and be prepared for the amount of time it’s going to take – or call in the experts to help ease the load!
Are you excited?
Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming after all is a form of planning.
—Gloria Steinem, writer, lecturer, political activist and feminist organiser
If you’re not excited yet (even if it’s nervously excited), then we’d suggest closing this book and handing it all over to someone else who does get excited by trade shows and who can manage your exhibition ambitions for you. Quite often there’s an assumption that everyone loves doing trade shows and everyone knows how to do them. That’s simply not the case and for some people just hearing that statement can come as a relief. Trade shows are hard work, physically, mentally and emotionally both in the run-up to and during the show itself, and they’re not for everyone. If you don’t enjoy the process, if you’re not buzzing on build day and enthusiastic about all the new contacts that you’re planning to meet, then visitors will see it in how you and your stand are presented. It will look forced and contrived and visitors won’t feel welcomed or comfortable engaging with you. If strategically trade shows are important to your business but you’re not the right person to project manage it, you have options, either within your own team or through outsourcing to partners who can organise absolutely everything for you. As Richard Branson has said many times, one of the qualities of a great leader is surrounding yourself with people who are better than you at the things you can’t do.
If you’re nervously excited, that’s great and something you should definitely embrace. The excitement will give you the motivation and energy to get you through and the nervousness will help you consider all the elements to make well-balanced decisions. One thing that might help at this stage is understanding what specifically is making you nervous. Is it the fact you will need to justify spend to your manager and you’re not sure how? Have you got a very functional product or service and you’re worried about how to create impact and attract attention? Is this your first time and you’re worrying about everything? All of these are perfectly understandable concerns, but none are insurmountable with some planning, some time to think and a bit of friendly advice (all of which you can find between these pages).
Summary
So, while this book is all about how fantastic trade shows can be in boosting your sales pipeline, we’ve been around long enough to know that for many businesses it’s just not the right tactic or the right time to help them achieve their long-term goals. As enthusiastic as you may be about heading off to Las Vegas with your mega-stand in tow, if the team back at the ranch haven’t yet nailed how they’re going to actually make your product in any great quantity, you may just fall at the first hurdle. Here are a few things in summary from this chapter to help sense check that trade shows will work effectively for your organisation:
• Consider your organisation’s objectives for the next 3–5 years and identify what role (if any) trade shows play in reaching the right audience to achieve those aims.
• Be honest about how ready your business is with the product/service you’re looking to sell and the capacity at which you can produce it. You don’t want to create more problems for yourself by over-promising to potential new customers.
• Review your customers’ readiness to buy your product and consider what else you might to do to help them realise they have a problem to which your product/service is the answer.
• If you know you have some gaps in the finer details of your product launch but are keen to exhibit to build momentum, make sure you have refined the answers for all the tricky questions visitors might ask about when and how they can get their hands on it.
• Review your whole marketing plan in the context of how trade shows maximise the other tactics you’re using and make sure you have alignment across the core objectives, messaging and actions. Trade shows rarely work in isolation and are most powerful when all the different levers work together to promote each other.
• Be honest about the amount of time, money and resource you’ll need to execute a trade show brilliantly from the start and where you don’t have enough of any consider how you can find more internally or get the external expertise you’ll need.
• Listen to your gut – if you’re not feeling butterflies, either from excitement or anxiety, think about passing the project management onto someone else. Trade shows are tough enough without feeling as though every decision, every form and every day on the show floor is a chore – it will show in every aspect you deliver if your heart’s not really in it!
With this book still firmly in your grasp, even though it may be with some nervous tension, over the following three chapters your exhibition journey truly begins, and we are here for you all the way. As mentioned in the introduction, although we have presented it as Planning, Implementation and Evaluation, it’s not a directly linear process and there are some elements in Evaluation that you’ll need to consider as part of your Planning. So, our advice, if you can, is to get to the end of the book before you start on your journey and everything will make more sense!
Follow your dreams, let them guide you. Who knows where they may take you.
—Nico J. Genes, Magnetic Reverie
PART II
P.I.E.
CHAPTER 3
PLANNING
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
—Abraham Lincoln
If you’ve decided having read the first two chapters that trade shows have a strategic role to play in meeting your organisation’s objectives, you’re probably eager to just get on the trade show floor and start talking to all those great new contacts. Hang fire though, great results from trade shows don’t happen by accident and the more you can put into the planning and preparation for your events, the more you are likely to get out. Just as Abraham Lincoln knew the most effective way of chopping his tree down was to invest the time to get his tools right, the more time you can dedicate to getting all your trade show tools in shape, the more likely you are to attract the right kind of visitors to your stand, and actually recognise them when they arrive.
Why visitors visit
Before we get too deeply into, and too excited by, your own planning, we want to challenge you to flip your thinking into your customer’s world for a moment – the more you can ground everything you do in solving your customer’s problem, the more likely you are to have a meaningful conversation with them. Visitors aren’t going to engage in a conversation with you because you like your product or service, or to do you a favour – they’ll keep talking because you’ve listened and identified their needs and are showing how you can help solve them. However, here’s the science bit that shows from research the reasons why visitors attend trade shows in priority order:
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