Tricks of the Trade: 7 Secrets to Conquer Your Next Trade Show

Ah, yes, the trade show circuit. If you're a small- to medium-sized business just breaking into the scene, it may feel as though you have quite a steep learning curve ahead. But it’s one that’s well worth your while, as few events can compete with trade shows in the sheer volume of exposure and opportunities for networking with clients, prospects and industry leaders that they offer. And with careful planning and strategic execution, your company can be well positioned to go head-to-head with even the most formidable Goliaths in your field.

But wait, you say, how can I hope to compete when they have far more money and resources to spare? Here’s the secret: what really gives the big firms their advantage isn’t necessarily their gargantuan budgets; it’s their experience. They’ve been in the game long enough to know what works and what doesn't, which allows them to sharpen their focus and avoid potential pitfalls.

To help level the playing field, here are the insider secrets that you need to know to conquer your next trade show without blowing your budget.

Secret #1: Bring plenty of firepower.

By firepower, I mean people. You can't just park a couple of employees in your booth and hope for the best.

Of course, you should man your booth at all times, but it takes more than that if you want to play ball with the big boys.

First of all, you need the right people at the booth. Not everyone can talk with potential customers, understand their issues and respond with helpful solutions on the spot. You must call on your most experienced, most personable front-line employees to fill these slots.

Second, you need another team of people circulating the trade show. It’s up to you to seek out and create opportunities, not sit back and wait for them to come to you. So make sure you have another string of well-spoken, outgoing employees working the floor for you.

Secret #2: Attend alternate events.

Most trade shows include alternate events either on- or off-site. Always make sure your company is being represented at as many of these events as possible.

The trade show floor has its own tone and formality, but when you can get in front of potential customers – and competitors – in a less rigid corporate setting, you can often strike up casual conversation that plant the seeds for valuable long-term relationships.

Many trade shows also offer classes and workshops. Even if you don't need the information being presented, show up and meet people. See who’s there asking questions and follow up with them afterward. These kinds of conversations are critical for building relationships, and they're never going to happen spontaneously at your booth.

Secret #3: Corner your customers at their booths.

Another way to open the door to new sales opportunities is to go to meet prospective customers at their own booths.

It takes a special finesse to pull this off well. Companies attend trade shows to make sales, not to be sold to.

The key is to carefully select which prospects you should approach prior to walking the floor. Then be mindful of your timing. If your potential customer has a small crowd around their booth, it’s not the time to jump into the fray. But if they're sitting around and the crickets are chirping, then that’s your cue to walk up and introduce yourself.

Keep in mind, too, that as the trade show winds down, activity dwindles. This can be an excellent time to make the rounds to the prospects you've scouted out. You don't want to interrupt folks if they're breaking down their booths, so be considerate. If you have lots of customers you want to network with, save your coldest leads for the end of the trade show so that you don’t risk missing an important connection.

Secret #4: Collect contact information.

Always obtain information from your new contacts in any and every way you can – whether it’s by gathering business cards or just jotting down handwritten notes on the fly. It's not enough to collect the information, though. You need to have a plan.

Make sure you take notes as you go, for example. Develop a keyword system so you can move quickly while still providing useful cues to help you remember important details of your conversation.

Purchase a business card scanner that will scan and automatically populate the information from a card into your contacts system. Anytime you get a break during the day, scan your cards and augment each one with all of the details that you can remember from your encounter. When the day is over, it's going to be hard to remember which card belongs to the man you met at 8:30 a.m. who asked you to call him on Monday morning because he is highly interested in your services.

Secret #5: Garner intelligence on competitors.

While you’ll want to maximize the time you spend with customers and prospects, it’s also worth your while to make time to research your competitors. After all, how often do you get direct access to potentially senior-level sales staff in your competitors' companies?

Be ethical, but don't be afraid to hide your badge, either. You may only get a few brochures with their latest product details, but with a few well-placed questions, you could also uncover other critical information that could have a far-reaching impact on your business.

Secret #6: Don't skimp on printed materials.

