Making the most of your trade show visit

Telemarketing & Call Center Solutions, May 1998 by Tehrani, Nadji

Meet The Visionaries, Brainstorm, Return With Lots Of New Ideas, And Find Out What Your Competition Is UP To!

The above are only some of the benefits you can gain by attending a trade show, provided adequate planning is done to make the most of your visit.

It has been said that if you return with only one good idea, the cost of attending a trade show is justifiable. It has also been said that ideas without action are worthless. So, if you don't think you will act on the new ideas, there is no point attending a trade show! New ideas will lead to new products and solutions, and new products and solutions (properly marketed) will lead to new market share and new revenue. I learned in an MBA course that progressive companies are those in which 50 percent or more of gross revenue comes from new products. In short, companies will not prosper for long if they are not led by a visionary who can conceive new ideas (which can be inspired by attending trade shows). The reason is simple: as competition attempts to grab more and more of your market share, you need a fresh infusion of new products to drive back that competition, allowing you to prosper with higher margins.

Over the years, I have attended countless trade shows where, sadly, I have found few people who truly make the most of their show attendance. I can separate show attendees into three categories: 1) There are those who attend a trade show and do nothing with what they learn. 2) There are those who flounder at a trade show and return with few, if any, ideas of substance to do something with. 3) And, there are those who do everything right and return with plenty of WORTHWHILE NEW IDEAS and plenty of contacts gained through aggressive networking. They also benefit from experts' information gleaned from seminar presentations at such conventions. This third category also puts their newly gained knowledge to work when they return from the convention.

Unscrambling The Nam

Over the years, I have done a great deal of thinking about how to help attendees get the most from trade shows. My concept, which was intriguing enough to prompt a Harvard professor of marketing call me to express his agreement with the theory, is called the "1/3 Rule." Here is the concept behind the "rule":

About the only way you can make the most of your attendance at a convention is to establish a set of objectives before attending a show. These could be meeting a maximum number of exhibitors and FINDING OUT WHAT IS NEW or researching to see what the competition is up to and/or what products could either render your products obsolete or substantially enhance your business. An equally worthwhile objective is to learn what new concepts or findings are presented by industry leaders in the conferences.

The 1/3 Rule

1) 1/3 of knowledge at a trade show comes from attending the seminars.

2) 1/3 of knowledge comes from visiting every relevant exhibitor of interest to you, asking them what is new, discussing with them your major problems or challenges, and asking for their guidance.

3) 1/3 of knowledge comes from networking with your peers, with the speakers and the industry visionaries.

It is vitally important to notice that the information that you will gain from one of the above enumerated 1/3s will be different from the information you will gain from the next 1/3, and so on. In other words, in the conferences, you will learn from the experiences of the speaker, who is considered to be an industry expert. Speakers can inform you not only about the theoretical concept, but also from a personal view. In the second case, you will learn from the experience of a vendor of a technology or service (i.e., CTI technology or outsourcing teleservices). While you will learn a different perspective from the vendors, the information learned in the conferences will be complementary. Last but not least, the information you gain by networking with your colleagues by asking, "How did you solve this problem?" will bring yet another perspective that is totally different from the above mentioned two perspectives. In this case, you are learning from the firsthand experience of a colleague, who, no doubt, has gone this road before. Given the enormous cost of capital investment involved, one cannot afford to simply learn from the experiences of a colleague without having the benefits of checks and balances by virtue of learning different sets of techniques and solutions from the first and second part of the 1/3 rule.

Exhibitor's Point Of View

The exhibitors have a totally different agenda. Obviously, they come to the convention to sell their goods and services and meet qualified prospects (attendees). While exhibit marketing has proven over and over again to be the most cost-effective way to market a product or service, the management of many companies still regards exhibiting at a trade show a non-essential part of their marketing program. I have come to realize this fact by observing many ill-advised marketing managers simply eliminate trade shows from their marketing plan as soon as there is an economic adversity in the marketplace. This is by far the most unwise decision any marketing manager, director or vice president can make! Given that trade show marketing is indeed the most cost-effective way to market and given that in bad economic times a company loses between 50 to 75 percent of its customers, it becomes rather obvious that cutting back trade show exhibits, advertising and promotion budgets makes no sense at all. Yet time and time again, over 80 percent of marketing managers do just that, thus there are record bankruptcies during recessions and bad economic times. We have learned that to be successful, you need not be a copycat. Following others' success requires vision and above all, often going against the grain. In other words, the best time to leapfrog over your competition is to market as aggressively as possible when the competition does not.