Some of the most intelligent online rants and discussions on sales and marketing topics occur at consultant Todd Youngblood’s YPSGroup.com. Recently, Youngblood blogged about expectations and reality of trade show marketing. He gave us approval to share it with you.
Expectations vs. Reality
One of the online groups I frequent recently had a discussion regarding the setting of appropriate expectations from attending trade shows. It took a while for me to figure out why the debate just felt wrong.
It was the whole notion of what to “expect” the results to be.
So I’m going to invest the time and treasure required to travel, buy hotel rooms, lug a small mountain of stuff to load into the booth and buy cool, new shirts for the whole team. I’m going into what by definition is a target-rich environment…
The basic premise is all wrong. It shouldn’t be “What are your expectations going into a trade show?” It should be “What
are your plans to use the trade show to grow sales?”
How many times have I and you and our cohorts gone into a three-day show “expecting” to “make a lot of good contacts?” Dumb! We ought to go in like one of my clients goes in with their Trade Show Radio strategy (dreamlandinteractive.com/tradeshowradio).
They plan for three days with three sales pros and three more folks in the booth, which is set up as a remote radio studio.
Prior to show day #1, each of the sales aces schedules 13 current customer execs and 13 more prospect execs for a 10-minute interview on their proprietary trade show radio show.
At the show, sales ace meets exec at his or her own booth 20 minutes prior to interview time, provides an escort to the radio dudes and talks a little shop. The next 15 minutes or so is interview — which is a WAY COOL experience for the exec. Then the exec gets an escort back to their home booth along with another 20-plus minutes of shop talk. You can easily picture my client’s three sales pros getting into a rotation of 26 kick-ass sales calls per day for three consecutive days.
And there’s more! Each exec for sure wants a copy of the interview audio file. Sales rep is happy to accommodate. That’s 78 more follow-up sales calls, reviving the memory of a unique experience for the decision-maker.
And there’s more! There are 78 blog posts for my customer’s website, and/or 78 pieces of great content for their e-newsletter. Lots of Google-bait!
And there’s more! Each of the 78 customers and prospects also has an excellent blog post and/or piece of newsletter content. Lot’s more Google-bait! And finally…
There’s buzz from their last trade show presence driving interest in the next trade show presence.
So don’t ask me about appropriate “expectations” for your next trade show foray.
Youngblood blogs at YPSGroup.com/blog.
