The Business of Building Buzz in Your Booth
Trade show season is upon us and for those representatives that depend upon them to make their fortunes, I thought I would relate a story that might help spark some sales creativity.
Our company, focused on the financial services vertical, more specifically banks, decided at the last minute to rent a booth at one of the annual banking association shows.
At the time I was working in a new territory for the company building a new client base and relaying references from our client banks that were thrilled with our expertise and skill at eliminating a lot of the technology and regulatory headaches faced by the banking industry.
Approximately two days before the show I got a call asking me to staff the booth for the show with two of my fellow team members.
Two days and many miles later, I arrived early to make sure we got the booth setup and that we had all of the services/equipment we were paying the show company for.
As it seems to go sometimes, we had no carpet, we had no electricity but what we did have in abundance was mass confusion on the part of the show company related to what we had ordered, what was needed and when anything could get done.
Even allowing the extra time the show opened before we were able to work out all of the details and get our show strategy in place, but on the bright side, we did have a bowl full of candy.
Our last minute booth selection put us along the back wall, in a corner, that was far away from the sessions the bankers were attending. You had to want to go back there to find us. If you did manage to find the row, the massive stretch of concrete down one side convinced some to forego our isle and the exhibiting vendors on it, altogether.
Doing their part, the show sponsors staged raffles and other events almost every hour to keep the show patrons engaged, the challenge for us was that none of the sponsored events were close to our booth, so far from seeing a traffic bump each event was in fact a net drain on participants in our area.
We realized pretty quickly that to have any chance of making the show a success, we were going to need to generate some excitement to get patrons flocking to our side of the exhibit hall.
Plan A was to raffle off an expensive iPod and to place a hawker out in the aisle redirecting traffic to the booth. We later expanded this by sending two hawkers all over the show floor talking to and collecting business cards from any interested attendee.
The iPod drew interest at the time because no one else was doing it, not the case today, but even then that was not a compelling reason to get them to our booth, it was only a strong enough draw if they were in the immediate area.
Plan B inadvertently came to me while I was driving around trying to find a place to park for the event. I saw a group of 8 or 10 people having fun rolling around on Segways on some sort of tour of the city.
While at the show, I called the tourist board and found the number to the Segway Tours company, gave them a call and effectively negotiated a package including the Segway and an instructor to give lessons in and around our booth while we were at the show.
The Segway was a fantastic draw. We had lines of bankers at our booth waiting, working with the instructor or riding around the large concrete expanse around our booth.
When one banker would see another banker he knew riding around the show floor, he would head to our booth to get his turn.
The show turned out to be a success, with a lot of leads, a pile of new contacts, and a ton of awareness for who we were. For better or worse, over the next few weeks as I traveled around on follow up meetings I was introduced as the Segway guy.
The year that followed that event proved to be the best year to date for our company. I can’t tie all of our success to that one trade show, but I can say that the show was the spark that gave us an opportunity to demonstrate how the life of a banker would be better with us than without us.
Got a success story or tip? I want to read it. Any wild failures that led to a great lesson learned? I would like to read that, too.
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