Jonathan 🧠 Pritchard

Hire someone who is an expert at combining your marketing messaging with a high quality "corporate presentation" that stops people in their tracks. The people I've seen who can do this are Mentalists (like me), magicians, wire sculptors, caricature artists, etc. Your most outgoing sales person is not used to drawing a crowd, entertaining people for 10 minutes while communicating your company's value, and then doing it all again in 20 minutes (and doing all that for the 8 hours that the floor is open). Having one Infotainer can easily result in getting you 2-5x more paying clients than you're used to with a sales team of 4 people.

One of the best tricks for successful conversations after the show STARTS when you have your business cards printed. Here it is: have you picture on your business card. This simple detail will go a long way to help people remember who you are (which means they're more likely to open your messages). Try it out and thank me later!

Email & social posts are great before the show; that's why most people do it. But, when you're at the show, everyone seems to assume "everyone's here anyways, so they'll HAVE TO stop by our booth!" And then they sit back waiting for attendees to strike up a conversation. Unfortunately, that rarely turns out to be a profitable strategy. Instead, they should have someone who is an expert in engaging attendees in a fun, memorable, and meaningful way while avoiding the "let me talk AT YOU" energy that most sales people have. I call these people "Infotainers" and they are a rare breed. If you don't have someone on your team who can gather a crowd of 20 people every 30 minutes; we need to talk!

I can't tell you how many times I've heard an organizer say "We don't need to do training; our people know what to do." And then watch their team bury their face in their phones, sit at the booth table typing away at their laptops, etc. The person organizing the trade show exhibit must understand that everyone who is attending the show is there for one reason & one reason alone: help the company get more business. The more clients that we connect with, the better off we all are. To that end, everyone needs to be reminded of the basics and be empowered to hold each other accountable to the highest levels of professionalism and representation on behalf of the company. Deciding against training is deciding to fail.

99% of strategies that I see companies using to promote their booth are passive: They rely on an attendee 1) seeing the offer 2) understanding the offer 3) willing to engage the sales team. The most successful 1% of booths take a different approach. They hire an "infotainer" who is skilled at combining the marketing messaging of the company with high visibility outreach. They are constantly inviting people over, starting conversations, and being the "life of the party" in a professional way. That's exactly what I do, and I regularly get 4x as many leads by myself as compared to my client's entire sales team. Proactive beats passive any day of the week!

One HUGE expense that I never see people talking about is the expense of following up with junk leads that you got from a poorly-filtered giveaway. I call it the fishbowl of doom. You know what I'm talking about. "Put in your business card and you're entered for a chance to win a fabulous vacation to Hawaii!" Who wants that? EVERYONE! How many of those people actually want to do business with you? NOBODY! Now you have to spend time that you could devote to paying client work to track down all those connections just to find out they're not interested. Ideally your booth strategy will help you avoid the expense of post-show follow-up with dud leads. If you're curious how that could work, I'd love to show you!