Michael Thimmesch's Page

You’ve been asked the same question time and time again:  “What’s the ROI from our trade show program?”  You grit your teeth, take a deep breath, force a smile on your face, and answer, “I don’t know.”

Why not?  It might be because you can’t get your sales team to share which leads turned into sales with you.  Or because you don’t have a unified database that tracks it automatically.  Or because you simply don’t have time to chase it all down.

But it’s not rocket…

Trade shows are a serious marketing medium in which we invest billions of dollars. In our quest to achieve business results, we often talk about getting the highest ROI (Return on Investment) or ROO (Return on Objectives).  But what about the greatest ROF (Return on Fun)?

Trade shows are about meeting people, those unpredictable, emotional…

Hidden rules govern almost every area of our lives.  They guide our behavior and expectations, yet are rarely written down for us in neat little books.

For example, there’s the 5 Second Rule:  When a piece of food falls on the floor, you can eat it if you pick it up within five seconds.  There’s the High Heel Rule: if a woman is…

He’s “that guy,” and he’s doing trade shows all wrong.

Here’s 8 things…

Last month at the TS2 Show I taught a class about lessons learned as a trade show marketer. After all the other students had left, a young exhibit manager approached me and asked, “Everybody in my company thinks of me as the trade show guy. How do I make them think of me as themarketing…