I get it, trade shows can be really tiring, especially in the later days of the show. The long days on your feet really can wear you down. But you need to remember that at some shows the buying decision is done on those last few days. Even though you have seen hundreds or even thousands of people go by, this may be the first time a buyer has seen you, so your first impression is still important.

A few months ago, I was speaking at an event and decided to hop over to the trade show exhibit area to see what was around. Although that was not really the reason for my being at the event, I also happen to be a part of their target market. This was the second to last day of the trade show and it really showed! You could tell most of the vendors were just looking forward to getting home. It does not make a good impression when you leave early or stay physically but refuse to give any more attention to the attendees. Imagine coming to my house for a party I’m throwing and spending all of your time looking at your watch. If you don’t have time for me then I am not going to have time for you.

I checked out maybe 55 booths that day. Of the ones I passed, about five of them had people working inside who looked like they wanted to talk to me and those were the five I made an effort to really go into and learn about what they were selling. There was a sixth booth that I tried to engage. The two guys running the booth, both sitting down by the way, made it look like I was interrupting their conversation! I guess because I was. I had the audacity to be curious about what they were representing. They happened to be there to promote another event for the same industry that they were in charge of organizing. Let’s just say I no longer looked into their event. Before that day it was an event that I already potentially wanted to attend. They lost me.

I know one of the nice things about industry events and trade shows is that you get to see people you know from other companies, current customers, or friends in general. But when you’re there for sales and the reps in your booth are all talking to each other and they partly form a circle, they make the booth feel like a closed group. Many, many people hesitate to walk into a booth let alone try to break into a conversation. Your goal at a trade show initially should be to make your space as welcoming as possible for potential customers. So that they walk off that middle aisle carpet at the trade show or event into your overpriced by the square foot booth carpeting.

You don’t do that by having your backs to people or by talking to each other. You do that by having a welcoming look on your face, a smile, and being open to everybody who walks in. If you start to judge me even before I get to your booth I am going to judge you as well and it is not going to be pretty. And nowadays, when people can add something to Facebook or Twitter in an instant, your giving someone a cold shoulder could have instant ramifications online, especially with the use of conference hashtags.

During my third and final year at college, I decided to attend the trade show that accompanied the annual human resources conference in Toronto. On my badge along with my name was the ribbon that stated I was a student attendee. In other words, please ignore me, I assume, because it meant nobody was giving me the time of day. I would walk down the middle aisle between vendor booths and get the fake smile from the sales reps that were standing there and as they let their eyes slide down for my name-tag for them to qualify whether they should talk to me. When they noticed the red ribbon that mentioned student, their fake smile went away and they literally looked disgusted or they simply turned away and looked for the next person walking toward them.

One of the things I was interested in was the computer software that we use in the industry, commonly referred to as HRMS Human Resources Management System. I was interested because being both a computer geek and going into the human resources field, I knew this was something I had a leg up on when I got into the industry. There were four main providers of this type of software at the trade show. Three of the vendors were almost trying to prevent me from even going into their booths. They seemed to be protecting their expensive high-gloss brochures from me, someone who they felt had no value to them as a customer at that time. Sales reps at the fourth booth were different. They were simply happy to see me, and more than happy to tell me about their software.

Please don’t forget that I do understand what it’s like to work a booth at a trade show. As soon as you commit to talking to one person you potentially lose the opportunity to talk to somebody else who is peering in at your booth. But your booth at a trade show is the point of engagement. You need to treat everybody like they have a potential influence in the sale down the road because in reality everybody in one way or another could. Including me on this day.

Fast-forward eight months. I was now working in the field and you’ll never guess whom my employer asked to help recommend a new HRMS system for them. That’s right, they asked red ribbon boy! And I’m sure you can figure out which system I knew really well because of the engagement I had with a vendor at the event. We ended up purchasing the system, and after all was said and done the sale was worth more than $100,000. Not bad for a student who had no buying power at the time.

You never know who somebody really is and who they might be down the road. You never know who someone knows currently or who they are going to be meeting with or speaking to after the show. If you believe in the six degrees of separation angle, then why aren’t you treating every person you come in contact with at the trade show as somebody who could help your business?

The same thing can occur not only at a B2B industry trade show but at consumer-based shows. You need to evaluate your biases and how they are affecting who you engage. When I write about social media a little later, you’ll see how the ability to share customer experiences online is changing who the influencers are. You need to pay attention.

Vendors complain a lot at trade shows about the quality of attendees. They get angry when a certain amount of them don’t have immediate buying power at a show. But they forget that many purchases are still trust-based and the trade show can be a great starting point to build relationships with people.

