Making a trade show pay for a services business

A trade show costs the stand, the build, the travel, the stock and three days of everyone's time. Most of that is spent before anyone has spoken to a buyer.

Then the leads go into a spreadsheet and are contacted, once, eleven days later.

The economics are back to front

The stand is the visible cost so it gets the attention. It is also the part with the least influence on the return.

What actually determines whether an event pays is what happens in the two weeks afterwards, and that is usually unplanned and unresourced.

Decide the follow-up before you book the stand. If nobody has time to do it properly, the event will not pay regardless of how the stand looks.

Before the event

Book meetings in advance. The highest-value conversations at any event are the ones scheduled beforehand. Contact the clients, prospects and partners who will be there and put times in.

An event with eight booked meetings is a good event before it starts. Relying on traffic is relying on chance.

Know who you want to meet. Exhibitor and attendee lists are usually available. Go through them and mark the twenty that matter.

Give people a reason to come to you. Not merchandise. Something useful: a review, an assessment, an answer to a question they actually have.

During

Capture properly. Name, contact, and one sentence about what they were interested in. That sentence is what makes the follow up work, and it is the part that always gets skipped by the second afternoon.

A scanned badge with no context is a cold contact with extra steps.

Qualify quickly and move on. Most people at a stand are not buyers. Being efficient about that is not rude, and it protects the conversations that matter.

Record while it is fresh. A voice note between conversations beats reconstructing thirty interactions on the flight home.

The follow up, which is the whole thing

Within twenty-four hours, while they remember the conversation. By day four the event has blurred into every other stand they visited.

Personal and specific. Reference the actual conversation. A generic thank-you email confirms you did not listen.

Segmented. The people you want to speak to again get a call. Everyone else gets something useful and goes onto the list. Those are different actions.

Sustained. Most of the value arrives months later. An event list contacted once is wasted. The same list in a sensible nurture sequence produces work for a year.

Measuring it honestly

Count enquiries and revenue traced to the event, over twelve months rather than twelve days.

Count relationships too: the partner introduction, the referral source, the supplier you now use. These rarely appear in a return calculation and are frequently the largest part of the value.

Then decide about next year on the number rather than on the feeling, because the feeling at the end of an event is mostly exhaustion.

The alternative worth considering

For many services businesses, attending without exhibiting produces a better return.

You get the same room, the same conversations and the same list, without the stand, the build or the three days of standing behind a bench. The budget goes into meetings, hospitality and follow up.

It is less visible, and visibility is not what was paying.