The role of trade shows in the 21st Century

Comment by Lee Ali on February 7, 2008 at 6:05pm

Malcolm; great article; and i totally agree with some of your comments.

Interesting paragraph for me is the following...

"Far-sighted companies are frequently removing their own salespeople from their booths and using professional traffic-gatherers, backed up by a few technically-competent specialists. This is not using vacuous 20-year olds on tottering high heels, but buying in the skills of people who have spent a lifetime in commerce in a number of industries and who are now largely freelancers with a ‘hint of grey’. It’s amazing how reassuring that can be for peace-of-mind-driven purchasers approaching a potentially new supplier, (even when they don’t work for the booth-owning company!)"

This is interesting because we set up our operation Expo Stars (http://www.expostars.com) purely focused on this. Having worked on exhibition booths frequently around the world it is amazing to this day how ill equiped staff members are with generating and qualifying sales leads. Gathering new qualified sales leads should be the primary focus of every exhibitor; and it is vital that staff members are fully trained to handle the initial sales window. After all people buy off people and not sparkling plastic displays. Tradeshows are about networking; meeting new people and the internet will never ever replace the human touch that the tradeshows have to buying and selling.

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