How to Drive Tradeshow ROI (Without Wasting Your Budget)

No matter how much you click from place to place, you'll never replace face to face. Trade shows are about people that are about creating relationships. You know that's where sales comes from. AI has not replaced that part yet.

You spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on trade shows, and yet you can't quantify the growth you get out of those shows. If that's the case, this episode is for you. Welcome to Driving Growth, the go to market podcast for traditional B2B businesses that are looking to build systems to create predictable revenue. In short, turning their company into a revenue factory.

I'm your host, Steve Whittington, president of roadmap and a believer in one simple truth. Sustainable growth is not an accident. It's engineered. And my company, roadmap is a builder of go to market systems.

On today's show, Anders Blank, founder and CEO of engage ify a trade show, infotainment and engagement expert, speaker, podcast host and author of Engage First Capture attention, Build Trust, and Drive Real Results, a book that you want to pick up. Anders. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me excited.

Well, trade shows are an element of marketing and sales plans that I feel are under underresourced and not quantified appropriately and not thought about strategically. Why do you think the trade show strategies or a trade show actually almost fails even before, like the booth is being set up? I think you you kind of touched on something already is just the idea of just going because you always have, you know, just the we're just going to show up, we're going to see how we do.

And compared to last year. And so there's not really an overarching strategy there as far as, you know, pre-show during the show post show. The goals and objectives aren't very clear. You know, the measurements are just basically the scan leads, maybe, maybe booked meetings.

But I think some companies aren't even at that level of sophistication. And so it's just they're kind of setting themselves up for failure or disappointment because they don't realize what's possible. What other companies do that are, you know, running at that higher level. And and so really, there's a lot of, things to look at and strategy in behind that, that most just kind of again, it's kind of the, the we call it, we have a trade show triangle, which is one of our models and the lowest level is called the booth buyer because they buy a booth, they set it up and that's what they do.

They build it and they will come. That's what they believe. That's the myth. Right, right, right.

Yeah. And and so what? And they sit back. They're passive.

They're just, you know, waiting for people to show up. And, and so they realize they need to be more active than that. The next level up is what we call the exhibitor, which is a commoditized term. But 60% of exhibitors fall in that.

They're a little bit more active, a little bit better leads, a little more differentiation. They're still below this train and track line, meaning they don't train their booth staff. They don't invest in their people. 85% of your success comes from this, from your booth staff.

Right? This is so there's all these senior, the center of exhibition industry research, you know, stats and people know it's a face to face thing, and yet they never really actually invest in that piece there. The the eye candy of the booth takes precedence, right. Or takes the majority of the budget.

So lots, lots to unpack there. Okay. Yeah. So you're talking about this triangle.

So let's, let's let's back up. So we just here we just sort of talked about what we're both seeing is a lot of folks, commit to a certain amount of shows because they always have. So they have this trade show budget that is often like when you start to put in just basic wages, travel, booths and all this sort of things. And certainly when you're dealing with manufacturers with large pieces of equipment, there's freight and there's all that stuff massive.

It's, you know, it's six figure budgets very, very easily. So what's the what should a company do before they even decide to commit to this trade show strategy? Like what's the first step that that you. Really.

Well, I think so there is strategy and behind, you know, picking the right show. You know like is is your ICP your ideal customer profile going to be at this show, researching this show to make sure it is worthwhile. And if you have done it, you know, digging into those numbers because a lot of companies don't even run, you know, kind of ROI on it, right? Looking at what came out of that show and, and that idea of, of getting that bang for your buck.

So, I would I would definitely, you know, stop look at what your, your show season looks like. Which ones are absolutely necessary. It's probably better. Well, it is better to do a really good job at a few than try to do them all right.

Like it's, it's it's hard to do it well everywhere you know. And so sometimes you might be going down a size maybe you're just doing ten by ten at some of the, you know, secondary tertiary shows. And then you bring your equipment, you bring your big stuff at the bigger ones. Right?

Yeah. So it's got to be the, you know, the, the message market match. All has to be in alignment, to for it to make sense. And then, you know, then we got to measure.

We got to measure and make sure this, this is going to pay off. So that's deciding if it's worth attending. You've got a good trade show fit and, and now you're setting expectations kind of, you know, hey, I'm going to go into the show, I'm going to try to get this. So now the next step is, you know, what are you going to put in the booth.

Right. So when you show up or when you talk to your clients about what makes a good presence, what's the step that you like to see being executed upon? You mentioned training. You mentioned a few things.

