You might say, “How can you talk about the 1st 7 seconds of a trade show? People attend trade shows for hours, if not days.” True. But it is possible, by using the Principles of Relevance Marketing, for your prospects to finish checking in for the show, walk past security, and then wonder where your booth is.
Causing Prospects to Say –
– “Wow! I Want to Go See These Guys at the Trade Show!”
Segment Your Products – If you plan to feature more than one product at the show, you must write a clear definition why a prospect will want each one, and who would want them – two DIFFERENT questions entirely.
Through most of the ’90s and early ’00s I worked selling capital equipment to the printing industry. The first 4-1/2 years I sold imagesetters and scanners. These items sold for $70k to $250k.
We had entry level, mid-range, and high level imagesetters and mid-range and high production scanners. I won’t explain here, but there were very specific reasons why a printing company would use one rather that the other.
Segment Your Prospects – The small printing companies would want our entry level imagesetters. From there it got complicated. There were reasons why an innovative, tech-savvy medium sized printer would want our top end products, and reasons why the larger company might go for our mid-range.
I had a territory of over 500 printers with 10-15% of them active anywhere in the sales cycle at a time. So I also segmented the printers according to current active interests. I didn’t bother with the bottom 100 – the potential return would be negligible if anything. (Look at both ends of the 80/20 Principle.)
Every key influencer and decision maker would receive something in the mail from me two weeks ahead of time – segmented according to what I thought or knew they’d be interested in. Also, they’d receive a reminder fax several days before the event. (Fax marketing was new at the time.)
Of my current, active accounts, the key influencers and decision makers would each receive a mail piece personalized for them and their company stating how they’d benefit from each of the product types they had expressed any interest in, and for any technology I thought they should consider.
I worked for this particular company in the early to mid ’90s. Technology today allows for a number of great ways to cause the prospects to want to visit your booth when they walk onto the trade show floor. But back then the Internet, CRM systems, and digital printing were in their infancies.
So I used an $89 contact database and a database publishing plug-in (XTension) to QuarkXPress 3.1 to personalize my own flyers and sales letters. The fax blast software came free on my Mac. These were my first efforts in Marketing as opposed to selling. The company I worked for didn’t use any technology even remotely this innovative; they mostly advertised in magazines and created product-centric, not prospect-centered brochures.
The week before the event I worked the phone. All of my key influencers and decision makers received a call from me regarding how they could benefit from the product(s) I’d mailed them about. I had different scripts for those I talked to and for voice mails. There IS a difference in what you say to each.
The goal was to set an appointed time for them to come by the booth, or at least learn what days they’d be there.
Regarding using the latest technologies, I wrote an article a little while ago about using pURL technology, digital printing, and the Internet in one-on-one marketing. I used two trade show examples to corroborate my explanations.
When Prospects Arrived at the Booth – How to Make the Trade Show All About Them
When anyone arrives at a trade show booth, most of what should happen is straight-forward selling – Straight-Forward RELEVANT Selling. You’re there showing off your products and/or services. Perhaps you even have new announcements that can increase the excitement for your prospects, as well as you and your support staff in the booth.
REMEMBER – It’s still all about your prospect!
• Talk about how they will benefit
• Talk about their ROI
• Talk about their increased revenues/profits
• Talk about their decreased costs, times-to-market, product turns
• Talk about specific problems/opportunities for them in their business that you know about
If you introduce them to demonstration people explain to that staffer the specifics the prospect is interested in. Most demonstrators come from user businesses and have experience in the types of work your prospect do. A few words from you can cause this staffer to tailor the demo to your own client, even if others are listening as well.
Bring the big guns around. You usually have high up executives, if not the whole C-Suite attending such events. The other sales folk will be clambering for their time as well, but grab whoever you can as often as you can. Introduce your prospects while telling how they will benefit from solving their problem, not by saying you’re trying to sell them something in particular. This makes it all about your customers and the big gun should pick up on that. National and Regional Sales Managers are great for this, and should quickly go with what you’re doing using this type of verbiage. Senior Support, Service, and Training Managers also can advance your case using this “all about the prospect” approach, if you position them to do so.
What to Do When the “Unknown” Prospect Shows
If you know your territory well, you should just about know everyone important in the top 50% of your accounts or so. Your awareness diminishes from there. Therefore, the unknowns will usually be smaller players in your market. They can mean incremental business at least.
Stop. Take the time to ask a few key questions about their interests. At this moment in your booth, they will probably be looking at something. Don’t assume that’s what they want. I look at sports cars every time I go to a car lot. But I’ll never buy one because of practicality issues. I’m there for something else. So might be your new prospect.
Because this is a trade show and you are highlighting your products and/or services, they will probably say, “I’m interested in _______,” and name one of your wares.
DON’T start talking about what they mention.
DO ask why they’re interested. This immediately makes it about them. If they say, “I know I need one,” still ask further until they state the business reason for what they said they need.
Working the Trade Show Blind
By blind I mean that you really don’t know the names of people attending because you’re presenting a new product for a new company, or something similar. Think about the 1-3 major reasons why anyone would use what you’re selling. How will they benefit?
Write one or two questions for each of these reasons and practice asking them until the questions seem natural, not canned. Then start asking those questions to any one who walks up.
For fourteen months during 1999-2000 I worked for a dot.com startup. (For about an hour and a half I was worth a good bit on paper.) We had a new technology that we were sure would be a dot.com smash, but we couldn’t really talk about it without non-disclosures. Not a good trade show scenario.
But we went to a trade show anyway because we had a small Photoshop Plug-in that did some pretty cool things and could lead us to prospects for our future services.
The booth was typical and we accomplished little in the first day. I left in the early afternoon and walked to a nearby Kinkos. I had them make up a simple black and white sign, 3′ x 4′ that read:
We Need to Talk
The next day I put the sign up where everyone could see it. We had a 6-8 times more people come up and start conversations with us than the day before. AND they were actual Photoshop users – many of them bought our inexpensive plug-in. AND a good number of buyers and even chatters worked for companies of size we would talk to over the months to come about our dot.com services.
Of course the dot.com bomb hit and I was a casualty like most everyone else, but I still have contacts from that one simple sign and this 1st 7 Seconds Rule of Relevance Marketing I used in that trade show.
