Make the Most of Your Investment by Properly Staffing Your Trade Show Booth.

You’ve spent the time and money to have a booth at the trade show and now you just need to show up and “man” the booth. Wrong, a badly staffed booth is just like throwing money away. When you properly manage who represents your company you can boost the profitably, your brand and sales at the show.

What can you do to ensure that you assemble a team of booth staffers that will get the job done right?

Make this your best trade show ever...

• Choose staffers who actually want to staff your trade show booth and have the right attitude throughout the show.  Then, train chosen staffers for product, company, and customer knowledge as needed.

• Your booth staffers will be more motivated when they understand clearly just how much you are investing at each show, what are the company’s goals and your goals for them at the show.

• A staffer that is able to stay focused on aisle traffic, watch attendees walking down the aisle for the right moment, and engage with them can get double, triple, or more leads than a booth staffer who is distracted or too shy.

• Your booth staffers don’t have time to tell your entire company history.  So train staffers to ask what matters most to your booth visitors, and then share only the relevant part of your story.

• Tell your booth staffers it’s essential they take a minute after each visitor conversation to write down a few sentences about what that lead said and wants, before going on to the next lead. This is extremely important as this allows them to personalize the “thank you for stopping by” follow-up email or letter.

• Spend enough time training your booth staffers to give them the chance to succeed.  A half hour just before the show starts is not nearly enough.  For example, can staffers all smoothly demonstrate your newest products or explain your services so that a layman can understand? This is especially crucial in the technical industries.

• New booth staffers benefit enormously by doing practice booth staff role-playing before the trade show.  It gets them over their fears and engrains the training much more memorably.

• Invest in bringing enough staffers so they can maximize the investment you’ve already spent in booth space, trade show exhibits, show expenses and services, and promotions.

• Surprisingly, introverted booth staffers can outperform extroverted booth staffers, because they can be more focused on engaging attendees and may listen more to your booth visitors’ needs.

• Offer prizes and/or recognition for the staffers who gather the highest quantity of qualified leads.

Remember, your booth staffers are the ambassadors of your brand.  What they say and do matters a great deal. Get more from your trade show investment by following the suggestions provide in this blog.

Do you have an interesting success story or a mistake you learned from? We would love to hear from you in the box below...