Exhibit Sales

Exhibit sales and the process is always going to be different with every company. I alway wonder how much up selling is still going on today. Well the company has been in the show for x amount of years and they always take a 20x20. They bring x part of their portfolio of products and they get y amount of leads.

So I'm sure alot of people just go with the flow and keep plotting the company in there for a 20x20 every show run. Or a 10x10 every show run. Now part of our job is to understand the exhibitors needs. Now don't get me wrong the size space they are taking may make perfect sense.

But let's consider a new approach to this let's look at what your exhibitors have been generating over the last three shows in leads if you can extract that information from your registration company.
Let's look at how they are setting up their booth how they are manning it, how much they have in the display area and whether it's crowded. Next let's look at what they are showcasing as their hook to get people into their booth. What is the product pitch. Next let's look at what product they say the have but they are not bringing to the show and may be missing out on the opportunity to use the hook to sell the other products.

Now they don't have the products there at the show so it may make it fairly difficult to close sale on something people cannot demo.
Consultative exhibit sales let's talk to them about their offerings their display and their leads and determine maybe how show management can assist them in making the show better. Now this could in turn lead to a slight upgrade in their booth space. Maybe not. But at least your explaning some options to them instead of just taking the standard sale.

Now don't get me wrong it's nice to see that application come in every year for x amount of the same space.
However because we are not being communicative with them, we are losing out on a potential opportunity.
So how much time do we have to talk to our exhibitors, well we should have all of the time in the world. We get the application in and you know we should call them and have a discussion, or better yet have one before they send in the application so you can discuss some options. Again get a feel for their current and future needs. This I believe will lead to some upgrade sales for your company.

Now what about the person that downsized well let's give them a call also before we just run the app thru and book em into their space. There is a need for this call, to gather some intelligence on why this happened and via discussions you may find a way to keep them in original size space before the downsize because you found out during the discussion that maybe if they had a spot in an area that better compliments them, this may enable to stay in a certain size space. Also during that process you can discuss how their company and products are going to be promoted and again maybe talked to them about their boothmanship and display.

What alot of this comes down to is pure conversations, let's have them with our customers. Let's engage and gather information. This gets back to an earlier blog as well, have an understand on what size space they are taking in other shows and evaluate if they are taking bigger space in that event, why are they not taking the same space in your event.
Again gather and collect information this will give you an advantage on helping your exhibitor customer succeed within your tradeshow platform.
Also relationship sales, it's good to work on that process. You will find that will go along ways if they have a relationship with you and trust your committment to making the show better for their company.

There is much more that can be added to this blog and I look forward to comments and suggestions on this topic and more as I'm sure there are plenty of you that have some great ideas, that you would be willing to share.