Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
Engage exhibition staff / trade show hostesses in lead generation.
One of the key elements of exhibition and trade show success depends on the “lead management process”. However, the best lead generation continues to be face to face and person to person. Visitors at an exhibition still want to be treated as the valued person that they are and not reduced to a target of a sterile marketing campaign. Event and trade show exhibitors continue to see higher results using professional exhibition staff / trade show hostesses to build awareness, engage visitors, distribute and gather information and expedite the sales process.
Engage and involve your exhibition staff or trade show hostesses in lead generation to ensure tradeshow and exhibition success:
- Prepare a lead card in advance for your exhibition staff to use. Your lead card needs to be easy to complete allowing space for attaching a business card and include space for notes. Insist that your exhibition staff fill the lead cards with as much information as possible. If you have the budget, consider a badge scanner for faster recording of leads.
- Leave the booth babes and wallflowers at home. Hire exhibition staff who understand your product and service and in turn can solve your clients’ problems. It’s important to have staff who are positive, upbeat, have a great smile and have experience in a customer facing role.
- Instead of giving away literature encourage your staff to offer to mail it to attendees. Collecting contact data will allow for further leads.
- Encourage your exhibition staff or trade show hostesses to take proper notes at the show so that the information visitors are interested in is properly communicated to the representative following up the lead post event.
- Encourage your exhibition staff to generate more leads by paying them commission on every lead generated. Hold a contest to reward the staffers who take the highest quantity of qualified leads. Although be careful, if you incentivize your exhibition staff, do so in a way to encourage teamwork, rather than aggressive, competing sales people.
- Encourage more leads by motivating people to visit your exhibition stand. You could perhaps ask your exhibition staff to promote a competition or prize draw. However if it doesn’t fit with your brand values and target market think if there’s a better way of achieving the same thing, the next tip may be worth considering.&
- Hire exhibition staff or trade show hostesses who can present live demonstrations on a stage if your booth is particularly large. This can help draw visitors to your stand, create a crowd and generate buzz at your stand, which in turn can increase lead generation. Read our blog on Hiring Live Presenters for exhibitions & trade shows is helpful.
- Record leads in a contact management database, your exhibition staff can do this onsite at the exhibition stand in the quieter times.
Hiring events staff for exhibitions & trade shows can be expensive but it’s money well spent and if their skills are utilised effectively they could well help you generate your business objectives and help you manage your lead generation effectively.
If this blog has been helpful, please also read our Tips on hiring Exhibition Staff and Exhibition staff motivation.
Tags: exhibition staff, trade show hostess, trade show hostesses
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Monday, February 18th, 2013
If your company is participating at exhibitions or trade shows, ensure you haven’t left hiring your exhibition staff to the 13th hour. We want you to get the most from your exhibition or tradeshow participation so we’ve put together a few tips on what to consider when hiring trade show hostesses / exhibition staff. After all, having invested time, money and effort in planning and promoting your exhibition stand, the last thing you need is for your stand staff to be being ill prepared.
Consider the tips below before committing to hiring exhibition staff:
- You should identify how busy the stand will be to ascertain the right level of staffing. Identify in advance what roles will be required by the exhibition staff, in other words what function will your exhibition staff provide at the show?
- Have you thought about distribution of company literature, freebie gifts or goodie bags. As these items are distributed think about how your exhibition staff can use that opportunity to start interaction with clients / guests.
- Are you planning on collecting data from your guests? For example, will you encourage guests to give their business cards, will guests be required to leave their details on a postcard or a “lead” card, will you encourage subscriptions to company newsletters or magazines? Encourage your exhibition staff to capture as much information as possible.
- Think about how you would like your exhibition staff to be dressed. We’ve found branded t-shirts to compliment your marketing campaign or stand design work well.
- Have you prepared a briefing document in advance for your exhibition staff? The briefing document should explain why you are exhibiting, your exhibiting objectives, what you expect of them and how you expect them to do it and sending this to your event staffing agency in advance will give staff enough time to read through before the event.
- When onsite, conducting a pre-show briefing with your exhibition staff will keep them well informed and it will remind them of their roles and responsibilities outlined in the briefing document.
- Also take time to prepare a staff rota and have allocated times for breaks and lunches to avoid any confusion on site.
- If your trade show or exhibition participation is on the large side and you have an extremely large booth have you ever thought of having a small stage whereby your exhibition staff can present a product or service from the stand. This will create theatre and increase your volume on a competitive exhibition floor. Having a live promotional presenter or demonstrator on a trade show floor is the smartest investment a company can make. This will deliver big crowds to your stand. We have exhibition staff who are experienced presenters and demonstrators, many of them are actors and actresses so they are not shy about presenting to mass audiences. Read our blog – hiring live presenters at exhibitions and trade shows.
- If the attendance at an exhibition is largely foreign visitors you absolutely must hire bilingual staff. This can help cement a deal with an exhibition visitor whose first language is not English.
- When selecting exhibition staff from event staffing agencies ensure they have a team located close to the exhibition venue to save you paying the agency travel costs for their staff. Event Protocol have local exhibition staff and trade show hostesses based around the major exhibition centres in the UK below, so we won’t charge the client expenses for our staff travelling to your show.
London: Earls Court, Olympia, Excel London, Business Design Centre
Midlands: NEC Birmingham, Telford International Centre, ICC Manchester: G-Mex
We hope the above tips help and when hiring any event staff, ask your event staffing agency for a portfolio of staff and their experience.
If you found this blog useful, you may want read the following:
Exhibition staff motivation!
Engage exhibition staff in lead generation
Tags: event staffing, exhibition staff, trade show hostesses
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
