Trade Shows – The Companies You Dream About Doing Business With – Stop Dreaming, Start Selling!

Just about every business owner will know the names of the dream companies that they would love their company to be doing business with.

These are companies who if they place an order can have a transformational impact on a business.

I call them the “High 5” wins. These are the orders that the owner’s sales team live to achieve and will celebrate mightily over when they win their first piece of business however small from one of these prospective giants.

In all of the years that I sold exhibition space to trade show exhibitors, I was never once asked by an exhibitor if any of these particular companies attended the show that I was selling and yet, I was in all modesty, hugely successful at my job.

The reason I was so successful was that I always asked who those “High 5” companies were for each of my clients. When I was able to show would-be exhibitors the people that attended our show from their dream businesses and others very like them, I always made a sale.

And when I say show them, I mean I highlighted the names of people, their job titles, the number of individuals attending from each company. I showed them to be real living and breathing people.

People that could be reached, could be pitched and could perhaps be sold to if the two parties were able to get together at the show.

Which brings me to the importance of pre-show marketing and a curious mindset among some exhibitors.

Trade Shows Hatch New Beings

If I told you that trade show organisers hatch completely new beings to be their visitors in advance of every show they run, you would wonder what I was talking about and yet, many exhibitors would appear to hold this belief.

They aren’t thinking clearly about how to use events to enhance and develop their list of prospective customers especially when it relates to those businesses that they are already communicating with.

They don’t see the value in alerting people within companies that they want to be doing business with to their presence at an upcoming exhibition or see that some of those same people might well be planning to attend.

When this is the case, it highlights a disconnect between ongoing marketing ambitions as laid out in a marketing plan versus a company’s trade show activities. Sometimes the two things seem to be only very loosely connected and this must be the reason why some exhibiting businesses undertake so little promotion in advance of a show.