One of the most important components of a successful trade show is who you bring to the show itself. The booth staff you select can literally make or break your ROI at the show itself. Whether on site or located afar, here’s the best tips to successfully manage your trade show booth staff:
Carefully Select Your Booth Staff in Advance
Within your company, you know who the subject matter experts are. You also know who has the personality of a wet blanket or the person who is so shy they’re practically mute. When selecting booth staff, it’s important to select knowledgeable and outgoing people who will represent your company well and drive more engagement.
When taking more staff is not an option, many companies supplement their booth staff with outsiders. This can either be professional trained trade show booth staff that you engage for the day or you could take your greatest brand advocates with your team- your customers. Both offer positives regarding engaging people on the trade show floor. Professional staffers are used to trying to capture people’s attention and are often briefed on the basics of the product, goods, or service to communicate with visitors. Using happy customers as booth staff is an exciting idea because it offers prospects a look at how they may similarly enjoy the product, good, or service. It also gives them more in depth knowledge about how other businesses or consumers have used the product, good, or service.
Train Train Train
If your company is taking only employees, it’s important to train your booth staff prior to arriving on the trade show floor. People need to know what is expected of them, who will run point on demonstrations, who to ask for help, or what the overall message is for the show. These are all good items to cover when you train your booth staff in advance. If your booth staff shows up on the trade show floor and aren’t all on the same page, your ROI could tank immediately. Ensure every one of the booth staff know the plan in advance.
Use App Based Lead Gathering Software to Connect to Your CRM
If your booth staff spoke to someone for an hour and didn’t collect all of their information, it was a waste of time. The fastest way to gather a prospect’s information is to scan their badge using an app based lead generation system. These work with many modern CRM’s and can automatically drop qualified leads into the CRM to access later. Another great benefit is that a Sales or Marketing Manager seeking to check in on the performance of their booth staff can do so remotely via the app or by checking their CRM. If the leads are coming in very slowly or appear to be mostly competitors checking out the trade show exhibit, then the manager can adjust the team’s strategy based on the information gathered.
Incentivize Booth Staff with the Most Qualified Leads
Who doesn’t love a contest, bonus, or benefit? By offering booth staff an incentive for qualifying the most leads at the trade show, they will focus like a laser on bringing people into the exhibit and having those quality conversations. Make sure to be clear about guidelines up front in order to avoid false qualifications or undesirable leads. Nobody wants to go through their CRM later and find out that one of the staff was just scanning badges of vendors at the show or competitors.
There are many great ways to successfully manage your staff while exhibiting at a trade show. We’ve only mentioned a few tactics here, but for more great ideas, ask your exhibit house partner. They can make some excellent recommendations based on decades of experience across the globe.