So let's make sure in terms of presence of the booth, there's something that we have and we got videos on this and in our LinkedIn and everything, we actually we just put it out not too long ago. Five pointed star. We say to be the star of the trade show, you got to ramp up your booth authority. And so because I've worked in all kinds of booths at different shows, and I started realizing that my ability to build crowds and present information, you know, was fairly consistent and my results varied accordingly to these five areas.

And so I realized this is really what, you know, makes a booth have presence. So, the first one is location, just like in real estate, right. You know, there is going to be more prominent locations, you know, you know, on the show floor and you can control that to some degree because there's loyalty points. You know, if you keep coming back, you get to pick your booth depending on what's left.

So there's that. Right. The size of your booth. Right.

Typically the bigger presence, the the bigger the booth, the bigger the presence. Although people can go overboard in certain circumstances, you have people walking by going, they've got that size of booth, I think. I think we're paying them too much money. Right.

Sometimes there's a negative to the big or it's so big they can't fill it with enough stuff and it looks like a ghost town in there, you know, there's not enough energy in it. So there is a sweet spot with that. And then then there's design, okay. Which, I mean, you can we could talk about design.

And if you have have someone on who exhibit designs, exhibits and could go on and on about this, but for me, the mistakes I see is it's so closed off people have trouble getting in or. Yeah, the things you really want them to engage with are in the center of the booth, and they have to walk through half of the booth to get there right. Make, you know, employ the path of least resistance, make it easy for people, you know, to to to participate, okay? And really take advantage of what we call the critical corner.

There's usually one corner of your booth that's going to be on a higher traffic aisle or intersection, if you will. Okay. That corner is what you would want to put the most engaging thing. You have to stop people and then have your people, you know, upsell their time and attention for a deeper, richer experience deeper into the booth, you know?

Okay, so, so, so all of that, so we get location, size, design, then production value, you know, is it maybe it's lighting, maybe it's ave, maybe it's staging. How do you create? You know, well, frame out what you have as important. Right.

And then when you do that and you showcase it, it does bring it more attention. And then the last star of the five pointed star is to make your booth. The star is your reputation. Now you.

That's a long term control kind of thing. You can't just turn that on or off. But a company like for example, in tech right now, companies and I, you know, Nvidia companies are really hot. Or you're just on trend or a darling of the industry that's going to have such a natural pull as well.

So I realize it's a lot easier working for a you know, a hot company that. Right. People just want to come naturally. Right?

So so that's you know what what I think makes up that, you know, that presence piece, that kind of gravitas, of a booth and, and the thing is to optimize those things that you can control. So, yeah, there is a lot of stuff that goes into that, like try to get the best location, try to design for the flow of folks. So you can, get engagement on on what you think is the most engaging piece. And then you talk about design and profiling and the last one reputation.

Like you have to continue to sometimes being at the show is part of building your reputation. Sure. But yeah, that's that's those are really great points for everybody to think through as they're actually designing their booth. But the next piece is the fact that you're at these places where there's a whole bunch of ideal client profiles, a whole bunch of people.

So how important is the people part of the booth? Very important. And one of the biggest mistakes I see is people putting in some sort of booth activation or attraction. And I mean the one I love to make fun of these days is coffee machines, like a barista.

Right and right. And some of these shows, we did a show a while back, $16,000 a day to have a barista. And like the sponsorship for that, like, so insane, you know, investment. And what are you doing?

You're basically giving coffee out to fellow exhibitors most of the time, right. And and yeah, it might make a line. But then the thing, the downfall that I see is that the booth staff never go and engage with this. It's just it's just a coffee giveaway, right?

It's like you're you're spending this money so that that human piece has to be there. And they have to be aware. They have to be head up ready to, you know, ready to interact. And often we see lots of different, you know, no no's or booths, you know, issues where people are clustering and they got their backs to the aisle and they're just visiting amongst themselves.

They're on their phones, their heads down. You can have a whale of a prospect walk by and they would never see it. And one of the things I do, and if you ever follow me on LinkedIn, I'll post some of these pictures of these things happening. And the people never even know I took the picture because, you know, there'll be 2 or 3 of them with their head down, right?

So, you know, those bad habits, trying to train that out of people, you know, and get it through their skulls that, you know, we have to be here for the people. There's there's kind of two sides of it. When we look at the trade show trainings that we do, Steve, is that one. The basic is let's not deter incoming engagement, right?

