Trade Show Exhibit Advice

By: Barry Siskind

In a recent issue of Trade Show Executive, I read an interesting article about Magic Stick, the winner of the TSE 2009 Innovation Award. Magic Stick is a small gadget, about the size of a computer memory stick that you carry with you. When you see someone also carrying a Magic Stick you can electronically exchange contact information. You each aim, push a button and voila you are networked.

Welcome to the age of High-Tec social networking whose first victims may very well be the handshake and a business card.

Twitter, Facebook, Web 2.0, SecondLife, LinkedIn, Flickr, LibraryThing, Ning, Jaiku, EventPeeps, are here to stay. There is nothing we can do about it nor should we for fear of being labeled Luddites. We should embrace social networking as a positive technology to help us build our personal networks.

This discussion is reminiscent of a time – a decade ago – when the world was a twitter (oops) about something called a virtual trade show and how this heralded the death of face-to-face marketing as we knew it. What happened to virtual exhibitions was that they became an integral part of larger face-to-face events providing year round exposure to products, services and education. What was feared to be an enemy became a powerful ally. The same, I am guessing, will happen to social networking sites.

Face to face marketing needs all the help it can get to maximize its potential and if technology can help, then all the better. But technology cannot replace the power of meeting a vendor or customer and talking about issues eye-ball to eye-ball. Meeting face to face is how we form opinions of people and the institutions that employ them. When we can integrate the technology to enhance our interpersonal contacts then we become winners in this brand new – very old game of networking. Here are a few thoughts as you go about building a productive and profitable network.

• Networks are not mailing lists – Social scientists tell us that each of us has approximately 200 people in our network. When you misuse the technology and build lists that include thousands of contacts you are clearly misusing the tool.

• Find your six degrees of separation – Each of your 200 people also has a network of two hundred, each of their two hundred has two hundred as well. If you take 200 to the sixth power the number is slightly more than six billion which coincidentally includes everyone on the planet. Learning how to tap into these sub-networks opens you to unlimited potential. If you look carefully you can find anyone you want to contact through your six degrees of separation.

• Don’t abuse your network – this is so easy when you simply use your network for commercial purposes. The people in your network are folks you have made a personal contact with. They have families, worries and dreams. When you can treat your network as an extension of yourself and treat these people as individuals you cannot lose.

• Stay in touch – there’s not much point meeting someone at a trade fair, exchanging information and not staying in touch. Treat your network as a living breathing thing that needs attention or it will simply wilt and die.

• Make it a 24/7 habit – don’t just built your network in times of need. You should be constantly looking for opportunities to expand your sphere of influence.

• Give something back – If your network is a living entity then it needs food to survive. The food you provide is in your willingness to give back. This means being constantly on the lookout to offer advice, contacts or a friendly word to your 200 people.

Social networking is quickly finding its place in the face-to-face marketing world. When you combine the power of your interpersonal skills to build your network and then integrate technology to record the experience and maintain contact you have a winning combination.

By: Barry Siskind

It’s an age old problem. Managers intuitively know that providing staff with specialized training makes them more proficient, helps increase confidence and improves the bottom line. So, you might ask, what is the problem? The answer is simply they can’t prove it. And, proof is what’s needed in order to justify the time and cost of providing training.

The challenge of creating a ROI for training is that it needs something to be compared to and without the ability to know what the training investment is being compared to, calculating the ROI is next to impossible. The root of the issue is the establishment of benchmarks. Here is where many trade show exhibit managers fall down in their ability to collect meaningful data from their exhibit experiences and to use that data to establish a benchmark from which future performance is compared.

Here is an example of a few of the bits of data that should be included in a post-show statistical analysis:

Sales cycle
This calculation of the average time it takes once your sales folks have met someone to the time it takes that contact to make a decision. This is an important number because once it is defined, it helps your booth staff focus on the right people.

Average time to convert a visitor to a lead
This is important because it helps your booth staff determine the length of a booth presentation and helps them manage their time.

Audience profile
You need to have a breakdown of the audience at any event to determine if there is a match between who is attending and the profile of your target contact (that is the person most likely to turn into a high quality lead)
that  you should have created ahead of time.

Success ratio
Success ratio answers the question “If you gave one of your staff 10 good quality leads, how many of these leads will be converted into a sale in the next 12 to 18 months?” The challenge is that when you measure ROI the number is often distorted because actual sales take time depending on your sales cycle. However knowing what the success ratio is helps you put real numbers to short term success.