Is Your Booth Experience a Big Bummer?

Warning: This post qualifies as a professional rant. 

Before running Boardroom Insiders, I spent about a decade working in the events industry. My job was to help large technology companies get more out of their event investments by engaging attendees in more targeted and relevant ways. For example, I would help them figure out how to segment event audiences so they could give their most important accounts a white-glove, VIP experience, while also delivering compelling experiences for rank-and-file accounts, where there was not as much at stake. Treating your most important customers differently from rank-and-file prospects just makes sense, right?

Figuring out how to do this in the Exhibit Hall was always tough. Attendees have become somewhat desensitized to the often circus-like tactics, the swag, and all the digital bells-and-whistles that companies employ in their booths. Driving booth traffic is a tough gig these days; some attendees are wary of the exhibit hall because they don’t want to be sold to. Event producers, in turn, festoon exhibit halls with buffets and open bars, in hopes of driving more traffic to their sponsors, who have spent gazillions (not an official statistic) of dollars and staff hours trying to come up with something creative, eye-catching and relevant. I know, because I spent a decade sitting in on those meetings and I saw the budgets. 

So I was pretty surprised earlier this year when I attended two back-to-back conferences focused on the disciplines of sales and marketing. I was eager to see the sponsors strut their stuff, because, well, they were sales and marketing companies, so they should be better at this stuff than anybody, right? Wrong, wrong wrong. 

I spent a lot of time going from booth to booth, trying to find out what these companies did, mainly because I am a curious person but also because I wanted to see what kind of cool swag I could bring home to impress my jaded teenagers. 

I observed the following:

1. Very few asked me who I was, what company I was with or what problem I was trying to solve.
2. Few even slyly looked at my badge to figure out if I was someone worth talking to.
3. The only question they asked was, “Do you mind if I scan your badge?” Afterward, I was usually given whatever swag item they had on display, or was entered into a contest to win the latest gadget. At one booth I was talked into climbing a ladder and playing Plinko. But the engagement always ended there.

Now, I no longer work in the events business, but this summer we have been publishing a lot of content on our blog about how companies can leverage industry events (many of which are coming up later this summer and in the early fall) to engage CXO decision makers. Preparing people to have successful meetings with CXOs is our bailiwick after all, and CXOs tend to go to events, which is why they are a focus for us and our customers. 

So while this is a bit off-topic for us, I wanted to raise the issue of these major booth fails in hopes that you, our sales and marketing customers who invest gazillions in events every year, might benefit. Because in the end, your booth could be your company's very first introduction to some very important people. CIOs who attend Gartner ITxpo for example, have told us that contrary to what you might think, they DO walk the exhibit hall because their jobs require that they keep up with the latest emerging technologies and vendors. This presents a golden opportunity for exhibitors—but you could end up doing more harm than good if a corporate CIO’s experience in your booth is as disappointing as mine. 

Most companies are talking today about the importance of engagement. But this summer, their booths seem to be all about badge scans and little more. Don’t let this be you.