Trade Show Booth Staff Training Expert, Susan Friedmann, CSP, The Tradeshow Coach

The 21st Winter Olympics are about the start.  The buzz of activities and all the arrangements are reaching a crescendo in preparation for the Opening Ceremony.  However, all is not exactly as planned.  The weather is causing havoc – fog, lack of snow and rain are not what was expected to make the events run smoothly.

How similar is this to your trade show plans? Don’t you plan for the ideal situation where everything runs seamlessly? The display and your products all arrive on time, damage-free. Your literature and giveaways are there as planned, Your team makes the trip from all parts of the world with no travel hassles. If only it was that easy!

As we all know, life has its wonderful way of throwing curve balls at us to test our endurance, but most importantly to test how well we’ve planned the event.
What is your Plan B if something untoward happens unexpectedly? Do you have a Plan B and even a Plan C?

Here are seven steps for preparing for the unforeseen:

1. Brainstorm with your team what possible scenarios could occur.
2. Ask other employees for their thoughts on unpredictable situations.
3. List all possible circumstances.
4. Map out each one of the unpredictable situations outlining what and who is needed.
5. Generate a crisis planning checklist.
6. Hold a crisis meeting with everyone who needs to be involved.
7. Create a written plan of action and distribute it to all necessary team members

Follow these seven steps, and then pray very hard that you don’t need to use anything you’ve planned for.

Having a contingency plan in place will give you peace of mind so that you’ll sleep better knowing that everything is under control, whatever happens!

In my tradeshow training programs, I’ve always encouraged my clients’ exhibiting team to be 100% scripted and 100% flexible when it comes to interacting with booth visitors. What I mean by this is, you need to know what questions to ask to get the end result. For example, if your goal for the show is to find out more about how the economy is affecting various projects your prospects or existing customers are working on, you need prepare the right questions to ask, to collect that information. However, I have always advocated that despite how prepared you are, you also extreme flexibility, because the trade show floor is very unpredictable. You can never foresee 100% what’s going to happen, as no two shows are identical.

This weekend I attended a very special program conducted by Eric Lofholm, sales trainer and script writing guru.  Eric advocates the opposite philosophy. He believes that, with thought and pre-planning, you can anticipate almost all the situations and questions surrounding your prospects and customers.  Eric teaches that script writing is the key to help get you through any good, bad, or ugly situation.

Until this weekend, scripts, for me, conjured up visions of those telemarketers, who love to call during dinner time, and robotically spew out their script, which, in your mind, you can see them reading.  In other words, it was a totally negative exercise, which I’ve resisted like the plague.  How wrong could I be? The Eric Lofholm system prescribes script preparation for every possible scenario. Then, when written, internalizing your words to the point where they become a totally natural part of your conversation.  When you listen to the master exercising his skill, it’s totally mesmerizing and utterly believable. On the flight home from San Diego, my pen was flying across pages in my exercise book working on the numerous scripts I need.

Now, I realize that for many sales professionals, this concept isn’t new.  They use scripts in their field selling all the time.  However, does your exhibit team prepare scripts for the time on the show floor, or do they wing it? Because visitor interaction time is extremely limited, often 3-5 minutes, according to tradeshow research, sales reps need different scripts from the ones they use day-to-day.  The question is, do they have them? If not, I highly recommend they do, especially if you want to maximize prospect time in the booth.

Oh, I forgot to mention that once your scripts are written, they’re done for life. Editing and adding to your script book (another of Eric’s recommendations), is always allowable.

Back in a couple of days.  In the meantime, I’m busy writing my scripts.

WII-fm plays everywhere all the time, but on the tradeshow floor listenership is at its peak. WII-fm, better known as “What’s In It for me,” resonates loud and clear among tradeshow attendees as they walk up and down the aisles, attend educational sessions, and networking events.

The Problem:

Most exhibitors only tune into their own WII-fm channel, which means they just think about themselves, their products/services. How do I know this? It’s blatantly obvious. Nine times out of ten, when I hear an exhibitor presentation, they can’t wait to shake hands, introduce themselves (that’s already a good exhibitor), and then launch into their verbal barrage (static) of what they have to offer, giving little, or no heed to whether or not a need exists.
The Solution:

The solution, like many things, is simple, but not easy.  Here are three steps to follow to help get rid of the static and pump up the success volume:
Step 1: Lower the volume on your WII-fm channel and tune into your prospect’s WII-fm channel. 
Step 2: Ask questions to uncover needs, and discover what’s most important to your prospect.
Step 3: Listen to the answers (this is tough), then take this valuable information, and tailor it to fit your product/service presentation or demonstration.
To make sure this three-step volume pumping process works successfully, use some tradeshow booth staff training prior to the show as and integral part of your pre-show planning, and preparation. Your team, like actors on a stage, need preparation, and practice (learning how to listen), which means knowing what to do, and how to do it, to help guarantee successful results. Don’t assume they know!

This the fourth and final part of our Trends for 2010 tips. Today, I’m focusing on five rules to help you leverage technology to add to your trade show success.

1. Online is not an add-on.

The virtual component must be integral to every step of your trade-show planning.  Select the best online communities to reach your customers. And maintain your brand voice and image in every message.

2. Accessibility is key.

Make sure your trade-show web page is optimized for all the browsers, including those on smart phones. The design that looked great on Internet Explorer may be unreadable on a Droid.

3. Make your message move and speak.

Use web video, still images, and podcasting as well as text. Multimedia approaches engage more of the user’s attention. Live feeds from your booth can extend your trade show message to customers around the world, and YouTube videos can make it accessible months or years after the event is over.

4. Update often.

Keep your customers coming back to check for more. Good content may be news and links, helpful tips, community-building, or just the sense of a warm, engaging person as the face of the company.

5. Listen as well as talk.

Twitter, Facebook, and blogs offer almost instantaneous feedback on what’s working and what’s not. If a member of your booth staff was rude to a customer, you can be sure the news will be all over Twitter in five minutes. Monitor the Internet and the Twitterverse with automatic searches, and respond instantly to any problems.

In this episode of the Tradeshow Training Minute, Susan Friedmann, CSP, The Tradeshow Coach, shares the essentials every exhibitor needs to follow up their tradeshow leads to turn them into sales.