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Trade Show Selling

Guest post by: Joe Ippolito

Article Overview: Trade shows provide a unique but different type of opportunity to sell your products and services. Here are some tips to help you maximize your time and effectivness.

Trade Show Selling

1. Obtain a List of Attendees Before the Show.

Pre-arrange meetings and appointments with targeted prospects, either at your booth, your hospitality suite, or over a meal. Just because you'll both already be there doesn't mean you should assume you will see these important prospects.

2. Plan Your Attack.

Leverage your time and energy by drawing up a plan with specific goals:

• Re-establish relationships with former customers.
• Refresh relationships with current customers.
• Conduct pre-show customer product analysis for up and cross sell opportunities.
• Set goals for making new sales contacts.
• Learn about new market trends
• Analyze the competition.

3. Adopt a Team Approach.

Take advantage of the talents of other team members. Having representatives from other functional areas such as customer service, manufacturing, or finance is a great way for them to experience the market's "front lines" and foster additional team spirit. It will also provide your customers with a more comprehensive understanding of your organization.

4. Follow-Up Quickly.

Leads are like bananas, they ripen and rot fast. Remember chances are your competition has talked to your same prospects. Make sure you turn that contact into an appointment and a sale!

5. Learn Effective Booth Skills.

Instead of asking, "How can I help you," which typically hooks a "Just looking." Try, "What brought you in to our booth today." Or, "Is there anything in particular that attracted your interest?" This technique engages the prospect to talk and open up. This means you will need to re-tune your bonding skills for these "brief encounters."

6. Learn How to Sift the Prospects From the Suspects-Quickly!

You don't have to tell your story to everyone...and it's OK to ask questions to determine who is qualified to hear your story. Far too many salespeople working trade shows drop immediately into their "spiel" once someone hesitates even for a second or two in front of the booth. Learn to ask the prosper questions before deciding whether or not he or she wants to see and hear more.

7. Meet at the End of Each Day and Recap.

I know you will be tired but the information gathered will be fresh in everyone's mind. Did you see your targeted prospects? What is the follow up plan? What products and services are attracting the most attention? What is the customers' feedback? Is there any "buzz" about new products or the competition?

8. Debrief.

At the end of the show, compare your results against plan. What worked and what didn't? What will you do differently next time? Compare notes with your colleagues, which is something you should have been doing throughout the show. What's your plan for post-show behavior?

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Article Tags: appointment, appointments, attendees, bananas, brief encounters, customer product, functional areas, hospitality suite, leverage your time, li li, market trends, pre show, prospects, relationships, sales contacts, talents, team approach, team members, team spirit, ul type



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Re: You can now trade stock with your twitter account - A nice idea for active traders who don't mind having their trades in the public domain. The biggest drawback seems to be that you still have to go into e-Trade to complete the transaction. That removes what I thought would be the biggest advantage of stock-trading via Twitter - the ability to trade quickly and instantaneously while on the go... On the other hand, having to confirm trades on e-Trade does mean that you can pull out of a deal if you have second thoughts!
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Re: This is Marketing Warfare! - Hey GT, I guess this was from a while back, and it'll test your memory a bit but could you possibly elaborate on Unique Selling Proposition? Can you give us some examples of good USPs?
What is your selling statigies? - We currently deal with Hospitals, school boards and engineering firms. In the pass we have cold called made appointments and presented our product. We are now thinking of approaching sales in the way of Trade shows. What is your approach? Do you do trade shows?


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