Are You My Customer? Culling Your Customers from the Wanderers
By Cameron Marschall

Book publishers straddle the line between the artistic creatives and the business minded. Unless you come from a marketing or sales background, the idea of manning a booth for hours or days in a roomful of strangers may not top your list of fun things to do. When you factor in the cost in money and energy, and the opportunities of reaching new customers, the need to plan how your trade show booth operates becomes crucial. Too many companies head off to a trade show without having SMART goals to pursue and without pre-training on how to interact with attendees. This article will touch upon attendance goals and how to separate the potential customer from the casual visitor.

Why are you attending the show? You are investing precious time and funds. What do you hope to gain? Too many employees treat booth work as a chance to canvass the competitors booths for a future job, for freebies, or as a mini-vacation. Independent book publishers, with limited means, should employ a steely-eyed commitment to working the trade show to the utmost, while maintaining a cordial attitude to all participants. Booth work is exhausting but fun, as long as you have set goals and practiced routines to maximize your outcomes. Possible goals can be selling large lots of books to book buyers, such as libraries or teachers. Or rolling out a new imprint or product line. Or capturing 300 new names for your newsletter. (You do have a newsletter, don’t you?) Attending because “everyone expects us to be there” is not enough of a reason. Have a goal or two, and, even better, make them SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. “Get more customers” is not a SMART goal. Capturing 50 new contacts interested in a follow up call on a product line the week after the convention is a SMART goal. (And you will follow up with each of the 50 contacts, won’t you?)

Goals in mind, you are now faced with running a successful booth. Here’s an important tip: you can only interact with a fraction of the attendees. A tiny percentage, in fact. Of those, the majority probably will not end up being customers or clients. They are “just looking.” Maybe they know a booth worker or are just walking down the aisle, drifting from booth to booth. Being friendly, polite people, they are glad to talk about the weather, the free gifts they found one aisle back, or books that are like what you offer. You must greet them with a smile, ask a few questions, and let them continue on their way, a simple list of your offerings in hand. Why? Because you only have a few peak hours to separate customers from the friendly wanderers. In the time it takes to talk about your high school days with a wanderer, the perfect customer may have come into the booth, been ignored, and walked away. Now that might happen anyway, but you must use your attendance goals to identify your targeted booth visitors.

I’m going to customize the vetting advice I’ve seen online, my past experience, and one prime source, Trade Show and Event Marketing by Ruth P. Stevens. At a trade show one of your biggest limitations is time. You have a small set of prime hours at a show, when the floor is hopping. If you have two people in your small booth, they can only talk to a certain number of passersby per hour. Let’s say each of your two reps in the booth can comfortably speak to 10 people in an hour. (Speaking means talking to someone who might be a customer, not saying hello, and handing out a brochure.) Now, let’s say 20 percent become likely prospects who agree to be contacted the following week. The show has four hours over two days of peak attendance, or eight peak hours. So, each of those hours 10 prospects are talked to, times 2 reps, for 20 X 4 or 80 prospects per day. The second day the same thing, 80. Eighty times 2 nets 160 possible customers! Of course, there will be other prospects found during the off hours, but the booth staff should put their “smile-power” into the hours that gather the most business. After the show, these 160 people are contacted, and 40 percent say yes to your great business offering. So, 64 actual customers out of 160. Even if there were 4000 attendees, your booth staff came away with 64, or under 2 percent of the visitor total!

If you are thinking, “Our little company never follows up on most leads and is happy to just break even by selling books at the booth,” then that’s fine, if this approach gives you a growing publishing company and achieves other goals such as meeting other publishers.

But how did you identify the real customers from the wanderers? Here are the steps in brief:

1. Greet each visitor with a smile and ask him/her something, like if the show is meeting his/her needs.
2. State what your company does and for what audience.
3. Ask the visitor if she is interested in what you offer.
4. If the answer is no, thank her for coming to the booth, and give her your basic sales literature. Ask for her e-mail for your mailing list, enter her in a giveaway, or do whatever else fits your goals.
5. If the visitor is interested in what you have to offer, then ask questions to find out what is needed and when. Gather the information into a prepared form. Just the basics: name, phone, e-mail, workplace name, job title, and a quick note of what the visitor has requested. If the visitor has a business card, staple it to the information sheet. Just remember to write clearly! (And take the extra seconds to get e-mail addresses correct.)

Of course, this is a simplified procedure, and you will add your own variations and unique touch. The key step is number 3. You must qualify each visitor and identify the true prospects. Done correctly, the visitor to your booth will never know that they are being “tested” for their hidden motives.

Creative individuals often have a hard time with sales. The stereotype of a used car salesman is often conjured up, when in fact sales is really about talking with a person, seeing if your offering can solve a problem or cure a hurt, then asking the other party to commit. No trickery or pressure. And you, in your booth, might use the techniques in this article to start a lifelong relationship.

© 2008 Cameron Marschall