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Making Home Shows and Trade Shows Effective and Profitable

 Making Your Trade Shows Effective and Profitable [40:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We speak with The Trade Show Coach, Susan Friedmann

It’s home show season, and many of you are planning your exhibits for upcoming shows.  So are your competitors.  How can you make your display different and attract more buyers?  What are the keys to an creating an effective display?  How do you guarantee the best possible return on investment, that is, sales?  We called on one of the leading experts in this field, Susan Friedmann – ‘The Trade Show Coach’, for answers.

“It all starts with knowing what you want to achieve from the show, your goals.  And those should be quantifiable so that they can be measured.  Are you looking for leads, or are you selling directly from the floor?  If you’re looking for leads, then how many leads do you want?”

To help you define your trade show strategies and set realistic goals, Friedmann offers the following tips and formulas:

Pre-Show Marketing

“The smaller your booth is in a large show, the more your going to have to do pre-show marketing to get people to come and visit your booth.  You have to let people know that you’re there and where to find you, and give them a reason why they should come and visit you.  Give them an incentive; tell them what they’ll get if they take their valuable time to visit your booth.

The larger the show, the more likely it is that people will have an agenda.  Research shows that over 68% of people attending large shows already have an agenda as to who they want to see before they walk onto the show floor.”

Leads

Friedmann’s formula for the number of leads you should get per trade show is simple:

______ number of leads per hour   x  hours per show  x  # people per booth

“No matter how many people are attending the show, you can’t talk to them all.  However, if one person can talk to, say, six good leads per hour, in an 8-hour day that’s 48 leads.  You might round that up to 50, so that at a 3-day show you would expect 150 leads per person.  You could use that as a starting point, then decide if that’s realistic or not.”

Giveaways

Don’t offer give-away’s or sign-ups that aren’t pertinent to your product just to get people into your booth.  That only takes your time away from those who are truly interested in your buying your homes.

However, product samples, reports, or checklists – things that can help a prospect move toward a buying decision – make great giveaways, as they tend to attract buyers and give them information they can use to choose to buy from you.

Gathering Information

“What is the most important information that you want from the people you’re going to meet?  You need to design a Lead Card to make sure you capture that information so that you can follow up.  You’ll need to know what it is that they’re interested in and what their needs are so you can respond specifically to those.”

Setting Up Your Exhibit

How do you determine how big your booth should be for a particular show or how many people you’ll need to effectively man it?  “As a guideline, figure about one person for every 55 square feet of booth space,” says Friedmann.  “That would mean that a 10 x 10 booth should have one to two people.

It’s always good to have someone to relieve you; you never want to leave the booth empty.  So, find someone who can watch the booth for you for half an hour or so, because you do need a break.

Working the Booth

Friedmann offers these tips to get more traffic into your booth:

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