When Tradeshows Can Be a Massive Waste of Money and Resources

Take a minute to see if this scenario sounds familiar.

Step 1: You invest $30,000 in a booth that can do double duty as an Island and Inline booth – very smart and efficient.

Step 2: You spend $6,000 per event for four booth staff members. Booth space cost, shipping & drayage and ancillary costs will move you into $20,000 to $25,000 range. Over five shows perhaps an aggregate of $125,000 plus some portion of booth cost amortized across the schedule. Let’s agree on $150,000 to cover the five major events plus the smaller events.

The primary purpose of attending the event is expanding market share through identifying and converting booth attendees to new clients.

Step 3: You make a common mistake of enticing attendees into the booth with the de rigueur Barnum and Bailey tricks and promotional items. Let’s say over ten shows you average 150 badge scans. Reality Check: 50% or more of the attendees have no real interest in purchasing your product and often promotional items are pushed onto attendees with the concomitant badge scan to avoid the hassle and cost of back shipping.

Step 4: The end product is 750 poorly qualified attendees leaving the booth. The leads are poorly qualified because badge data is inaccurate; there is no ability to electronically edit the information in the booth or collect specific information that Sales has identified as important to the sales process. Unfortunately, Sales will still have to follow up with all 1500 attendees to determine that, after thousands of wasted calls, the attendees merely wanted a promotional item or to enter a raffle for a Kindle or iPad.

Historically, Marketing has used badge scans as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to validate show success. Following this path will actually reduce sales efficiency, increase campaign costs, and fuel the gap between sales and marketing.

Step 5: Debrief: You have invested $150,000 and Sales had to wade through 1500 names to arrive at the unfortunate conclusion that only 5% of the attendees might potentially be a new client and, given your historic close rate, you might garner 10-15 new clients. You just spent $1,000 to $1,500 per new client and clogged your marketing automation system with bad information. The booth, based on your current process, is too big and overstaffed to meet your real attendee interaction needs.

You could achieve better results with half the investment and the use of consistent strategic processes to improve the number of qualified attendees to your booth, gather pertinent information for Sales, deliver specific product information to attendees and provide valid reports to management.

If this resonates with you, to help I only need verification of one aspect of your program: Your team wants to improve their performance and, if that is the case, I am sure we can help.