Hi, guys. My name's Bernard Ablola, President of Think Strategy. We are a B2B sales and marketing firm located in Irvine, California. My spare time, I also sit on a nonprofit called the Holistic Life Foundation. We teach kids yoga and mindfulness in inner city schools, specifically in Baltimore city.
I'm here interviewing the CEO and founder of Exhibit Potential, Ross. How's it going, Ross?
Good, thanks.
Awesome. I'm glad I have you here.
Thank you.
Ross is a 12 year veteran of trade shows and exhibits. He's also a consultant and a strategic partner, bringing companies to exhibit halls and trade shows.
With that said, what are some of the common myths behind trade shows?
In a sense of the people exhibiting at them and stuff, like when they actually exhibit at the show?
Yeah, a lot of times ... Yeah. Yeah.
I think people ... If you separate into the first time exhibitors, for example, people new to exhibiting, I think the myth is, is that, of what they can actually accomplish at a show or what they can get out of it.
For example, you have a show like CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. The CES show is the largest trade show by attendance in the world. You get up to 150,000 people, in 2018, I think, that went to this thing. It's in all these different convention halls.
Say you have a 10 by 10 space. Well, you're not gonna have access to 150,000 people. You might not have access to 1,000 people. It's like, just understanding what your goals are and what you're trying to accomplish at the show, and being realistic about that, I think matters.
There's a myth about, "We're gonna bring the product there and we're gonna have so many orders afterwards," and it just doesn't work that way. Even with the people that have the experience, they don't know what they want to accomplish at the show, with getting the leads and all that kinda stuff and not following up with them afterwards, like there's some sort of magic solution once you're there.
Or there's even stuff like where you put your space, 'cause you have a map of spaces available and ... "Well, I'm gonna put my space next to the bathroom because it's gonna have the biggest traffic." Well, that's a myth. Yeah, people are gonna be whipping right past your booth. They're not gonna be like, "Oh, well I'm on my way to the bathroom. I'm gonna stop here and see what's up with his guy's product." You think because you have the volume of people walking by there, that that's gonna be a good way to attract more space, when realistically, the best way to attract more space is to be next to the largest booths.
Oh, that's good.
Right?
Yeah.
Because those guys are the ones spending the most marketing dollars, and that's who everybody's gonna go see, so you can catch the overflow of the larger booths at the show ...
That's gold.
... than having them by the bathroom or something like that, or even by the entrance sometimes. The entrance is great for exposure, but with the high volume of people going through, sometimes it's hard to get people's attention because they're gonna walk in and they're either gonna go left, or they're gonna go right.
Everybody has their process for how they're gonna go through the show, as opposed to they're not gonna walk down the aisle and just start right there.
Depending on how long the show is, say a show's three days. The first day, you're gonna be busy, but really, the second day is probably a stronger day because the first day, everybody's really just checking out the show, finding out where they wanna go, what they wanna do, absorbing everything, and it's not until the second day really where you can really go and spend the time to do it.
The third day tends to not be as strong because people usually leave. Right? They might not come for the whole day, so I think those are some of the biggest misconceptions.
Those are great. Those are some gold nuggets. We did a show several years back, and as a team, we were looking at the mapping of where we should put our booth. We just said, "Okay. Well, let's put it near the food place where they're gonna line up because they can sit there and look at our booth while they're going for lunch."
But we realized that only works for one hour of the day. We were sitting there and kinda waiting throughout the booth, and the exhibit, the ... All the action's happening other places, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, so there you go. That proves it right there, so there's a myth that you just debunked.
Why do companies fail at trade shows?
