Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Hi Cathy, call an objectives/goals meeting for this show and invite the key players to attend (should be mainly sales people). Discuss the goals and objectives that are to be accomplished from this show, and the best ways to accomplish these. Develop your booth layout based on the goals and objectives. For example, if your company is launching a new product, that product will need to have prime positioning in your booth.

Develop a master schedule that shows tasks, person responsible, due dates, status, etc. As much as possible, make sure that everyone involved follows and adheres to the schedule. Would recommend holding status meetings to make sure that everything is getting done and going according to schedule.

Determine the best way to draw traffic to your booth. You can prepare pre-show mailers, have a demonstration in your booth, activities, enter-to-win, etc. Make sure that the right people are working the booth (knowledgeable, friendly, upbeat, approachable).

Business card lead scanners are also important to have in your booth. Otherwise, you're collecting business cards and handwriting leads on paper. The lead scanner will scan in pertinent information about prospects. You can also tailor the scanner to incorporate specific questions that may help your sales team follow up on these leads.

Make your company/products a big deal with the media in your industry. Put together press kits for the media. Submit editorial articles for trade publications. These trade publications get extra distribution at trade shows, so more people will have access to info. about your company/products.

Since your company has not taken trade shows seriously in the past, you may need to make it a big deal (by incorporating the above and more) to get them to see how beneficial trade shows can be.

www.tsnn.com is a useful trade show site. https://www.tsnn.com/multinl/frntpage.cfm has newsletters with helpful tips.

Jong has provided some excellent input.

Here's a few more ideas:

Look at what the whole show is costing you and decide whether it should be paying for itself from the sales generated or whether it is justifiable partly as a branding exercise where you will get the benefits say for the next 9-12 months.

When you figure the whole cost make sure you include booth costs, transport, travel, samples and freebies, sales incentives and salespersons commissions, printing and advertising, seminar attendances, lodgings and subsistence, meals, airfares, taxis, entertainment, staff time and support staff costs. Pick a percentage of those costs you think you should recoup. (Based on previous paragraph).

Work out what you need to sell to make back that amount in gross profit (margin generated from the sale).

Develop your sales target for the show based on generating the profit back. add a percentage to give yourself a buffer if you like.

Now break that budget back against the products or services you need to sell, i.e.. x of product A, y of product B, and so on. And then break the product budget back into your sales people who will be working at the show.

Now make sure everyone knows what their personal budget is. And what are the incentives for achieving it.

If the show goes a few days, hold a breakfast meeting in a private room each morning to talk about the offers, the sales, the progress versus budget, and the lessons learned from talking to customers and observing competitors.

First time I followed this plan, we wrote 300% of the budget which was 1200% of what we had sold at any previous show. The method works! People do what you expect when you measure them!

Remember too, a trade show is a fantastic level playing field to review what you competitors are doing and how your (and their) customers are reacting to the various products and services on offer. One company I worked with brought its engineers to trade shows to review every competitors products with the aim of improving our own. Each year we developed a "best of breed" list of product enhancements that constantly kept us ahead of all others in the field.

Hope this helps.

ChrisB