Can you imagine the embarrassment and frustration of having a juicy prospect right in the palm of your hand only to have nothing to offer him as a take-away?

That’s why you never, ever want to run out of brochures, business cards and other printed materials. Have more than you need on-hand. Be sensible, but it's better to over-estimate than to run out.

Be very aware of your supplies, especially if you have multiple trade shows on the horizon. If you're getting low, now’s the time to order more – not when you’re trying to pack and ship everything to your booth.

Secret #7: Communicate with the event coordinators.

The most important people you can know before you arrive are the event coordination staff for both the event and the location. Often this may be the same person, but always find out for sure. The trade show itself sometimes has its own staff to help coordinate logistics and other details while the venue where the trade show is hosted may have a separate group. If something goes wrong, you need to have these people on speed dial (and, more importantly, you need them to know who you are when they answer the phone)!

Don't wait until a few days before the event to introduce yourself; be the early bird that gets the worm. Yes, these event coordinators may hear from hundreds or thousands of attendees, but reaching out never hurts. These folks can save your entire trade show because they know all the tricks and where to find things if something of yours is missing or needs to be replaced at the last minute.

Bonus secrets

Finally, here are a few more tricks you should have up your sleeve to help grease the gears at your show:

• Run a contest or drawing for a prize that people actually want.
• Offer coffee and snacks for those who stop by your booth.
• Arrange your booth in an open floor plan.
• Make eye contact with those walking by and greet them with a smile.

While these small details won’t necessarily make or break a sale, they all contribute to making your booth a place that feels welcoming and approachable to prospects. Remember, at the end of the day, we’re all just human, and sometimes a simple smile can be all that’s needed to disarm a passer-by and open the door to a great conversation.

Don't let a moment of your next (or first!) trade show event go to waste. Use these secret strategies to make the most of every opportunity it affords. With a solid plan of action and plenty of preparation, you’ll return to the office with a proud feeling of accomplishment and a large stack of valuable contacts that will make all of your planning and strategizing well worth your while.

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Intelligent Design: Transform Your Website into a Sales Engine with Machine Learning

Machine learning: The phrase evokes images of computers playing chess or IBM’s Watson destroying two legendary Jeopardy! champions in a three-day tournament. The truth is, though, machine learning is no longer a novelty; it’s now an integral part of our daily lives. Every time you receive a product recommendation from Amazon, your email server weeds out spam before it reaches your inbox or you enjoy a playlist on Pandora, you’re seeing machine learning in action. In a nutshell, machine learning is the science of training computers to recognize data patterns and make adjustments automatically when those patterns change. While on the surface this may not sound very exciting, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, machine learning is the key to transforming your website into a lean, mean selling machine.

Understanding machine learning in 100 words or less

Machine learning uses algorithms to build models from data; as more data is collected, the algorithms are “trained” to adapt to changes. There are two ways in which machine learning can be implemented: supervised and unsupervised. Supervised learning algorithms are used to create models that establish relationships between types of data — the relationship between purchase data and user clickstream data, for example. Unsupervised learning uses algorithms to gain insights into customer behaviors and preferences by looking for patterns within the data. Both of these methodologies are designed to make marketing and e-commerce more exact, more personal and more profitable.

Putting machine learning to work

Netflix, Pandora and Amazon are all familiar examples of machine learning in action. All three use recommender systems powered by complex algorithms. These systems collect data about your browsing activities, past selections and any ratings or reviews you may have provided. Then they segment you into clusters with other customers who have demonstrated similar interests or behaviors and use this data to suggest items that might appeal to you based on the browsing and purchasing habits of these other customers. You see this on Netflix as the category titled “Because you watched...” and on Amazon as “Customers who viewed this also viewed...” To gain a deeper understanding of how these algorithms work, let’s take a closer look at Amazon. To Amazon, you are a very long row of numbers in a massive table of data. Your row represents everything you’ve looked at, clicked on, purchased (or, equally as important, not purchased) or reviewed on the site. The other rows in this gargantuan table encompass the same thing for the millions of other customers who shop on Amazon. With every click, visit and purchase, more data is added to your row, which allows Amazon to constantly mold and shape the products it recommends to you and the special offers you receive based on an ever-evolving stream of information about you that is being collected and stored. Another innovative example is True Fit, a retail software start-up that is on a mission to apply data analytics to increase customer confidence in online clothing purchases while decreasing the number of returns for e-railers. Well-known fashion retailers, including Nordstrom, Macy’s and Guess, have implemented True Fit’s algorithms on their e-commerce sites. When customers shop on these sites, they’re asked to create a profile that includes their height, weight and perhaps most importantly, the size and brand of their favorite piece of clothing. Using that data, True Fit is able to recommend the correct size for a specific brand and article of clothing. Even more importantly, as customers continue to use the True Fit system, it learns more about their personal style and preferences and steers them toward purchases they’ll be more likely to keep and enjoy rather than return.

