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Transcript
1:06 – Trade Show Strategies
1:50 – Strategy 1: Create a mind map or funnel
2:30 – Strategy 2: Staffs must understand strategies
2:49 – Presentation for trade shows
4:20 – Presentation: Image-based display vs. stock display
4:47 – Presentation: Storyboards
5:51 – Staffing
7:27 – Measure activities
8:40 – Follow up
9:57 – Follow up: The 3-week post event window
11:06 – Follow up: personalized phone calls
11:35 – Follow up: emails
11:54 – Follow up: postcards
12:30 – Follow up: Catalogs
13:45 – Brief recap
14:20 – Answer to 1 listener question
Hello everybody! Welcome to the hvacbusinessgrowth.com podcast. I’m your host, Nick Bielawski. We have another great episode lined up for you today.
Today we’re going to talk about Trade Show Marketing. I wanted to talk about this because it’s really fresh in my mind. I actually go to probably 4 trade shows a year and I just got back from another trade show. I just want to share with you some of the key findings that I discovered when I was at this trade show and what I see in all the other trade shows as well.
So what exactly are we going to talk about today? Well, we’re going to talk about some strategies, presentation and the follow up strategy. Now let’s get stuck into the strategy.
Firstly, we need to create a strategy for the event for the Trade Show. How are you going to position yourself?
I just want to make sure that your positioning is congruent with how you do business. From a strategic point of view, do you think you’re going to drive business at the event? It depends on what sort of trade show you’re actually going to do. If there is a large amount of consumers coming through or your residential target market, you might not be able to ride a whole lot of business. If it says purely-trade only or industry-type of an event, then you might have better chances of doing some business.
Do you think that you’re going to give information to people? Do you think that you’re going to take leads?
So you need to think about all these things strategically. The best way to formulate the strategy is to actually begin with the outcome. Ideally, you want people to buy or use your products and services, right? So, you have the outcome. Put it down on a piece of paper and call this a mind map or a funnel. Then what you need to do is to map back or track back what you’re going to do all the way back to the trade show. From here, you’re going to understand what you need in terms of staffing, marketing collateral and presentation of your stand. Having a strategy is very vital.
You also have to make sure that everybody is on the same page with your strategy for the trade show. Have meetings beforehand and make sure that the strategy for the trade show is well defined.
So the next thing that we’re going to get into is the presentation side of things. Like I said in the introduction, I attend at least 4 trade shows in every year and I see a great variety of presentation skills when I go to these trade shows. Some people just basically buy the space and then spend a couple of hundred bucks on the display while other people go all out on the spending.
For example, in the trade show that I was just at, the space costs $110,000. Some of you may think that it’s expensive while some would think that the price is not too bad. At the same time, companies would spend $500,000 on the display. It gives you a total of well above $600,000. So now, you can imagine why they need to write a lot of business to make that work.
But it just so happens that this Trade Show is pretty much the No. 1 show in the country and in the world. So it’s vital that you have a strong presence at this show. The show also helps you write a lot of business as well. When I spoke with some of the insiders of certain businesses, they said that probably 75% of their business was written at this particular trade show. That is a pretty impressive figure. But it’s also daunting because if they don’t get the trade show right or if they mess up with their strategy, then that’s a lot of business that could go down the toilet. So you need to be a little bit careful.
The other thing that you need to think about from a presentation perspective is, are you going to have a full stock range in the show or are you going to have more of an image-based display?
These are important questions because, as you can imagine, you may have a lot of stocks and also, the stock that you have could be really heavy, large, bulky and difficult to shift. So, this is something that you really need to think about.
One thing that I also saw in the most recent show that I was at was the storyboards. What are storyboards? Companies create storyboards that define the concept of the business and help position the business in the market. It’s really about building a story and getting the people in the trade show, whether they are in the residential or commercial market, to understand your business and how you are positioned relative to the rest of the people who are in the show.
If you have a really unique story or a great way of positioning your business, try to map it out in an image-based storyboard. You might be able to get a marketing company to help you design this. This is incredibly effective since it helps people associate with your products and services more.
