How To Dominate Your Next Trade Show

Tradeshows… they are the love and hate of a lot of business owners. There is a lot of foot traffic and you either get the opportunity to create a lot of connections quickly, or you spend a lot of money with little results. Trade shows are a lot of work and it’s not as easy as setting up a booth and going.

The whole intention of a trade show is to get more business.

People -> Value Creation -> Conversations -> Meetings -> Contracts

1. Get on the stage - if you can

This is HUGE! If you can create the opportunity to speak on stage do whatever it takes to grab that bull by the horns. Speaking on stage sets you apart from your competition and forms you as a “thought leader” in your industry.

Create A Compelling Topic

Create a topic that is compelling and delivers new facts or a bit of controversy. It should have a call to action (CTA) in the topic summary and one at the end of the speaking engagement.

Most breakout sessions and main stage events only give 30-45 minutes on stage. This must be a high impact with value to the audience and clarity on what using your product or service can provide the audience if they choose to do business with you after the event.

In the topic introduction, which is usually presented before the audience attends, there should be a “takeaway” that entices the audience to know what they will get from listening to the topic. This will help to “sell” your session above the others that the people can attend.

How to Get On Stage

Many trade shows will allow stage presence for a fee above the standard trade show booth. It is always worth asking the person organizing the event if there is availability to speak. Also, ask the organizers what their preferential topics are and be willing to be flexible with your speaking topic. If the event is full for speakers ask about potential next opportunities that they host or if they know of any other upcoming events that are similar to theirs.

Why Being On Stage is Valuable

Rarely do you get an opportunity as golden as being on stage. The undivided attention of anywhere from the high 10s to thousands of people is better than any blog or other social media post. It is quick and worth its cost. Depending on your product or service it may only take one or two sales to pay back the cost of speaking.

Related Post: The Time No One Showed Up To My Event

My Company’s Experience of Being On Stage

As The Leading Sales Coach, I first approached the event planners of RevYYC with a speaking pitch. I wanted to use my compelling talk: Go From Handshake to $100K in 20 Minutes. Unfortunately, one of their key sponsors at the event was a sales training organization, and the topic sounded too similar to their sponsor's. Thankfully, the CEO of Change Your Results!, Shawn Shewchuk, had a compelling talk about the transition from going from solo-business owner to business leader as you grow and hire employees. This topic resonated with the event planning team, and after several emails and phone calls, they agreed to put us on the schedule.

2. Train Your Staff For the Proper Sell

The day before the event we called our staff into a meeting and asked them two questions: 1) What do we hope to get out of the day? and 2) What call to action (CTA) are we requesting on that day to drive sales?

Create a Concise and Consistent Elevator Pitch

Our team spent 30 minutes discussing our elevator pitch and our talk track. Together we had everyone on the same page for cohesiveness. We wanted everyone’s talk track to be the same. It needed to be high impact, slightly vague, and would allow the conversation to naturally develop into how we can help the person we were speaking to.

Related Post: The Shameless Ask

We tailored our elevator pitch to the people that we knew were going to be in the room. RevYYC was hosted by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and focused on driving small business growth. We developed our elevator pitch as, “We assist small business owners in delivering their highest revenue results in a shorter amount of time than if they were to create it by themselves”.

When people began to ask us further details such as what amount of results do we provide, in what amount of time can we do that, we would turn the conversation around and began to ask the prospect specific questions about their business, who are their target clients, and where they would like to be within the next year or two. 

You Are Pressured By Time

We knew we were going to be limited by time in two ways: 1) people weren’t there to be engaged in long conversations, and 2) we didn’t want to talk to any single person too long in the event we had a new prospect stopping by. We wanted to ensure everyone received personal attention, and we wanted to maximize the potential prospects we received. We told our staff to get the conversation started, then immediately get their contact information, staple the business card to a sheet of paper with a quick note on the conversation, then we could do a more customized follow-up phone call and email after the event.

3. Create Excitement and Get Assertive

Trade show attendees walking past and will typically give you less than one minute of their time. They glance to see if your booth is compelling enough to give their attention and they will carry on.

Create Excitement with Your Booth

If you can, create something unique with your booth that provides the character of your company and entices people to test your product or service, or gives the people a reason to visit. In hindsight, this was a miss with our booth. We created a standard booth, but we needed something more. Because we are a service organization with online products there is little that we can have people “sample”, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing of value that we can still provide. Some examples I thought of afterward were a cell phone charging station, a social media picture booth, a sign up 15-minute business assessment, or something as easy as a one-on-one Snapchat set up and introduction to the app, including adding us as their first “friend”.

The main goal is to get people to come inside the booth and see enough value that they will either return, as in the case of a signup session, or willing to wait, as in the case of a sample. If you are providing samples, don't just hand them out. As you give them out explain the ingredients, the manufacturing process, or the story about how the company came to be. People will forget trying out the product, they will have a harder time forgetting the connection that was received when they were handed the product.

Related Post: The Strength of Weak Networks

Get Assertive, Sweetly

This is where it is best to learn the difference between assertiveness and aggression. People will be turned off by an aggressive booth host before even approaching. They can sense it and will see how the people ahead of them are reacting to the booth. However, gifts and candy are always well received. We had our staff stand outside the booth with a bowl of chocolates and offered them to the people passing. As they took the chocolate then we would give our pitch.

We had two talk tracks: one before our CEO spoke, and the second after he spoke. Before Shawn went up to speak, our conversation was focused entirely on driving people to the talk. We knew that if we could get as many people to the breakout session as possible, more people would attend. We also knew that the more people that heard Shawn speak the greater our chances of having them come back to learn more about our company and potentially request a meeting. After Shawn went to speak, anyone that passed by was then engaged in conversation using our elevator pitch, from above. 

4. Follow Up With Everyone

The intention of the trade show day was to get as many meetings after the trade show as possible. We were lucky after Shawn’s talk because that spurred a few people to ask for a meeting on their own accord. However. we still had a lot of business cards and conversations.

Phone Every Business Card Received

Everyone that left us a business card received a phone call from our team asking if they attended the talk and a few questions about any notes that were provided from the sheet of paper. They were also put in our database and received an email with the link to our free e-book. We also asked the Calgary Chamber of Commerce to provide the same link to all the attendees to help maximize our exposure. This then drives more people to receive our material, and therefore more people that we can personally follow up with.

Related Post: How Often Should I Contact My Customer?

The event was almost two weeks ago and out of the 300 attendees, we brought on four new clients and have many more meetings still planned, as well as a new list of people for future events and other services when we’re ready to expand our service offerings.

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Get Selling More

Kim is an international speaker, two-time author, and The Leading Sales Coach for entrepreneurs and small businesses. As Vice President of the Change Your Results! team, she helps companies create a sales process and ask the right questions at the right time in order to immediately achieve consistent revenue streams in only a short time.

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