How to Get More Return from Trade Shows

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom.

[0:21] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox, today day sharing ideas and insights around trade shows and how we can make them a much more successful vehicle to creating full funnel freedom. The Full Funnel Freedom Podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. Sandler in Calgary supports our clients to create consistent, repeatable, scalable sales teams. To find out more and discover if Sandler in Calgary might be a good fit to support you and your sales team, go to hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler.

[0:55] Trade shows can be a great place to fill the funnel. However, they are often misinterpreted by salespeople as selling events when they're actually prospecting events. Now, a lot of trade shows have shifted online over the course of the last few years. The insights I'll be sharing today still do apply in an online environment, but as we're seeing more restrictions ease and more or individuals are traveling for business, we are expecting that we will see more and more trade shows go back to being in person. And trade shows are expensive. Just between the.

[1:35] Renting the floor space, then whatever your booth or exhibit is going to look like, the design of that, the shipping of that, getting all of our people to the show, hotels, airplanes, food, etc. A lot of expenses go into a trade show, and we want to get a return on our investment. I spoke to the VP of sales in Calgary once who had exhibited for 20 years at a specific, very well-known large trade show and had zero business to show from it. So of course I was like, why are you continuing to do this? The booth space alone, and they were getting like the smallest booth, is like $12,000 a show. Why would you do that over and over and over again? And they said, because we believe that we have to be present or we're going to get lost. Well, you know, that may be true, but there's lots of other ways that we can stand out without having to burn a whole pile of money going to a trade show where we're getting no results. However, implement the insights from today's episode.

[2:38] You're going to get some results from your trade show or more results from your next trade show. So as I mentioned earlier in the episode, trade shows are prospecting events, not selling events. And when we are prospecting, all we are looking to do is to get an appointment.

[2:53] That's it. All we're trying to do is get an appointment. We have a very, very limited time when someone stops by our booth. Again, virtual booth, in-person booth, doesn't matter. We've got a very limited amount of time. And this is not the time for one of our salespeople to be talking about pricing or implementation because we don't know if this person is even a prospect or a suspect at this point. And we need to get our salespeople to qualify them. So what we want our salespeople to think of is 5, 30, 90. So they have five seconds to engage with someone who stops at the booth. They've got 30 seconds to understand a little bit about the reason why they stopped and.

[3:36] And 90 seconds to confirm another conversation, whether that's on the phone or in person before thanking that person who stopped by and moving on to the next conversation. It might sound a little bit strange, like why would you let someone go? Well, we don't actually know if they're a prospect yet. And there are a lot of tire kickers at trade shows. There's a lot of people who are just looking for free stuff. They're looking to enter all the draws they can get into, maybe kick some tires, maybe get some free consulting. but they're really not qualified to buy from us. So 53090 gives our salespeople a guideline to very quickly call out the suspects from the prospects. And for the prospects, they get a time in the calendar when both of them are expecting to have a conversation. I worked with a cabinet maker here in Calgary before the big home show, and they had a book where you write your name down if you want to have a further conversation.

[4:33] And so when we started our conversation, the goal was to get 30 names in the book over the course of the three days to have five in-home consultations and to close one piece of business. So 30 names in the book, five in-home consultations and closed one piece of business. They left the show with over 75 names in the book. They confirmed 26 in-home consultations and they ended up closing 18 pieces of business and using the 53090 and some of the other things that I'll be sharing with you in this episode.

[5:13] So very, very easy to exceed your goals. By the way, if you have them, that's a key question we ask all of our clients when they come to us for support with going to a trade show is we will say, what are your specific measurable goals for that event in terms of conversations and meetings booked?

[5:34] And often the answer is, I'm not really sure, or I think it would be this, or it would be great if.

[5:39] If we have specific, measurable, observable goals, we have something to track to. So tip number three, instill in our salespeople that it's not about us and our stuff. It's about the person who stopped at our booth. For example, why did they stop? I have no idea. So let's encourage our salespeople to ask them. They might be fishing for giveaways, as I mentioned earlier, or they might actually have a real problem and they saw your booth and they thought, hey, maybe this is someone who can help me solve my problem. So always want to acknowledge and appreciate that they stopped. So we might encourage our salespeople to say, thanks for stopping. What prompted you to stop? Prospect might say, well, I'm looking to solve this issue and say, well, hey, thanks for sharing that. Would you give me an example of what that looks like right now in your business or at your home? Is it worth fixing? And then this is where our suspect, who might become a prospect, is thinking, oh, they're going to try to close me. So what we want to do is transition and take away that pressure and anxiety by saying something like.