How machine learning drives smarter marketing

You don’t need the resources of major e-commerce giants like Amazon or Netflix to take advantage of machine learning to to improve your e-commerce site and your online marketing efforts. By enhancing your existing site with systems that allow you to create a virtual marketing intelligence brain, you can create a more personalized – and therefore higher quality – shopping experience for your customers. By establishing this type of marketing intelligence ecosystem, you can mine the data provided by customers every time they visit your site to answer vital questions that will help you fine-tune your site and your online marketing strategy – questions like these:

• How likely is a given website visitor to convert?
• What behaviors characterize customers who are likely to buy?
• What behaviors characterize customers who are likely not to buy?
• How can new visitors be identified as high-potential long-term customers?
• Which type of web traffic has the most value?
• Which products or services appeal most to a given segment of customers?
• Given the contents of a particular customer’s shopping cart, which additional products are high-potential recommendations?
• How can website visits be optimized to provide the best possible experience for each individual customer?

Making it personal

The final question in the list above is one that deserves special notice because of the staggering potential for using machine learning to create a more personalized shopping experience – one of the key drivers for increasing online sales. Not only can the data collected via such marketing intelligence ecosystems be used to drive recommender systems, it can also be used to create personalized advertising based on market segments — or even individual profiles — that can be distributed across a variety of desktop, mobile and social platforms. This type of advertising can be tailored to any number of personal preferences and demographic information, including age, marital status, location, lifestyle choices, typical purchases, brand preferences and so on. Ads can be focused to such a granular level that they reflect specific colors a given customer prefers, and their individual purchase drivers, such as status or cost-effectiveness. Another exciting aspect of machine learning-based personalization is the development of individual customer profiles. You can even combine online and offline customer data to create a more complete picture of a given user. Types of data included in this profile might include online and in-store purchases, membership and activity in rewards programs, product ratings and clothing sizes. Just imagine how much more powerful your marketing efforts could be if you were armed with this level of information. One of the most important aspects of a successful marketing intelligence ecosystem is how data mined from customer activities is combined with sound business rules in order to make smart recommendations that are well received by customers and that do not compromise their trust in your brand. For example, most people who walk into a supermarket like bananas and will often buy some. So shouldn’t the recommender simply recommend bananas to every customer? No – because it wouldn’t help the customer, and it wouldn’t increase banana sales. So a smart supermarket recommender would always include a rule to exclude recommending bananas. At the other end of the spectrum, the recommender shouldn’t push high-margin items just because it’s beneficial to the seller’s bottom line. It’s like going to a restaurant where the server steers you toward a particular high-dollar entree. Is it really his favorite? Or did the chef urge the staff to push the dish because it comes with a side order of premium mark-up? To build trust, the best recommender systems strive for some degree of transparency by giving customers clues as to why a particular item was recommended and letting them adjust their profile if they don’t like the recommendations they’re receiving.

Science fact, not fiction

Machine learning can give your business a serious competitive edge by opening the door new opportunities in the marketplace. It can help you personalize and improve your customer experience dramatically and thereby drive sales and revenues. Creatives and developers alike are rapidly pioneering new and innovative ways for marketers to use machine learning — and the future of marketing built on these ideas has seemingly endless possibilities.

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