Getting Value From Trade Shows: VON Redux
Tom Keating took a humorous swipe at VON this morning. Well, at least, I am going to treat it as humor, and pre-suppose that he doesn’t want to create bad feelings between the two giants of the IP Communications tradeshow world today — TMC and Pulvermedia.Â
Tom quoted Voxilla’s Chamberlain as saying that traffic was down. He also quoted Garrett Smith with a similar view. But you know, my team, on the AOL booth, was run off their feet for the whole show. We had a very different experience.
Getting value from tradeshows is a real art.Â
- Begin with solid, achievable objectives. Is it PR? Lead generation? Business? Know in advance what you want to achieve, and how you’re going to achieve it.Â
- Make sure the audience that you need to achieve those objectives attends the show and knows that you are there. A trade show is nothing more than an opportunity for face-to-face meetings. Figure out what meetings you want, the objective of the meeting, and define a successful outcome.
- Message your objectives clearly to your audience — on your booth, brochures, and in presentations. How many booths have you walked by at a show where you haven’t got a clue what is being sold?
- Pre-book as many meetings as you possibly can. Get on the telephone, weeks in advance, and set the meetings. The worst time to set the meetings is at the show. At that point, you’ve left your objectives up to chance.
- Follow up religiously.
iotum went to VON to achieve three things:
- Support our new partner AOL in recruiting developers at their boot.
- Recruit Asterisk business for our company, and close some Asterisk deals that we had been working on.
- Meet the press, and explain the momentum we have achieved recently.Â
We did great. We have more post-show follow up than we can possibly handle, and some great business deals which we will be able to announce shortly.  Tom’s post about VON complaints, when compared to our experience, really shows the gulf of experiences which are possible at a trade show.Â
If you’re going to spend the money on a trade show exhibit, make sure you do everything you can to maximize your ROI. Preparation is key. The disappointed exhibitors are usually the ones who didn’t.
September 27th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Excellent points Alec, agree with you 100%. The same can also be said for those who are not exhibiting… but attending. With over 300 exhibits, we would have found ourselves out of time if we didn’t clearly set our expectations with the exhibitors up front. For example: I noticed many vendors launching into their sales pitch without so much as asking their potential customer what their target price range is.
It’s silly to think that many of the vendors would launch into a sales pitch for a product that’s $150,000, only to find out their target customer is only willing to spend $25,000. It’s important to be friendly, but you have to know when to cut your conversation short and move on to the next candidate standing in your booth. Somebody would do well to write a HOW TO on conferences. Hrm… Conference Exhibiting for Dummies?
September 27th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
[...] Alec Saunders writes a good post on getting the most from trade shows. [...]
September 28th, 2006 at 4:40 am
I agree with you. It mainly depends on your goals.
September 28th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Unfortunately, Ben and Luca, most people don’t define what they want first. Many folks go to a show viewing it as a lead generating opportunity, when in fact it’s a very expensive tool for generating leads.
September 28th, 2006 at 10:02 am
>>Tom Keating took a humorous swipe at VON this morning. Well, at least, I am going to treat it as humor
First, glad you found it humorous. Second, it was indeed intended as humor, so I hope everyone - Pulver included took it that way.
September 28th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I think you need to find a new team to write your jokes Tom ;)
September 30th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
[...] It seems that my original post on Fall VON fueled a war of words this week when fellow blogger Tom Keating wrote a saterical post about the Fall VON being more about Video on the Net then Voice. It seems that Tom’s post even got Jeff Pulver’s attention, causing him to make a WTF call to the CEO of Voxilla. (NOTE: Only Eric was disappointed with FALL VON, not Voxilla. They thought it was great.) Alec Saunders, a long time VON supporter, added on his blog that Iotum had a great show and even offered some insights on how an exhibitor can put themselves in the best position to have a “great show.” [...]
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I think you’re right when you say that it mainly depends on your goals. Everything else works itself out from there.