MegaShow Trade Show and Exhibition Services
- Maximizing Your Participation Effectiveness
Trade shows are many companies' largest marketing expenditure, after advertising. Trade shows can be your most powerful, profitable marketing tool, IF you maximize your participation effectiveness. Are you getting your money's worth?
To most effectively use trade shows and exhibits as an integral and effective part of their marketing mix, many clients rely on the Bennion-Robertson MegaShow Trade Show and Exhibition Services to maximize their investment.
Bennion-Robertson offers services to enhance and maximize your tradeshow investment through the following:
1) Sales and Marketing Team Support
2) Market Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence and Innovation Scanning
3) Sales Team Performance Training
4) Business Backroom Support
Sales and Marketing Team Support
Going to the right show. Tradeshows are a significant investment from your marketing budget. However, research shows that the ultimate cost per sale is lower when initiated at a trade show. Each year there were more than 110 million attendees visiting over 1.4 million exhibitors at almost 4.300 trade shows in North America, alone. Internationally, that number grows exponentially. How does your company select which shows to participate in? Many companies select certain trade shows simply because 'everyone else' in their industry will be there. Bennion-Robertson can help you thoroughly evaluate which trade shows will give the strongest potential return for your company in light of your company goals and objectives.Preparing right for the show. To really wring the most ROI out of your trade show budget takes early and detailed planning, as well as effective implementation. Selecting the right show opens the door for the real work to begin. The planning process can make or break the success of each tradeshow in which your company participates. Planning a specific timetable for your pre-show planning is crucial - and planning should begin as early as possible. Early promotion of your attendance, in a way that actually targets those qualified prospects as well as current clients takes understanding your market and early, effective, targeted marketing. Bennion-Robertson can help you prepare a thorough plan of action, the implementation of which will lead to a profitable show.
Getting it right at the show. How often have you attended tradeshows, only to watch booth staffers sitting on their cell phones, nonchalantly chatting among themselves as prospects and buyers pass on to the next booth? Your staffers are the most important element in making a show effective and profitable. Empower your booth performance by planning for and assuring their effective training. Bennion-Robertson is skilled at training on how to prepare for the show, to read the attendees for top prospects, to dismiss time wasters, to identify and qualify important prospects, to build rapport, and to gather detailed prospect information which allows for most effective follow-up.
Market Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, and Innovation Scanning
According to research by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, most CEO's consider the acquisition of market information and intelligence to be the most important reason for attending tradeshows and exhibitions.In the Art of War, Sun Tzu states: "What enables the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge. Now this knowledge cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor any deductive calculation.. The dispositions of the enemy are ascertainable through spies and spies alone."
A trade show or exhibition provides a unique opportunity to scan what your competition and the industry is doing. Where else can you do so much first hand market research in an economical way? But to be most effective takes training and skill.
Bennion-Robertson is renowned for its fully ethical approach to gathering market research and competitive intelligence. We will help you select the tradeshows or exhibits that will be most effective to attend, whether exhibiting or not. Drawing from years of consulting, training, and conducting competitive intelligence, we will help you refine your list of information and indicators that you are watching for.
Prior to your participation in a trade show, we will train your staff in our proprietary IntelsourceT and HumanvantageT processes, empowering them to draw out key information regarding competitors, market trends, and potential product innovations.
As important as knowing what information to gather, is training your staff on what information not to give up. Bennion-Robertson will also train your staff in Essential Elements of Friendly Information, or EEFI. Without being aware, staff members are susceptible to information gathering by your competition. After training, they will be empowered to safeguard company information that you determine should be kept private or confidential.
Sales Team Performance Training
Trade Show sales are different than field sales. Investing in training your sales team empowers them to make fully effective use of their time, and to make your financial commitment to the show a powerful use of marketing resources.Trade shows, conferences and exhibits can be a key time to meet with current customers. Where else can you have the advantage of having so many existing customers come to you, in such a compact period of time? Bennion-Robertson will teach your personnel well ahead of the show itself how to truly capitalize on this potential.
New customers are the lifeblood of corporate growth, and trade shows represent one of the best and most cost-effective ways to obtain those new customers. Buyers come to trade shows looking for solutions to their needs - potentially your products, your services. According to trade show research, as many as 90 percent of those who attend an exhibit will not have been called on by a salesperson during the previous year, and they are seeking solutions.
According to a Center for Exhibition Industry Research report, only 16% of attendees at a trade show will be qualified prospects for your product or service. If the show you are attending has 5,000 attendees, can your team effectively sort through, finding the 800 who are qualified contacts for your company? Bennion-Robertson will train your staff clearly on how to identify, target, and qualify potential customers. We will sharpen their ability to gather enough data, and to effectively debrief this data, to significantly increase the success of follow-up efforts.