5 tips to successfully represent your company at a trade show
Lessons learned from CES 2019
Let’s face it, if you found out that your company is invited to showcase at one of the biggest Consumer Electronics shows in the world 4 tiny weeks before the date, you are not going to be 100% prepared (ahem).
However, there’s a good chance you will be decent and will leverage your experience to crush it next year. That’s exactly what we here at Focus21 are aiming to do. Watch out CES 2020!
So what is it that we’ve learned from CES 2019?
Tip#1: Logistics
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. You will of course need to create a budget for travel and other expenses. You also need to dedicate a team member, Executive Assistant or even hire someone to plan everyone’s airfares, accommodations, insurance, conference passes etc as well as coordinate booth duty and meetings in a cohesive schedule.
A good checklist to get you started:
•Create budget
• Book your booth space
• Design/build booth per conference instructions
• Get attendees their conference passes
• Get branding merchandise (T-shirts, pens, business cards etc. etc.)
• Book flights
• Book accommodations
• Review & remind your team of expense policy
• Check that everyone has travel insurance
• Check everyone’s emergency contacts
• Create a booth duty schedule
• Check if there’s an app for the conference
• Check conference schedule for events/speakers you want team to attend
Tip #2: Do your RESEARCH and book meetings BEFORE you go.
That’s right. Having had only 4 weeks to prepare (2 of them Christmas Holidays), this is definitely a step to improve on for us.
- First things first. Study the convention’s online guide and download their app. CES did a great job here (iOs | Android).
2. Study the list of companies. Identify those that are of interest to you.
Pro Tip #1: Visit companies’ LinkedIn profiles to see if you already have common connections with their employees.
Pro Tip #2: Create a separate folder/tag in your CRM right away so that all team members can plug in their contacts right away at the show.
3. List keynotes and events you think are beneficial to you and you team to attend. Assign them to team members (there may not be enough time or people to attend them all!).
4. Book meetings. Reach out to prospective clients and partners to book a meeting. Fill up that schedule. Yes, you will be busy!
Tip#3: Train your team/ Hire a sales team
It’s something we hadn’t thought of, but it actually makes quite a lot of sense to hire external sales people for booth duty for the event.
Pros:
1.They are professionally trained for just such events
2. You can free up yourself and your team for more important meetings and networking
Cons:
1. They may not be able to answer more technical questions at the level that you or your team members would
2. Potential leads may want to talk to you, the Executive rather than salespeople
In general, however, we saw that it was a common practice to hire sales people for larger companies, so the pros probably outweigh the cons. 2020 Companies, for example provides training for sales personnel and the personnel itself.
Now let’s say you are unable or don’t want to hire external help or you are a small startup sending your more technical staff to booth duty. In that case, understand that they need a little bit of coaching before the show to be able to sell as it is not their regular role and pushes them out of their comfort zone quite a bit.
Pro Tip: Spend a day or two before you head out on practicing elevator pitches and mock client conversations with your team. If time permits, spend the first day at the show to walk around and learn how to sell by example from other companies so they start closing like pros.
Tip #4: Attention grabbers — be creative!
This is all about your booth. I’m sure you will make sure your booth has a slick on-brand design with the right amount of text and images.
Now, what we saw happening a lot at CES is companies using the silliest things to captivate attention of the crowd.
Hint: you can use things that have absolutely nothing to do directly with your business. It’s all about getting people to stop by and spend some time at your booth!
Here are things that we thought worked great:
- Install a simple game or arcade. For example, one of the exhibitors had a Wack-a-Mole at the booth.
- Prize Wheel. You can get creative with things you can give away, starting from samples of your product, free trials to your service, free consults, merch and so much more. Don’t forget to grab their emails ;)
- Visual aids. TV screen, 3D models even holograms! Hypervsn who had an amazing booth themselves at CES provides somewhat affordable propeller hologram displays that can be easily installed in your booth.
- Showstoppers. From Barbie-looking hired models to cos-playing, we’ve seen it all at CES! And those booths stuck in our minds the most ;) But even just a well-trained pretty-looking salesperson will go a long way.
Ok, maybe you can do better than that.
Tip #5: Streamline your leads
We’ve mentioned this earlier, but nothing is worse that sorting through a stack of business cards after the show with no recollection of who each person was or, more importantly, what was their interest in you or vice versa.
Have your CRM ready to go before the show
Have team members plug in their leads (WITH NOTES) right away
Have a follow-up practice in place as soon as you come back. (Standard 3 follow up emails/calls will go a long way).
Additional Pearls of Wisdom
- Don’t forget to schedule some fun for the delegation. Reward your team members for long hours at the booth, networking and meeting prospects. Us? We opted out for Top Golf even if just to learn that we don’t know a thing about golfing (some team members were surprisingly adequate).
- Have a retrospective meeting when you come back to identify what was done well and what needs to be improved or next time.
- Don’t let those leads sit on the desk too long! The sooner you reach out to people with follow-ups, the easier it will be for them to place you in their mind and pick up the conversation where you left off.
Cheers! You’re going to crush it at your next show!
See more of what we do here at Focus21 Inc.
