What do you really want to achieve?

  
There are only three reasons for exhibiting; okay, maybe a few subsidiary ones like market research but let’s stick with main reasons:

To make sales (though not usually at B2B shows)
To make appointments
To make contacts

At exhibitions you meet clients and prospects face-to-face. You meet people not usually accessible to you and your sales team. Importantly, you meet these people on relatively neutral territory.

You will have the opportunity to demonstrate products, especially products that you cannot conveniently lug around to your prospects’ offices, like military hardware or sewage filtration systems.

You can make the surroundings much more conducive to developing a long-term relationship than is your dreary old factory.

So, what is your target going to be? I say ‘target’ in the singular because you will enjoy more success if you aim for a single outcome than if you try to cover your entire product/service range.

A simple way to find your target is to pose this question:

“What do most of my customers buy most of  most of the time?”

Job done!

At this point, many of my clients protest. They say yes, they have a most popular or most profitable line, but they also want to feature a couple of other things (or, frequently, a couple of dozen). My assertion is that this will weaken your pitch, fuzz your focus and lead to overall less satisfactory results.

Other clients argue that they have a brand new, world-beating product or service they want to reveal at the show. Good point … but. you need to be really sure that this is the best way to launch something new – and that will mean detailed discussion and research, so the concept is not suitable for a short article. But by all means contact us to chat about possibilities!

Keep it simple, answer the question above, and enjoy a super-successful exhibition.