[6:49] I'm really glad you stopped by, but this is probably not the right place to have a conversation about whether or not we might be able to help you out with this fixing this problem i'm sure you've also got a lot of other things that you want to go see at the show how about we get a time in the calendar in the next couple of weeks to talk and now we can very quickly transition into setting up that appointment confirming a time when both our salesperson and this prospect are actually expecting to have the call and we have avoided having a salesperson do a bunch of features and benefit dumping or getting into free consulting because they got excited because someone said, hey, I've got a problem that I think you can solve. And the salesperson went, oh, I got a live one. And they just sold them. They talked themselves out of a sale.

[7:35] The last tip might make you feel a little uncomfortable, and that is we want to make attendees earn our product information. Plenty of trade show booths. All the brochures are right at the front. If I'm walking by, I can just grab one, stuff it in my pocket, never have an interaction with one of the salespeople. And for us, that is a lost opportunity. So what we recommend to all of our clients is if you're going to do brochures, take one One or two brochures, let's say you've got two products, you've got two brochures, and tape them at the back of your booth. Best practice is a U-shaped booth, something that invites someone to come in. We don't want to have the table across the front of the booth. I've seen several trade show booths look like that with salespeople standing on the other side, almost like a guard at the gate. I was like, I don't really want to talk to that person. So we want to make our prospects earn our product information. So take the brochure, put it at the back of the booth, tape it to the booth. Because if someone is motivated enough to walk to the back of the booth and start trying to pick up this brochure, great time for our salesperson to come on over and say, hey, appreciate you stopping by. So you're looking at our brochure, kind of curious what prompted you to stop.

[8:50] And now we have an opportunity to figure out if they're a suspect or a prospect. And if they're a prospect, give them something. Give them something. This triggers reciprocity. We give them something. They're likely to give us something back in return. May not be their business. This is not a magic wand where you give a brochure and magically a salesperson is going to close the sale after the trade show. But.

[9:16] By giving our prospect a brochure after they've given us some information, we create a little bit more of a bond, create a little bit more rapport, and the next conversation between that prospect and one of our salespeople is likely to go a little bit smoother. So when we're thinking about trade shows to review, number one is mindset for our salespeople. This is a prospecting opportunity, not a selling opportunity. All we're trying to do is get appointments in the calendar. And back earlier in my career, we had a series of trade shows that we went to because all of the associations that we belong to happen to have their trade shows or big conferences in June. And we had a contest as to who could get the most qualified appointments in their calendar at each show. And then we actually had an overall because there was a small group of us who went to every one of the shows. and it was highly motivating because we were focused on the right activity. We weren't focused on how many business cards did we get? We weren't focused on how many draws did we enter? We were very focused on how could we put real opportunities at the top of our funnel that would eventually roll down. So you may want to consider a contest with your salespeople as number of qualified meetings in their calendar for conversations outside of the trade show.

[10:37] Second tip remember it's five seconds to find out why someone stopped 30 seconds to understand a little bit about the reason why they stopped and then 90 seconds to confirm an appointment and then politely end the conversation and move on to the next one again it's about them not about us. We want to find out why did they stop, qualify them a little bit, and then we also want to make the attendees earn our product information. No free giveaways, no free consulting. If we're running a giveaway because we want to get business cards, great, that's marketing. But if we want to have real prospecting conversations, we want to make our attendees earn our product information. This has been the How to Succeed podcast. I've been your host, Hamish Knox, sharing ideas and insights on how to make your trade shows more successful. The Full Funnel Freedom Podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary, hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler. Thanks for listening. Rate and review, like and share. If you do want to become a guest or get involved as an advertiser on the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, email podcast at fullfunnelfreedom.com. Until we connect on the next episode, go create Full Funnel Freedom. Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[12:07] Music.