What happened to the good old days? Are they gone? Will they come back?
It's kind of like the stories you hear from those that start with you remember when?
Those stories are always good to hear and used to open some eyes and cause some chuckles depending on the story. However as we have become entrenched in this global economy that is making every go from watching every dollar they spend to scrutinizing every penny they spend.
Now don't get me wrong we all should look at expenses no matter what business we are in. What happened to the old phrase that has survived the test of time "You need to spend money to make money ?" Is it gone or misplace or forgotten or are the people that say you remember when not including it in their old wise tales.
Now don't anyone go crazy when I say, Do you remember when you would just say here are the dates of the show or I'm starting a show and usually you x amount of exhibitors that were ready to get on the bandwagon. You had x amount of attendees that would come to the show. Yes I know it wasn't that simple, many people would say well we had great marketing, fantastic tag lines, a great sales team, we were fundamentally sound from a-z and had our moment in the sun.
I'm sure many of us long for the day of tradeshow nirvana and all wonder what happened to all of that good karma.
Let's look at how we were selling before and how we should be selling in the future?
In the past we would pick-up the phone? Send a piece of mail, go visit prospects at other shows and close them at our events, while the iron was hot.
Now we still do many of these things and they are all vital. But sometimes we rely to much on email, to much on mail and lack the f2f that we all promote for our business to use for our closures.
Now what happened to the relationship sales techniques, the consultative sales, the r&d sales?
R&D sales what is it. Well it's when we probe our customers for information on where they spend their money, where they achieve ROI, find out their pain and come up with a way to turn their pain into joy.
Consultative Sales: What is it, more importantly what happened to it. It's in my opinion so vital to everything we do. We are supposed to marketers in this business, promoters, facilitators?
Our exhibitors are busy, juggling multiple act, multi-tasking, assuming new duties every day. Also they are becoming more conservative in some ways, meaning they don't want to put their job on the line for your event.
Now what is their skill set? Who do they work with and report to in their organization? How do they market their products? How are they measuring the results? What mediums are they using? What obstacles are they facing in their sales & marketing plans? What is their budgets for x, y and z. If the person your dealing with has the brakes on find out where the objective is and get with that person or heck get the team on the line. Use a phone call, go to meeting, whatever it takes to close the deal. ABC always be closing. Someone is always making the close either them to nullify the sale or you to get the sale.
I could go on but above is some of the probing questions that need to be done. You need to probe the questions and provide the answers and have them visulize the opportunity you present.
Are we doing this? Most of us maybe ask one or two questions?
How is our follow-up, good, fair, poor, heck let's go for excellent.
Also when you get knocked out on the sale, do you ever go to another team member and say here is what I did? I didn't get the sale and suggestions?
How often does your sales team work on their skill set? How many of them have become inbound sales? What about outbound sales? Also how many of your sales team professionals understand all of the data collection that you have collected from your attendees?
Are you collecting enough information for consultative sales? If not ask these probing questions to get your metrics up to date for this new economy.
How about some competition? Does your sales team compete for anything? Give it some motivation? Now in this economy have you limited your sales teams earning potential? Everyone knows sales need some incentive?
Do you need to look at your current sales team and determine if they are the correct team for the new sales model.
Also do they understand online sales, do they get all of the metrics to f2f.
I have a lot of questions in the blog today and you should as well as you look at your Revenue potential.
Also before I forget please look at your offerings, banners, flages, column wraps, is that really effective ROI. Do you have anyway to measure it. I would rather spend 10,000 for something where you deliver people with names that I get to meet either online or offline.
Just some food for thought.
That's it for now.
Jim
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