17 Tips to Optimize B2B Industrial Trade Shows

This is an excerpt of a post which is available in full on the Consilium Blog.

It's trade show planning season

In much of the industrial B2B world it's trade show season - not the shows themselves which will roll around in the Autumn, but rather planning season.

As you allocate massive (or even minor) portions of your budget to shows, it's worth challenging some traditional assumptions. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you not to exhibit because trade shows are dead - in fact they remain important to both manufacturers and buyers. After all, even the internet types who conduct business by email and text message, and who predict the demise of shows....still look forward to their pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show.

Although shows aren't going away, buyer expectations are changing. Your expectations should as well - and your execution must.

One important note - this post is focused on shows which are structured around lead generation rather than writing orders on the floor.

It's not about leads!

If that's your focus, you'll fail. Crazy you think? Well, let's unpack it.

Who cares about leads? Only you and your team. Nobody comes to the show excited to become someone's lead. They come to discover; to learn; to foster relationships; and to compare you with your competitors.

Aren't you likely to be more successful helping them satisfy their priorities rather than imposing yours on them?

Now, rest easy. I get it. You can't leave the show empty handed. You're putting a bunch of money into it and you've got to justify the expense with more than just the opportunity to refresh old friendships and plant your flag.

Of course.

But you don't carry leads on your balance sheet - particularly leads which close at a very low rate. The yardstick for trade shows is revenue. So let's start from the beginning. How can you leverage new tools to simultaneously provide an experience that will be far more satisfying for prospects AND actually engage new and previous contacts in ways around the show which will move them further through their buying process.

There are three elements to this approach:

1. Provide information in the context of their business (not your newest features)
2. Make it easy for them to get the information they want, in the format they want
3. Infer and ask what's important to them - set the cookie (note that international trade shows may require some data collection adaptations)

Expertise not badge swipers or "booth babes"

Remember back in the old days when a sales rep took handwritten notes on some sort of lead form? Collecting the lead's contact details required a discussion of sorts which offered the sales rep a chance to bond a bit and gather sales insights - all while collecting contact information.

Then badge scanners came along. So now your sales rep tries to have a bit of conversation while scanning / swiping the visitor's show badge. If your booth is busy, that's a perfunctory transaction. If it's not busy, likely the person having the conversation scribbles a couple poorly written cryptic notes - after all, it's probably in another rep's territory.

In neither case does the visitor receive any value - just the vague promise of follow up and the hope that they win who/when follow up lottery.

So why can't they scan themselves?

Oh, that's right, you need an expert to explain what you're showing in the booth. Except your expert may not be; and talking about your gadgets is almost certainly going to overlook what business value they would realized.

So let's take this from the top. Instead of selecting service packages from the show manual, let's look ateffective approaches which lie at the intersection of technology and changing buyer behaviors. These will help you optimize your show results....to help prospects understand how you might make their business lives better, and coach them through their buying journey at a pace that is comfortable for them.

17 Key tips to drive better trade show results

Find the full text here.

1. Set a pre-show goals

2. Build your booth, communications & promotion around 3-5 key business issues for your persona

3. Build a show microsite

4. Create a great show "offer"

5. Effectively segment your pre-show emails

6. Connect with those who "map your booth"

7. Schedule some events around industry topics

8. Lean your lead management process

9. Convert the shadow leads

10. Improve your lead capture

11. Make your booth interactive

12. Make it newsworthy

13. Make it social

14. Collect data to understand how your booth worked

15. Improve & enhance follow up activities

16. Junk lead alchemy

17. Use data to plan the next show

Symptom of a larger issue?

As we finish, let's talk about the higher level takeaway here. If at any of these points you thought to yourself "That would be great, but" then you've got some other challenges to address. Maybe IT controls your contact database or website. Maybe your site isn't mobile responsive, much less capable of optimization. Perhaps you don't use a CRM and haven't implemented marketing automation. Maybe your sales & marketing teams can't agree on shifting to a buyer perspective instead of just pitching gadgets.

You've got a choice. You can continue to invest in the show and manage it the way you always have. You'll comfort yourself with the fact that it's important to show the flag anyway. Or, you can acknowledge that if you've got gaps around trade show execution that inhibit performance, then certainly the broader sales & marketing effort is also compromised. And you can commit to fix it.

Would you tell a customer that this year you'll fix a small quality problem in their equipment but the others will have to wait until next year? I hope note. So why take that approach in your interaction with them simply because of internal conflicts, silos and inertia?

Think maybe it's time to take a different approach to your industrial trade shows? Let's schedule a 20 minute call to discuss your goals.