Trade Show Exhibitors:
7 ways to ensure success at the show

1. Keep your customers top-of-mind. What solutions can your company offer to solve their problems? What benefits do you offer over your closest competitors? The better you know your customers, the better you’re able to design your booth, promotions and hand-outs to attract your audience.

2. Maintain your own direct-mail list. While you can rent exhibitor lists from trade show organizers, you can’t be sure how many are actually qualified buyers. Carefully target your pre-show promotions to ensure you reach prospects that can use your products.

3. Think beyond the show. Trade shows are springboards to making quality contacts. If you mail to your customer base prior to the show, and some aren’t attending, you’ve still added a building block to your business relationship.

4. Limit free giveaways. Free drawings, for example, may help you collect business cards to build your mailing list. However, freebies are a traffic trap that congest your booth and scare away serious contacts who need information on how your company can solve their problems. Again, there’s no guarantee that you’re building a quality database.

5. Make your booth unique. You have roughly 3 seconds to grab someone’s attention at a trade show. Make sure pictures are large enough to be seen from the aisles and will draw your prospects into the booth. Don’t make your booth hard to get in and out of—make it open and inviting so people can easily get needed information. Draw people into your booth with benefit-oriented statements (Here’s how our product will solve this issue for you), not "Widget Company is the Best Company Ever.)

6. Bring educated booth staff. Once prospects enter your booth, they’ve made a time commitment to learning more. Don’t waste their time—get them to the appropriate person who can answer their questions. If there are too many layers ("greeters" who don’t have product knowledge), attendees lose interest and will move on. Don’t put chairs in the booth because staff who are sitting look unengaged and passersby may not want to disturb them. Rotate staff so the person at the booth is always fresh and ready to talk to the next attendee as if they are the first one of the day.

7. Close the Sale. Have a review meeting after the show to discuss successes and future opportunities. Divvy up leads and make sure you get a status report from each person as to what happened to that lead. Follow-up within two weeks of the show or the attendee will not remember your company. And, make a personal contact—none of this "Dear Trade Show Attendee…" They took the time to visit you—make the time to follow-up with specific information on what products and services they were interested in. Jot down something they said to you at the booth to jog your memory about your conversation.

5 Basics of
Successful
Exhibiting

• Plan before you go
• Attract the attention of the RIGHT prospects
• Project a professional image
• Communicate your offer—instantly
• Keep your exhibit simple. You want to generate interest in your
products and services, but your exhibit can’t do it all. It’s simply the
attention-grabber (with high-quality photos, an open, environment,
quick product recognition, etc.)