The Very Simple System For Picking Your Trade Shows

Last time we established that trade shows are many things, among them giant cash-sucking machines, that are terrible at lead generation.

Before we dive into the Very Simple System, let’s remember that trade shows exist for one reason: to make money for someone who isn’t you. It can be a private event company or, in B2B, it’s often an association that uses the trade show as a way to offset the costs of the talking bits of their conference and to give Bill Clinton something to do.

Why do we bother? Brand is why we bother. The right events have the people whose faces we want to be all up in. This is good news if you are trying to break into a market space, and it’s great news if you are already there and plan to stay.

So how do we pick which shows to go to?  In the first place, ignore your Sales Squirrels. They want to go to all of them since it beats picking up the phone. Next, you will need a few dry erase markers, one of those giant year-at-a-glance laminated calendars from Staples and your stack of emails, brochures, and post-it notes with all the events you’re considering.

Now stick your calendar to the wall (yes, I know you can do this on your iPad, but it’s more fun on the wall). Using a blue pen mark out all the product things you are doing next year – releases,refreshes, announcements etc. If you are a service company, plot out your thought leadership and research timelines. If you are opening new offices, working on an acquisition or spinning off a division, plot those too.

Use a black marker to block off sales training dates, sales kick off events, trips, boondoggles, golf tournaments and all that stuff that Squirrels do when they aren’t selling. In my experience, events that fall during these times will see you and the summer student all alone on booth duty.

Using your red marker put all the events in your giant pile on the same calendar (even if you think they’re stupid, put them up there). Be sure to include all the “must-do” events you receive from the Squirrels.

Where you have red and blue overlapping, you have hope, so start there. Are any of the events in and around your product release dates a good place to make a major announcement? Can you shift a release announcement over a little (remember, the announcement can precede or trail the actual release by a few weeks if needed)? Where you can manage to make an event and a bit of news overlap, these are your best bets to do some brand-building. These are your must-go shows for the year and the places you should allocate some decent budget and some good exhibit staff. Make sure you have it on the calendars of your Corporate Overlords so they can be available to meet with media, influencers and analysts at the events.

In a good year you might get two such events, so you’ll probably need a few others to prop up your visibility. Looking at your red scribbles, flag a few events that are in key segments or locations where you could improve your awareness or competitiveness. These are your second tier events, and in some ways they are much trickier to get value from than the big ones. This is where you need to do a bit of analysis (that’s MBA-speak for reading the brochure or website). You’re looking for the events where you can snag a speaking opportunity, a sponsorship that gives you the attendee list before and after, or do a unique customer event. You should have a few of these on your list when you’re finished.

Now the fun part: take your green marker and circle the remaining events that your company considers to be essential. The ones you’ve been attending for so long nobody can even remember signing the contract. The ones you attend reflexively when your competitors sign up. The ones your past CEOs signed you up for when they were on some committee or another. If you’ve been around the industry a while, you’ll be hearing a lot of sacred cows mooing in the corner. Time to make some burgers, people. Remove one or, if you’re feeling cocky, two from your list for next year.

As some of our comments from the last post reminded us, it’s perfectly okay to stop attending an event. IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and other big fish have walked away from big events because they were not producing the results they needed. You can do the same thing and the world will not end. It will be, briefly, a bit noisier. With all the mooing and the Squirrel chatter and the raised eyebrows in the C-suite, you’ll be doing some explaining and you may even be doing some recanting but stick with it.

By stepping away from even one event you’ve “always” attended, a few cool things happen. First, you get some budget back to spend on the events that will actually produce some value. This should make the CFO go away. Second, you are sending a very strong message to the show’s organizers that they can’t take you (or anyone) for granted and they had better start coming up with new ways to add value. Third, you are going to freak out your competition, especially if they’ve already signed a big, fat platinum sponsorship deal.

Remember, trade shows are terrible places for leads so your absence really doesn’t confer any benefit on your competition, but it will certainly have them wondering what you know that they don’t know.  If they have done the same exercise as you and have stayed in the event, chances are they are going to use it to launch something or make other noise, in which case, you were probably going to be out-shouted anyway.

Fourth, you still get to attend the event. If your Squirrels are insisting that some venerable industry get-together is crucial to their ability to eat, then buy them all-access passes and tell them get in there and mingle with their customers and prospects instead of sitting on their arses in your booth. Remind them of all the quality facetime they’ll have now that they are attendees and not exhibitors.

When dry erase marker buzz wears off, you should have one or two signature events to support product launches or announcements, two or three solid brand-building events to support your existing base, one shiny new event to take out for a test drive and maybe a handful of little regional shows just to wave the flag.

Next week we’ll look at events that actually deliver revenue, piss off your competitors, thrill the heck out of your prospects and make your customers feel loved.

Related Posts:

Trade Shows Part 2: How to Pick Events
Four Things Marketing Should Say No About in 2013
Trade Shows Part 8: Other Things I Know

BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
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