The staff is vital in trade shows. We’ve already touched this a little bit but basically the message is you should not neglect the staffing side of trade shows. If you don’t have trained staff at the show, that people can talk to and have conversation with about your products and services, you lose potential leads. People you meet and have conversations with at trade shows are much more qualified leads compared to people who just receive information pack or something like that. So, again the message is to make sure that you have a lot of staff on site and make sure they are briefed and they understand what the show is about. You need to set standards and objectives for your staff.
At the same trade show that I was at, it was quite amazing how busy it was and yet some staffs were there. A great expense for the company but they still thought it’s a great idea to go out until 5AM and get drunk. You should have seen them … they look like zombies.I bet they would have done a good job associating with people and engaging with customers. So make sure you set standards and objectives for your staffs that are there.
Measuring what’s happening in the trade show is vital as well. A lot of people fork out all this money and they don’t measure what happens at these trade shows. So you want to try and measure how many people your staff had contact with. You can measure that by counting how many information packs you gave away or how many leads they took note of. You can have a journal system where they can record the leads that they get in.
You need to have a way of actually defining what the cost-per-lead is for this type of event. Then, you can track these leads all the way through to the cost-per-sale as well. Then you can actually work out whether the trade shows are actually worth it for you.
Obviously, if you’re spending a million dollars or a few thousand dollars in advertising or a trade show but you’re not getting your return on investment, you have to question what you’re doing. If it doesn’t work out for you or if you’re not making money from these shows then, it might be a good idea to cut your losses and look into pursuing a different marketing channel.
I feel that one of the most important things from a trade show is the follow-up part of it. I just got back from a trade show around 10 days ago; probably enough days to receive a great deal of follow up. I got a few automated emails from stalls I’ve showed interest in and people I’ve talked with. But I haven’t had any personal follow-up yet. So, the follow-up side of it is really the groundbreaker. It’s where you can go from breaking even in trade shows to super profits.
Given the information that I just shared with you in terms of nobody calling me back, sending emails or making a personalized approach to me, can you imagine how interesting and special I would feel if somebody actually took the time and give me a quick phone call and just say, “Hey it was great meeting you at the show recently. We discussed this. Do you want to take this further or is there something I can do to help you make a decision?” But somehow, I don’t think that I’m going to get the phone call anytime soon.
Here’s what I think about following up at trade shows. I think there’s a 3-week post-event window that’s critically important. Usually when someone goes to a show, they get some fantastic ideas for what they can do with their business. They get plenty of adrenaline; they come back with heaps of ideas and they want to do things. But as we know it, life gets in the way. Some people have to go back to work. We have events that happen within the family and parties to go to. Basically we just forget about it because, unfortunately, the trade show that they went to, 3 weeks later, is not the most important thing in their life. They’re not thinking about it anymore.
So the 3-week window is absolutely important. But what you need to do is set some sort of follow-up or marketing schedule that leverages this 3-week window. What I mean is, you concentrate your efforts in this first 3 weeks post the event while the adrenaline from the show and the love is still there, so to speak.
You can set a schedule. Things that I like to include in the follow-up sequence are personalized phone calls. They work fantastically. Ideally, it’s from the person you spoke with at the trade show. He or she will call 3 weeks after the trade show to follow up and see whether the conversation you left off can be taken any further.
Email is also really good. Like I said, after the recent show, I received automated emails. I didn’t receive personalized emails for follow-up. That was a bit disappointing; they could have obviously done better there. Email is pretty quick to get. It’s fairly impersonal though but it’s obviously better than doing nothing at all.
Postcards can also work really well. It’s something that you can set up in a semi-automated type of fashion where if you collect somebody’s details, you can put them into a database and you can actually hire marketing companies that may send out cards. There are particular companies that do this. They print the card for you, put the name and address of the person and they send it out for you. It may cost a dollar per card to get it printed and sent so I think it’s a fantastic deal.
