Assume your trade show has 10,000 attendees and 500 exhibitors. Your realistic and likely clients make up just three percent of all attendees or 300 people. Your goal for the trade show is to connect with those prospects to make a sale or at least begin a serious conversation about making a sale. Your interim goal, then, is to connect with those prospects at the trade show. You only have three days and you have three people working at your exhibitor booth.
Let’s look at your situation using some high-level numbers.
Assume one of your booth staff needs a fifteen minute conversation with a prospect to connect, qualify, and explain your product. The numbers are, again, high-level. They are simplified to understand the structure before we drill deeper.Your team’s theoretical maximum is: eight-hour days/15 minutes = 32 conversations per trade show day per person. Three trade show days give us 96 conversations per person. That’s about three hundred conversations under ideal laboratory conditions assuming no breaks and the same level of energy on the last day as during the first hour of the trade show. Lab conditions.
So, even under ideal, unrealistic conditions, your entire team can have fewer than three hundred meaningful, connected conversations during the entire trade show. The same trade show it took months to prepare for and will take at least days to disassemble and ship everything back. And yet, that is only three percent of all trade show attendees.
Yes – but you needed your three percent, the exact prospects. Excluding people who came specifically for your company, other conversations came from attendees who were qualified at random or not qualified at all, or worse, attracted by things irrelevant to making a sale.
Yes – but you needed your three percent, the exact prospects. Excluding people who came specifically for your company, other conversations came from attendees who were qualified at random or not qualified at all, or worse, attracted by things irrelevant to making a sale.
It gets worse before it gets better: every irrelevant (to your sales) attendee who takes up your team’s time clogs up your bandwidth that is too narrow as it is.
That is every person who stops by because of free candy, pens or other swag giveaways, technology demo gimmicks, VR headsets, or just to talk to booth staff, or who is bored or killing time while waiting for colleagues – every single one of these unqualified people clogs up your bandwidth.
Here is a better way.
You need a method to sift through attendees, prequalify just the ones you need and connect with them effectively, automatically and consistently, with the same energy on day one as on day three.
That is a lot of concurrent requirements, but it is possible, and here is how.
Your best, most qualified leads need to receive your most picture-perfect elevator pitch. The same elevator pitch can be used to prequalify those prospects because the better the match between them and your product, the more responsive they will be. At the same time, the elevator pitch must be delivered precisely, always in the exact same way, to the right people, and at scale.
Reimagine your perfect elevator pitch as a purpose-built trade show animated video. It is automated, picture-perfect, scalable and it plays on repeat. And the key thing: unlike your trade show team, it builds an instant information bridge with the minds of your most qualified leads – and everyone else.
Let’s dig in.
Here is how a normal human interaction works between your trade show staff and an attendee. It begins with visual or auditory contact (“Hello, excuse me!”) within about 15 feet from your booth, the attendee’s asset to communication, a greeting, a sentence of small talk, an offer to provide information, qualification questions, answering attendee’s questions, and multiple opportunities for the attendee to disconnect, wasting both time and mental energy of your staff. We are not going to do that again.
Here is how an instant information bridge works between your trade show animated video and an attendee. It instantly delivers the elevator pitch – the same perfect way, every single time. It doesn’t waste time on greetings and small talk. It doesn’t ask for permission to deliver the message (“Can I show you…?”). It doesn’t even give an attendee a chance to disconnect from the communication: as soon as the attendee sees the video while walking by or standing nearby, the message is delivered and it cannot be unseen. It is also delivered quickly: in the time it takes to say “Hello, excuse me, can I show you our products?” an animated video communicates enough information about your product to give reason for that initial interest if there is any basis for it in the first place. This happens in seconds. And it translates much further, depending on screen and positon, sometimes up to a hundred feet or more.
What’s more, it protects your team. Your staff members’ psychological energy is limited and it can’t be squandered by irrelevant looky-loos and passers-by who came for free pens and candy. The animated video plays constantly, without fatigue, the same way every time. It is never affected by mood or fatigue. A minute-long animated video will play nearly five hundred times per trade show day.
Remember the very limited bandwidth of your booth team during the trade show and the importance of keeping that bandwidth clear of all irrelevant communication. It is a precision instrument you paid a lot of money for and it is only there for your sales.
The old way was to offer candy and swag gifts to attract people to your booth and then talk to everyone who comes up to qualify them. The new way is to remove this wrong incentive altogether and to cast a net of your elevator pitch widely and continuously in order to attract only those attendees with whom your elevator pitch resonates. There should not be other reasons to come to your exhibitor booth, other than for your sales or precursors to your sales.
We are here to make that happen.