Hey, sales and marketing manager(s), have you evaluated your team’s trade show performance recently?  If not, it’s time to get out and walk the floor, work the booth and listen and learn. 

In my own B2B experience, trade shows were important components of an overall program to build thought-leadership, strengthen industry and influencer relations, and of course, generate leads.  It’s too bad that many companies flush valuable money and time right down the proverbial toilet, by failing to execute properly on the show floor and throughout the event. 

You can avoid this problem by paying close attention to this short-list of trade show best practices:

#1:  Who’s Staffing the Booth?

The booth staff must be knowledgeable, well trained on your firm’s offerings and capable of conducting professional floor demonstrations/explanations as well as be competent at probing for qualifying questions.  Many organizations mistakenly put an inexperienced and mismatched crew on the floor, often bowing to internal pressures to avoid "booth duty" from more experienced sales and marketing professionals.  This is a mistake.

The floor staff should include a mix of senior and junior associates, as well as a cross-section of sales, product management and technical professionals.  The goal is to ensure that visitors to your booth are treated professionally and ideally, engaged for follow-up on potential projects.  Fielding the right booth staff is essential to floor success.

#2: Who’s Managing the Booth?

While ensuring that the booth is up and functioning and that necessary services are in place are all responsibilities of the company’s Trade Show Manager, managing the floor staff is the responsibility of sales and marketing management.  The Booth Manager must manage schedules and breaks, to ensure that visitors are properly served and to keep the staff focused on their floor responsibilities.

I encourage firms to rotate this responsibility between Sales Managers, usually opting for the territory manager where the show is located.  Everyone working the floor is responsible to the Booth Manager during show hours, and expectations for support should be communicated in advance of the event.

#3: What’s Our Message?

For a fascinating experience in communications, walk up to almost any booth on a trade show floor, read the signage and then ask several of the booth staff these simple questions:

-What do you do?
-What’s new here?
-Who are your competitors on the floor?
-Why are you better than your competitors?

Most of the time, you will receive unintelligible, cliché filled answers with little substance.  The more people you ask the in the same booth, the more confused you are likely to become.

A key to trade show success is ensuring that your entire staff is educated on the core messages well in advance of the show.  I encourage clients to develop a simple, clear message map as a supplement to an internal "Show Planning Guide" that provides the basic answers to each of the above questions as well as other important show message points.  The message points should be reviewed at a pre-show group meeting, and the Booth Manager and senior representative from Marketing are responsible for monitoring floor discussions to ensure that they are being used throughout the event.

#4: What do we need to know from show visitors?

For a fleeting moment in time, you might have the attention and interest of someone that controls a large budget and has a need for your products or services.  Or you are engaged in an animated discussion with someone gathering information for a competitive report.  Or you are talking with someone that has no ability or interest in buying what you are selling, but they liked the new flat-panel screen in your booth or they wanted a t-shirt.  Which one is it? 

Next to ensuring that everyone understands the core message points for the show, teaching your floor staff the right qualifying questions as well as how to capture that information is critical.   This is where the rubber meets the road at trade shows, and the better you are at qualifying and classifying the visitor’s needs, interests, ability to decide and time-frame, the better-armed your marketing and sales teams will be to beat competitors to the punch during and after the show. 

Failing to qualify properly is like dropping the football on the one-yard line after mounting a long drive: a lot of energy goes into the drive and you cannot afford to come away without putting points on the board. 

#5: Where are the leads?

The value of a lead reduces in half (or more) for every day after the show that the lead is not followed up.  Many organizations are rightfully protective of paper and electronic leads, and of course many sales representatives rightfully covet the "hot" inquiries.  Take too long to get the leads back out to the field after a show and you risk frustrating your sales associates and losing out to speedier competitors.  Fail to watch your leads closely and they will end up in the well-intentioned pockets of your sales members.  Good lead management processes are essential to avoiding these problems.  Here’s how I advise clients:

-Ensure that all leads are properly collected in the booth—during and at the end of the day.  Sales representatives and the Booth Manager should have a procedure for flagging "hot" leads and ensuring that the Rep has a copy of the information for immediate follow-up. 

-Electronic leads should be uploaded nightly to corporate and someone responsible for entering them into a database or CRM system the next morning.  Paper leads must be forwarded to corporate at show close.

-Good internal qualifying and lead disposition processes will have leads entered and a course of action for every single lead determined and this information shared between marketing and sales.   I encourage clients to use a qualifying process that ensures that someone makes contact with every booth visitor immediately following the show.  If this additional qualification step calls for sales action, the lead moves accordingly to the right rep, while many will become important entries into a corporate database for incubation and follow-up over time.   However, in all cases, timeliness is essential.  Chances are that your competitor has this same lead. 

Don’t let clunky lead processes jeopardize your show success.  Move the leads from the floor to the right party to take action as quickly as possible and you will avoid the battle cry of, "Where are the leads?" heard so often in organizations that haven’t thought through this critical step in the event management process.

The Bottom Line:

Trade show marketing remains an important part of promotion and lead generation, and it is surprising how many firms spend money for presence but don’t take the time to execute on the floor.  Take the time to plan your show staffing, management, messaging, qualification and lead disposition processes and you will dramatically improve your return  on your trade show investments.