Next are catalogs. If people have requested further information then by all means send them out your business catalogs. You must do this with a cover letter though to introduce yourself, your business and your special offer related to the catalog. The same goes with information packs as well. Don’t just send a blank information pack. Send it with a nice cover letter with it where you may make a direct-response type of offer.
It doesn’t really matter too much what tools you’ll use since it’s going to be different for every business. But what you must do is create a sequence and follow through on this sequence. Like I said, have a good concentration on that first 3 weeks. It doesn’t mean you should stop at 3 weeks because you might have a very high visitor value to your business or a high average dollar transaction to your business. So it might actually make sense that you could send out a hundred dollars worth of follow up marketing over 6 months. If that turns into a sale, that could still be profitable for you. It just depends on your business margins and what the lifetime customer value is actually worth. We already discussed this in our previous podcast.
So that’s enough on the topic of Trade Show Marketing. Let’s talk about some great things for you to implement at the next trade show. Make sure you set a realistic plan and a good budget for the next trade show that you do. Come up with a strategy, brief all of your staffs and create a follow-up funnel or a marketing sequence that will build off the back of the good work that you did at the show.
Normally it would be time for HVAC Business Growth tip of the week. But this week it’s coming in the form of a listener question. One person from an HVAC security company sent me a message through Facebook and asked how they can get a better qualified and engaged sales team.
I have 3 points that are going to answer these questions and some of which we’ve already discussed in previous podcasts. First of all, make your sales team as motivated and efficient as possible. You want to make sure that the problem isn’t in your end. You want to make sure that they’re not actually prospecting. Basically, prospecting is going out into the market and calling absolutely every leader out there and looking for anything with a pulse. So that’s really an inefficient way of using the time of your sales team.
You want to set up some pool marketing strategies which we discussed in previous podcasts and videos on the website. You want to make sure that the sales team is actually dealing with qualified leads. If they’re dealing with qualified leads, that makes a massive difference to their success.
The second thing that you might want to consider depends on how your business is structured from profit point of view whether you have any backend sales but some businesses have great success in front loading the commissions to their sales teams.
So, basically this is what it is: if somebody makes a first upsale, if you have a strong backend to your business meaning follow up sales, they actually give up to up 100%. Sometimes, just a little bit less but sometimes it’s a 100% of the sale.
Here’s an example: Just say a salesman goes out and makes a $1,000 sale. In the first instance, the company gives that person $1,000. They give him the entire sale or they might give him the entire profit for the sale. After that, if they’ve actually analyzed the backend and the net worth of the customer, they’ll actually realize that they might spend or, technically, lose a thousand dollars upfront that it’s actually worth $10,000 in backend business to them. And for that the sales person might get a nominal fee from there. But it’s quite heavily-loaded to the front-end.
That might actually work for your business. I’m not quite sure how you’ve got it structured but you might be able to come up with a workaround or something similar to that effect.
The third important thing is you need to provide training for your sales team. One of the human needs is to feel that you’re actually growing in your career or life in general. So if you’re not providing any training for your staff and you’re not assisting in their career development and their growth, you might be able to keep them for a little while but sooner or later they’re going to find a different job. This is because they’re not getting engaged or encouraged to grow their career or their sales skills.
To summarize, the 3 things that I think that you could do to help engage the staff in your business are: They should not be prospecting. Have a pool marketing system so they’re dealing with qualified leads. Secondly, look at some sort of front-loaded commission structure where your staffs are awarded for early sales but the back end revenue is obviously weighted in your favor. Thirdly, you need to provide training for your staff and make sure that their needs are being met and they’re growing in their careers.
So I hope that answers the question for you. For anyone else out there, if you have any questions about your HVAC business whether it has to do with marketing, sales, advertising or whatever it is, just send them to me. You can email them through my email address which is n[email protected]. You can also send me a message via Facebook or Twitter. I’ll do my best to answer them in our podcast show.
So that’s all we’ve got time for today. I’m your host, Nick Bielawski. Thank you for listening to the hvacbusinessgrowth.com podcast.