I know people, myself included, who delay a buying decision at a trade show simply because they haven’t seen everything there yet. There are tons of reasons to delay a buying decision related to the trust gap we spoke about earlier. Your company may be new to me and I want to check with people I trust, or because I still have stock from another company that I need to clear out, or because I need to budget against other purchases. None of these reasons mean that I will not be ready to buy from you at some point in the future—so why ignore me?

When I worked the booth at various trade shows as a national sales training manager, I heard these kinds of replies from potential customers all the time. That maybe they would come back later, or give us a call, or let us know another time.

Similar to the art show example at the beginning of the book, as an exhibitor you need to create not only an effective pull-and-stay method for trade shows, but your follow-up system has to be engaging and almost immediate. It doesn’t matter what system the trade show group has given you to collect leads. You can be from the old-school style of simply collecting business cards from potential buyers all the way up to the fancy machines where you can scan their badge immediately and get all of their contact information. The pull part of pull and stay is already done for you, but here is where you can separate yourself from the other vendors at the show. Follow up quickly and personally. And by quickly I don’t mean when you get back from the show five days later. I mean have a system where you can get in touch with them within 24 hours. Give them a quick phone call or shoot them e-mail them a brochure—pretty much all your leads will come with an e-mail address.

The goal here is to drop them a line to say thank you for coming by your booth. Let the potential customer know you will be sending the materials they requested (if they did) and then start another level of engagement with them. You can do this easily by asking them an open-ended question. Not one of those sleazy sales ones like, “When do you think you’ll be ready to make a purchasing decision?” A simple one like, “What did you think of the show this year?” Something like that will start a dialogue between you. I don’t mean that you should ask the phony “How are you?” People ask that question every day and do not care about the answer. I mean to ask a question that you genuinely want to know what they thought. I guarantee that you’ll not only get responses back and open a channel of post-trade show communication with them. You are also going to get responses from people telling you how impressed they are, about not only the speed of your response to them, but your personal response to them.

Here is how you get started. If you have less than 25 leads to set up this system, you need to go back to your hotel room for an Internet connection or use one at the actual trade show if it’s available, so you can e-mail them that day. Just delay going to the trade show bar for a half-hour or so. Trust me, you can do it. You may even run into some of your potential customers at the evening events and they have already received your e-mail on their BlackBerry or iPhone. I’ve actually had people seek me out to say how impressed they were that I had already gotten back to them. Pay close attention and remember if a potential customer asked you a question at the show that you couldn’t answer just then and send that answer in the first e-mail. Even if they asked you about products or services that you don’t offer, recommend other vendors who do. Being helpful in this way greatly endears you to that person.

Some trade shows make it easier for vendors to pull information from attendees than others. At B2B shows, it is common for people to give up their information quickly because they are so targeted. This means that potentially most visitors really do have a serious interest in many of the vendors. When it comes to consumer-based trade shows it’s much harder to get people’s information because there are a variety of industries in the booths, making the audience less targeted.

Consumer shows also have more freebie seekers.¹³⁹ It’s sometimes pretty hard to get people to commit their information. A lot of the time people are more interested in hitting every booth possible for free samples than actually getting to know you or your product. So you have an even smaller window to engage with the people.

In regard to the giveaway, I remember the big packaging trade shows I used to work. There was almost a scavenger-style hunt for the best trade show swag. One year in Chicago the best giveaway was a cool looking walking stick from a company (I can’t remember their name). And there’s the problem. If you make your giveaway not relatable to your company, then what good does it do for you after the conference? I don’t have the exact statistic but I think the number of people that make purchasing decisions based on receiving a coffee mug is 0.1 percent with a margin of error of 0.1 percent.

Why give away some golf shirts or fancy travel mugs to current customers when that is what they are expecting anyway? And everyone else is doing the same thing. If you give something away, why not give away something that shows the amount of value you provide. Give away a CD or DVD showing your ability to educate that end-user or customer. Make it something you can send to them instead of giving it to them to put in their conference bag, which they will never ever go through entirely. Your pull-and-stay action here would be to say, “At the show this week we are giving away free access to our online workshop and how you can do scrap booking better. If you give us your e-mail address we will send you access to it online as well as our free monthly newsletter, which will give you deals on scrap booking supplies and will let you know about future events.” Just like when we were talking about follow-up earlier—get your gift to them as quickly as possible! Then do a potential follow-up e-mail or call a week or so later to find out if they’ve tried it and start that conversation again. Don’t get lost in this sea of conference swag that will end up costing you a lot of money with little return.