Like, let's not ignore the people who want to be helped, okay? And are being overlooked because you're not you're not ready to receive them. And then the second, second part of this is how can you create that engagement in the first place and be proactive, right. So, you know, because you you can have some really good booth staff that are just out there on the edge of the aisle interacting.

Even just saying good morning to people is going to create maybe some, some sort of like stop and hey, what do you guys do? Right. Like that's the, the ultimate is can you get someone to look at your booth, go, what do you guys do? And that is the invitation to your your elevator pitch to you to, you know, start to connect with them.

I used to work a lot of trade shows and I loved I love working trade shows because it was an opportunity for me on the executive team to interact with our end customers. But I always found that. And then I then ended up picking teams that would go to it, and inviting specific people that I knew that were great at being engaging. So like you, you'd get onto the trade shows team.

But I always felt that people forgot the second word in trade show that it's a show like you're actually, you know, you're supposed to show up and you're engaging, you're putting on a show, right? As opposed to some showmanship. Right? Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And so like. Yeah.

So the people is so critical. So I'd like you to sort of dive into a little bit about how tactics that used you just said, like in the aisle saying good morning. What are some simple ways that folks can, make sure they have the right kind of people there and be, you talked about a foundation of what they need to do, but how can they actually engage people to actually be part of the trade show experience for sure. And, and some of the ways we think about the people side of things.

And when we think of it, it's these meaningful interactions, right? The ability to connect. And so we talk about having a top tier team, which is what you were talking about. So you're picking the right people for the right roles.

Yeah. So you typically want more extroverted people work in the perimeter like yourself. Right. And then the people who are maybe a little more introverted, probably more technical expertise, you know, sure.

Better on one on ones. Those subject matter experts, they're going to be more on the interior of the booth. And so that you have, though, that the extroverts on the perimeter working at finding those qualified people that then get, you know, time with those experts, you know, so that's that's one way of looking at it's kind of the outside in the inside. Okay.

We talk about top tier team. We also talk about engagement expertise, which is that training of of your people. 49% of companies rarely or never train their booth staff, even though it's so important only 1 to 2% ever train their booth staff with an outside trainer, with a third party with an expert. So it's it's it's a kind of a rare thing.

And the trainings we do see, it's typically people just listing off a bunch of don't do it, do this, don't do that off their phone or a clipboard kind of thing. Right. So there can be a lot more done to kind of ingrain this into people and make it very fun, you know? So and then the then the last thing too is we have specialized support, which is, you know, if you don't have the right people, right, if you don't have the team that's wired to do it, you can bring in professionals to work that out at that perimeter, you know?

Right. So and they know the things that you need to do is yeah, say hi to people. You know, just just a smile on your face. Just having some some warmth, exuding some, you know, positive body language.

You can just engage people in that kind of almost passive way. But if you do have maybe a special giveaway, you're entering people into a draw for for some sort of raffle prize. Those people can then be equipped to say, hey, you want to enter a prize? You want to stop, you know, maybe have you seen our new blah blah, blah, whatever, fill in the blank kind of thing, right?

And they're asking a lot. And it's a lot of rejection. Right. And that's why we often bring in our own people because they're immune to it now.

Yeah, it's to that point. One tactic that I would do is I would cycle my people through the days. I would be at the show the whole day as a leader. But then I'd have new staff every day because, yes, I mean, with having internships, right?

Yeah. No, that's great if you can afford to do that for sure. Yeah. We'll get back to the show in just a minute.

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So if you're doing all this kind of stuff I got a hope that you're capturing some conversations. You're capturing some leads. I've, I've had so many conversations with well, how many leads do we get at the show? And they're like, oh, about 6 to 8.

I'm like, was it six or was it eight? How many was it? So what do you think is broken about how like leads are captured at shows these days? You know.

And the old stat was that 75% of leads are never followed up on like that. That's going back in the like early 2000 and before. And, and then I started thinking like, you know, in this day and age of CRM and integrations and APIs and all of this, we should be getting these leads in and into, you know, a cadence or some sort of, funnel for that lead follow up. Right, that we can be automated and the really hot ones we're going to call right away.

You know, it's all segmented and everything. But there was a report that came out from Swap Card, which is one of these scanning, companies kind of thing for, for batch scanning. And they were still saying that 80% of the leads are never downloaded off of their off of their site. So, so that's and I just I couldn't believe it because, I mean, we we work with a lot of tech companies who are, you know, very sophisticated.

And so I, I'm just kind of like that must be on the whole and lots of these smaller shows and maybe, you know, smaller businesses that just aren't, you know, maybe that's skewing all the data, but, you know, whoever's listening, think, get the leads into a CRM. Right. But ideally you've you've already planned that follow up before you got the leads. Right.

