A huge percentage of companies in your marketplace do it.
They’ve discovered the negative-ROI secret of flushing a vast amount conference dollars down the toilet – and you can, too!
It’s quite simple, really. Just neglect to make your booth personnel attendee-ready.
What does that mean? Well, consider what Mark Schaefer wrote in a recent blog post after attending two content marketing conferences:
I spent a significant amount of time on the trade show floor talking to the many vendors trying to capture a piece of this content marketing space. The biggest problem I found is that most companies could not articulate what they do. They all wanted to show me a 30-minute demo.
This is a problem. I really didn’t have time for a half-hour demo times 25 vendors! If you can’t describe the problems you solve and why you are uniquely qualified to solve it, you need to revisit your marketing plan. (emphasis mine)
These sales people weren’t ready for the dynamic of interacting with conference attendees. They wanted to give a standard pitch. Here’s why that is a really bad – and very wasteful – approach:
- Conference attendees are inundated all day with information, and their memory space is severely taxed.
- Conference attendess have a ton of sessions to attend, so their schedule is quite pressured.
- Conference attendees have a lot of booths to visit, and all the pitches and offerings quickly blend into a confusing mass.
Those attendees who are on the exhibit floor cannot process the overload of information and stimulation going on all around them. Your long-winded sales pitch and poorly-articulated explanations? Gone – the moment your new “lead” walks away.
Here is how you want to prepare for Conference Attention Deficit Disorder so that you are not throwing all those marketing dollars out the window:
- Focus on one – ONE – primary message. Build the booth visuals, the collateral, and the spoken messages around that single idea. If you can get one message into the mind of your audience, you’ve done better than the vast majority of your competitors.
- Be sure that all of your booth personnel can give a one-sentence explanation of your company’s offering(s) and value. Aim for no more than 10-15 words. If you don’t have this down, you’re not ready for any sales situation, let alone the craziness of an exhibit hall.
- Remember that you have about 1-2 seconds to win the attention of a walk-by. Make your booth visuals incredibly simple and compelling. A booth is not the place for your 30-bullet point overview. Or 30-minute demo.
We might have the best offering on the planet, but all our attempts to market and sell are stillborn if there’s no clarity in the moment of interaction. Those conference investment dollars are precious. We shouldn’t blow them because we’re not attendee-ready.
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Also on the blog: Who is Clarity Therapy For?
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