Using tradeshows – tradeshows
from the consumer side of the isle
Use tradeshows wisely.
That doesn’t even mean that you should always buy into
booth. Sometimes the
best benefits of a tradeshow are to be had in walking the isles
and meeting tradeshow exhibitors in complementary industries face
to face.
Introduce yourself and your
company, be polite, professional, and most of all be courteous in
understanding why they are exhibiting at the tradeshow.
It’s to make new clients first and make new alliances and
acquaintances second. Be
sure to yield when THEIR potential clients come along.
Be sure to get a card and write
down everything you learned on the back of the card or better yet,
attach it to a steno pad where you wrote down all the info.
A great tip on making these kinds of tradeshow contacts is
to find a personal connection, spend a minute on it, and then
reference it again when you call 3-4 days after the show.
It helps people connect.
Another tradeshow tip:
Don’t follow up with these tradeshow exhibitors the very
next day. Aside from
the fact that they are tired and sometimes cranky, they’ve
probably gotten back to the office and found out they have all
sorts of fires to deal with you.
Call the next day and you will probably be very quickly
dismissed.
But
do your tradeshow follow-ups.
There’s no point in having attended it if you don’t
make the phone call. It’s
quite unlikely that because you shoved your card into their hand,
that in a week they will even recall who you are.
The
Center for
Exhibition Industry Research says 88 percent of exhibition
attendees weren't called by salespeople in 2000.
