Sales squirrels ignoring you? Here’s a fun way to get their attention: tell them you’re cancelling all the trade shows next year. Now count backwards from ten after you click send and stand by for the howling, the outrage, the pleading. It will sound something like this:
“How will we ever make quota?”
“The quarter is doomed!”
“How can I meet my clients?
“Where else could we demo the product?
“How am I going to close my deals?”
“Where will the leads come from?”
“I need quality face time.”
“Everybody will be there”
Select all that apply.
Yes, these are the same people who refuse to take a shift at the booth, sit around eating, reading and talking on the phone when they are at the booth and who take a perverse pride in wearing a suit instead of the swell golf shirts you ordered for the show.
Let’s assume you are the number one or two player in your market and you are attending a mid-level event with a good-sized booth, say 20×20. Let’s assume there are 2,500 people at this event and it’s two days long.
Cost of the booth space, shipping, equipment, toys, furniture, internet connection that never quite works, carpet and trinkets: $50,000. So about $20 per person just to be seen. Say you have about 25% share of market in this crowd. You have 1875 people who could be described as opportunities. Now what percentage of those are decision makers? Be honest: for B2B sales, you need at least a director or better to get anywhere close to a deal. Senior people don’t go to tradeshows. They send junior people to go to tradeshows, look at stuff, pick up bits of paper, sit through demos and come back with a report and a new cloth bag.
Let’s pretend that some decision makers do come. Say 10% of the non-clients are actual people who buy stuff. That’s 188 people. Uh oh. That’s $266 a piece just to have them walk by. If you were bright enough to hit them with a mailer first, that cost might pop up to $270. And this generously assumes that each of these paper-picker-uppers represents a separate company, which practically never happens.
Oh, and let’s back out the other vendors, students, speakers, organizers and those Shriners who showed up a week early for their own event. They aren’t your customers.
$270 to stand in a loud, crowded hall with a couple of thousand other people trying to move the sale along? That’s a terrible deal, people.
Let’s have a look at the clients, shall we? Squirrels insist trade shows are great places to hang out with clients. Maybe compared to the deck of an aircraft carrier they are, but it’s hardly intimate, quality time.
Clients are there to attend sessions and scoop up trinkets, not meet with you on crowded noisy show floor. If you were organized enough to set up a quiet lunch or dinner, good for you. That is a way tradeshows can be useful.
In our scenario here, we have 625 people who already give you money. They represent some much smaller number of companies; say 1.5 people per company that’s actually only 417 customers. How many of them are going to come to your booth to say hi? About two, and they probably have their resumes in their hands.
How many are going to come by to complain? I’m going with a generous ten percent porcupine factor in your base, so about 42. That’s fun. Forty-two unpleasant conversations in public. Who doesn’t want to pay $50,000 for that? In my experience, when the porcupines show up, the Squirrels have an urgent need to count their nuts someplace else.
Now we’re down to 300 and change actual customers, and at most, about 30 decision makers. While there is always merit in handing out a keychain and showing off a new product, you can’t really justify 50 big ones for that, can you?
So trade shows are not the best ways to move prospects through the Funnel of Love. But they are great for filling up the top of the funnel with fresh leads, right? Wrong. That fishbowl full of business cards you’re going make Skippy type into your CRM system might as well be full of Lego guy heads for all the good it’s going to do you.
The Squirrels long since picked out the very small number of those cards that held any promise, leaving you and Skippy with a bunch of sales-rejectable leads. If you collect 500 cards, you will have paid $100 for each of them.
But you know that business card ≠ lead. In fact, your fancy database reveals total revenue of 84 cents from this same show last year. You should point that out to the squirrels. It stops them quite dead between admitting they don’t enter a thing into the fancy database or admitting tradeshows don’t generate revenue.
A day or two later, they will come back with this helpful observation: “Our competitors are there.” Oh, well, in that case, we should totally be there wasting money too. In fact, if they can waste $50,000, I say we waste $75,000 and show them who’s boss.
If shows suck so much, what is the point? The point is they are good for a few things. Branding is one of them. When the squirrels are whining that the competition is there and you should be there too, they are partly right. If you are an industry leader or want to be, you really ought to show up at their main event. It’s only polite.
If you have a new product to show off, a trade show is a terrific place to do it. Your industry media are there, a few clients and prospects are there, you can rub it into your competitors’ faces and you will probably make more noise than you might otherwise. This is also branding. It is also not sales.
Do not confuse visibility and product launches with lead generation. They aren’t the same thing, but they are the same amount of important and that’s why trade shows are not a horrible idea.
Next week we’ll look at a Very Simple System to figure out which shows you should attend in 2015.
Related Posts:
Ten Ways to Rock Your Tradeshows
Five Dumb Things That Unrock Your Tradeshows
Treat a Tradeshow Like Your Office
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
So true it hurts. Love this post. I’m sure IBM doesn’t regret pulling out of Comdex in 1997, nor does Microsoft regret taking a pass on CES in 2012. Hell, Apple even said buh-bye to Macworld. You are dead right that without some very careful decision-making (can’t wait for next post), planning and discipline (wear the f#$king golf shirt, squirrel!) trade shows are the epitome of suck.
“Do not confuse visibility and product launches with lead generation. They aren’t the same thing, but they are the same amount of important and that’s why trade shows are not a horrible idea.”
Interesting point. I’ve realized that a knowledgeable staff has the ability to generate a few leads where there might not have been. But overall, you made some good points.
So what do you tell someone (or try to tell someone) that going to an industry tradeshow just to go isn’t the right approach? No pre-planning, no announcements, no promotion, but yet still feel it important to spend upwards of $75K for 68 prospects contact information. Sure, you have a flashy, big exhibit, you have participated in sponsorships so your logo is everywhere but… Is it purely because competitors will be there and therefore it is feeding into paranoia that if we are not there something bad will happen?
Thanks for the comment. That’s a tricky conversation, especially if you’re a “tenured” player in the industry. I say, measure it as you would an ad campaign or a PR blitz (which is basically what it is). Would $75K get you the same or better results someplace else? If yes, you’re an idiot if you don’t go there and spend it. If no, then set up your little booth and treat it like the branding activity it is instead of the sales activity it isn’t. The chance to show up a competitor is always worth a few bucks, but paying for the opportunity for them to make a bigger splash at your expense is just dumb.