Product/Segments: If your client database has the info readily available, you can also check out and record on your spreadsheet what products and services they bought. Did they buy the new product you introduced at the show, or your popular existing products? Do the products and clients fall into more than one market segment for you? If so, see if the biggest segments were the ones you targeted at the show. You may be surprised, and you may want to change your trade show exhibit messaging and promotions.

It takes some work initially, but it is worth the effort to finally determine your Trade Show ROI.

TSNN.com