Like the follow up is already created and you just you got to just put it through that, that cadence or that market attack campaign after the fact. Right. So, but the but there's got to be some good notes too, because the tough thing these days is if you do follow up and you're emailing some of these generic follow ups that we just kind of talked about in this CRM are going to fall on deaf ears and blind eyes because they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But when you have a lot of relevance, you've made notes.

Now all of a sudden you're addressing their needs from that conversation. It's pretty hard to ignore that kind of email if you do see it. Yeah, know for sure. So if I was a CEO of, a B2B company that's doing shows where I'm trying to get accounts or supporting, a dealer network or a retail network on that, what's what's in I'm listening to this.

What's the one thing that you would say to them that you got to make sure you get this right, if you're looking at what you're doing for trade shows this year? Well, I'm we have them we have a model we call the engage five framework. And it's actually three things. And I just want to talk about how they kind of like tie together.

So so we talk about attract attract connect and convey. And so some companies try to do things out of order or try to skip a step and then it just doesn't work. So we first have to stop them. We need we need people to stop.

Give them a reason to stop. That's that attract phase. And that's where you know, your boost activation. Some of the people on the outside stopping, you know, maybe you have some sort of incentive to make people want to take part.

It may not even relate to what you do. It's better when it does. But let's face it, there's a lot of, you know, massages and coffee and all these other things, right? But then the connect piece, that's where, you know, the people come in, right where we're talking about that, that's so critical.

I feel like that, you know, connecting people and interacting in a way that you're creating meaningful interactions so that you basically earn the right to pitch. Right? Sometimes we skip that kind of, you know, time to build rapport or just make people feel welcome in the booth. And it's just like, hey, buy from us, buy from us, right?

Which, you know, people stopped and now it feels weird. So if you have that piece, you go to the last piece, which is convey, you know, we gave them a reason to stop, give them a reason to listen, which is that connect. And now let's give them a reason to buy. Right.

And this is where you get into your messaging and, and what it is that you do. And hopefully they've actually, you know, are interested now because they've stopped, they've, they've been made welcome. They kind of understand a little bit more of what you're doing. And, you know, you can take them down that road.

Any final thoughts? I think the biggest thing that and we did touch on this is but the no matter how much you click from place to place, you'll never replace face to face trade shows are about people. They're about creating relationships. You know, that's where sales comes from.

I has not replaced that part yet. Okay. I don't know how they will, but you know, and so that idea of yeah, investing in your people, really equipping them with the skills, bringing the right people in the first place, they're not fighting their wiring in a sense, you know, that is so critical and it's so overlooked. And I mentioned some of the stats before.

It's just, if more companies paid a little bit more attention to that, we talk about, the ROI, a three legged stool of ROI. And I'll just go to this real quick. 75 to 80% of the budget is for the booth, the booth space, the shipping, the storage, the triage, all of that. Right.

Number five, 10 to 15%, which is the second leg is your employees T&E, you know, bringing your booth staff and putting them up and everything. And then the third leg, which is for engagement, is only 5 to 10% of your budget. And so often and what we call a booth buyer just have their people and the booth. You just have those two legs and they focus on those two legs so much when there's no engagement that three legged stool falls over and there's no ROI to be had because it's supported by the those three legs.

So have that engagement and training your booth staff having good people ready and willing to engage. That's that's where that's at. Anders, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge, your your spot on in this world where we live in, where human connection is becoming more sought after, trade shows are a place to optimize, because, you know, people want to talk to people. So thank you for everything that you've shared.

And, let's hope that folks listen to your advice and go and make some impact. All right. Thanks for having me. It was great to have Anders on the show.

We're kindred spirits, and we both love trade shows. But I believe there is, an unfortunate pattern amongst a lot of organizations that they don't take the time to organize and optimize their investment. And it is a big investment on the most part. And there's a lot of pieces that have to go into it.

And you need to have a plan. You need to make sure that you get the right people. You need to have an offer. You need to have a unified, team that is executing upon your trade show strategy.

And then, of course, it has to be all tied into your overall go to market system so that you can justify and track ROI in order to make that investment to optimize down the road. Lots of things to unpack. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you like what you heard, go to Roadmap agency.

com/podcast and download the Revenue Factory Toolkit in which you will receive the mathematical models and framework for building your go to market system. Also subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. With new episodes dropping on the first and the third Wednesday of every month, I'm Steve Whittington. Thanks for listening.

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