DOUBLE YOUR LEADS from Trade Shows and Conferences

After a decade and a half as a business development consultant, I wanted to share some best practices and strategies for optimizing your efforts at trade shows and conferences. I'll cover best practices for filling your lead pipeline, how to create meaningful connections with potential clients and partners, and share one strategy that has helped me double the number of leads I get from trade shows and conferences.

Maximizing Your Trade Show and Conference Efforts

Mindset

First, you should approach trade shows and conferences with the mindset that these are big opportunities to develop new business opportunities. Think about the sales journey of your clients. What other opportunity would give you a chance to speak to hundreds of prospects all at once? Think about how many lunches, emails, phone calls, or knocks on doors you would have to make just to get a chance to talk to a few hundred people. When you do the math, it would probably take the majority of the year just to get through a few hundred names. So make sure you shift your mindset to look at this as more of a hack to get significant attention to what you have to say or sell.

Develop a game plan

Second, developing a game plan prior to attending can be the difference between a successful event and one that feels like a failure. To ensure success, it’s important to plan ahead and have clear objectives in mind. Before attending, research the conference agenda and identify potential networking opportunities. Also, consider how you want to represent your business as this will help identify marketing materials you will need to develop beforehand.

One important action plan I include on my checklist is something I’ve named the “5-5-5 Plan”. What I do is make a list of 5 important people or industry influencers that I want to try and meet, 5 existing relationships that I want to catch up with at the event, and 5 prospects that I want to connect with and begin building rapport with. When it comes to meeting industry influencers, they are a gateway for connecting and can help make warm introductions to prospects that may be on your list. Another reason you want to connect with the industry influencers is that perhaps you have a podcast or are writing an article that may need some industry expertise to help complete your content. Having an industry influencer as part of your content piece would boost your reach and add credibility to your platform. In terms of meeting with existing relationships, it is always important to keep up relations with those existing contacts, as you never know where opportunities may lie for both parties. I’ve been in situations where I took an existing referral source out for dinner and ended up learning about a new opportunity that I was able to pitch my services to. Finally, meeting new prospects is an obvious task for you as it will build new relationships and fill your pipeline with leads to keep you busy for the rest of the year.

Go as a team

Third, if you’re an exhibitor at the conference or trade show, make sure to always go with a team. While it may be difficult for sole practitioners or smaller businesses to register a team to attend, you do need to scale your efforts in order to maximize opportunities, especially if you are also exhibiting at the trade show. Having the ability to leave your booth and network with others is important. Having multiple people attend from your company will allow you to split the duties of who is at the booth, who is roaming the convention floor, and who is attending the individual workshop sessions. Always have a plan and make a schedule so that it is very clear what the responsibilities are prior to attending the event.

Have fun!

Fourth, make sure to have as much fun as you can! Look at trade shows as a fun way to do business development, which will open your mind and make you more open to new ideas and meeting new people. One way I like to make conferences or trade shows fun is to attend as many hospitality suite events or after-hours parties as possible. There are no shortage of exhibitors and sponsors looking to outdo each other at large conferences. Hospitality suites, after-hours parties, and sponsored in-city events such as golfing are typically on the agenda for many sponsors, so make sure to be on the lookout for them. Reach out to the event organizers and industry contacts to see who has an “in” to these events. After-hours parties are probably the best, as everyone lets loose at the end of a long day and you can have more personable touch points with people you want to do business with.

Be remembered

Fifth, be remembered. Do whatever you can to be remembered in a positive way. You probably don’t want to embarrass yourself, especially if you are a professional looking to make a good impression on potential clients and referral sources. I’ll share something that my business partner does really well at events. While he’s an accountant by trade, he is also an avid photographer, and he has all the fancy camera gear you can think of. At conferences, he always has his camera out and is taking candid shots of attendees. With their permission, he asks if he can post their pictures on social media to share. Most will say yes, and when he tags them in the photos, his social profile reaches the person’s network that he took the photo of. What an amazing way to amplify the number of connections he makes at conferences! Not everyone is a photographer or is comfortable asking others for photos, so do what comes naturally to you. Try and be a presenter at the event, pass out a fun sticker about your company to everyone you meet, or host a small get-together and buy drinks for key prospects you meet at the event.

“Secret” strategy

For most conferences, they will have an early setup time for the exhibitors to come the day before to get their booths setup. If you are also exhibiting at the event, make sure to get there as early as possible and get your booth setup completed (this is where having multiple people from your company attend is important). While your team is setting up the booth, or if you get done early, start walking around the convention centre and have a chat with the other exhibitors. What I discovered was that I could get meetings with key people or at least insights into who was the decision-maker at that company. Because I got there a day earlier, most of the exhibitors weren't super rushed and had a few minutes for a quick chat. The other advantage was that I was pretty much the first person to talk to them, so they were more than eager to take my business card or commit to having a meeting later in the conference schedule. If I was able to chat with the decision-maker, I would end up getting introduced to an entirely new network of people that I wasn’t expecting to meet. One thing to note, make sure to take into consideration that if the person setting up the booth looks stressed or busy, the last thing they want to do is talk to you. In those situations, I would normally just take note and come back later, or alternatively, I’ve offered to help other exhibitors set up their booth, which is also a good way to make a new connection.

What if you aren’t an exhibitor? I don’t recommend lying your way in; instead, what I’ve done in the past is reach out to the organizers and offer to do coffee runs to the exhibitors. Sometimes you’ll be able to do it for free, and all it costs is for you to grab some large coffee travel cases and some disposable cups. Some organizers may be willing to do a custom sponsorship deal with you, which I will think is well worth the cost if you can afford it.