Coach Exhibitors for the Win-Win

How can event organizers coach exhibitors to have success onsite?

Interview with Ed Bruno, EventsPass VP of Sales

 

One of the questions we get asked often by our customers, our show organizers, is how we can work together as a team to be more effective in helping the exhibitors be successful. And what we often see is, show organizers are really good at selling booth space — You've got your 250 or 350 booths filled out. You've got your floor map designed and done. All the boxes are checked and it's high fives around the office.

 

But an opportunity is missed if you're not taking on the role of a coach post-booth-sale to help ensure the success of those exhibitors.

You know they've spent a bunch of money to be there on site and they have expectations and they're all different. Ask them

• What are your goals?
• What's your strategy to achieve those goals?
• What's your average cost per sale?
• How many sales do you need? Are you shooting for?
• And what's your path, your plan, your strategy as an exhibitor to meet those goals?
• Are you doing contesting on site?
• Are you doing special promotional components that are giving discounts and price point incentives and things like that

 

It's very different too for an exhibitor that it's a lead show. Then show organizers must find out:

• What are your goals and your metrics that you're looking at?
• How many leads do you need?
• Out of those leads, how many leads do you expect will be good qualified leads?
• Post-show, when you've got that bank of qualified leads, what's your conversion rate?
• How many do you typically close? Is it half? If it's half, what's your average transaction value per sale?

 

You can start to create a pathway, a methodology that you back into for what kind of volume you need to meet the outcomes that you have. With our exhibitors and our show organizers, EventsPass will do webinars as one example of how we support the overall health of a show.

 

We'll do up to four of them leading up to the opening of a show. And we have exhibitors jumping into these webinars. We have tools like an ROI calculator where we're putting in all kinds of metrics. That are really eye-opening for a lot of exhibitors. I've had some say, “My gosh, I didn't think I needed that many sales to really hit the number that I wanted. I never really thought of it that way before.”

 

Or they'll say, “I'm surprised how few sales actually are needed to have a great effective show.”

 

So the moral of the story, if you will, is it takes a lot less energy with a focus strategy to keep exhibitors happy and re-sign them year over year, re-sell them, vs. dealing with a lot of churn and having to go out into biz dev mode and find new exhibitors that you're trying to find and sell. 

 

We would love to work with you if you want to get into a deeper conversation about how we can collaborate to build a sales strategy for post-booth sales. “Sell through the sale” is our motto.