Ok, so the title may be a little misleading… but not entirely. I’ll get to that point in a minute…
For a very long time, I’ve had a love affair with vans. Not the shoe variety, but the surf bus classics. I’ve been in the water most of my life (though still not found a suitable solution to let me keep working whilst in the ocean!) and have always “needed” a van to get me there and of course for the extended weekends and surf holidays.
I’ve been searching for a new bus to convert and recently, we’ve found our new machine. I say new, it’s a 1985 LT 31 and it needs some work doing to it… but that’s another story.
When searching for my van, the process would typically go something like this: search hours on the web / magazines / forums for a potential bus. See said bus, look at description, go over and over the photos, do a bit more research about that bus on the web and then I’d contact the person selling it asking for a few more photos, documents and a bit more history about the van. Then we’d arrange a viewing and in this case, I’d buy it.
So how does this relate to exhibiting?
Typically, 57% of the buying process is complete, before a customer engages with you personally.
Me buying my van is no different to how a typical customer engages with a supplier. So, if you could find out a bit more about potential customers and what they might be interested in before they meet you for the first time at an event, wouldn’t you? It could give you the edge over your competition and help you to create more sales at the event.
There’s a plethora of tools out there to find out who’s going to an event. Some organisers offer you the chance to capture leads before the event via a unique registration form to your company (like N200’s Partner Portal). There might be a meeting planner type app or you could trawl Twitter or Linkedin pages to see who else might be going. Or, if you already know who will be going and they’ve been to your website before, why not create a little bit of remarketing to them and encourage them to come and see you at the event.
With just a little bit of work before the event (and not much cost), you could sift out the time wasters before they even get to your stand so that you can save that 20 minute going nowhere conversation and give the hot prospect the time they deserve leading to more sales success at the event.
Back to working on my bus…it’s dark and cold out…but it’s got to be ready by summer!