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The Advanced Selling Podcast
Mastering Trade Show Selling
00:11:18
In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast: 2 Minute Drill, Bryan shares a practical framework for maximizing your ROI at trade shows. Too often, salespeople approach these high-cost opportunities without a clear plan. Bryan breaks down his...
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Brian Neal
Foreign. Welcome everybody to the advanced selling podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in podcast history. And this is the two minute drill where two minutes seems like 20, because it is. I'm Brian Neal. Solo episode coming your way. Happy New Year. We're here after a great, great holiday season. By the way, solo episodes two minute drill with B. Neil powered by. If you're watching this on YouTube, which you all should be, look at that. The Blind Zebra Sales operating system. After one year in the market, the Blind Zale Blind Zebra sales operating system. We have 31 soon to be 43 certified coaches who are serving about 300 salespeople. I'm telling you, take a look. Shoot me an email. You can send it to Brian B R Y a n@blind-zebra.com or just go to blind-zebra.com and we've got podcast listeners that have already like pulled the trigger and they're certified. We've also got this cool community that all the certified coaches and all the salespeople that run the system, they each get together live on a zoom with me live once a month. And it's a cool community and we have a little fun event planned for later in the fall. So come blind-zebra.com learn how to become certified in the Blind Zebra sales operating system. Now, if you're watching on video, watch this. Watch the studio change. There's our sponsor, Blind Zebra sales operating system. Now watch this. Ta. Look at that. Oh, screwy. TAADA Advanced selling podcast back. Because that's how y'all know us. Okay, today's episode, I am going to do a two minute drill on trade show selling. Trade show sell. Okay, now some of you like, I don't do trade shows, Neely. I don't need to do this. Everybody at some point will go to a trade show. And if you don't do trade shows, I bet you go to some networking event and association event. So some of the things I'm going to talk about in today's episode will apply to those things. But nothing, nothing makes my head explode more than watching how people approach trade shows. Just go figure. Just like I'll do some math, I'll use chat GPT to figure out how many hundreds of millions of dollars get spent on trade shows. Travel. The boost, the boosts are a billion dollars. They're so enormous. There's so much st. All the travel, the time away, the meals, all the stuff the brain cells lost at the bar, all of those things, all those things and we don't know how they, how they work. Think of. And I'm not blaming y'all, I'm not blaming you. But think about it. You get back from the trade show, what do you, what does your boss always ask you? CEO, cfo, whoever, I don't care. VP of sales. How was the show? What do you say? It's good. It's good a lot. It was really, really busy. Or you say it wasn't very good. Not a lot of foot traffic. Not good. Oh, bummer. You think we should go next year? I don't know. That's like as deep as the analysis gets. Play this, send this to your boss. I'm telling you, that's how it goes. So let's change that, shall we? So I'm going to give you a little mini framework, by the way, if you run the Blind Zebra sales operating system, I've got a whole set of tools, three of them to be exact, that will help you with this in depth. I'll give you a little snippets today in today's episode. So let's just start with some real basic common sense framework that most people don't use. There are three elements to going to a trade show. There is the time before the show, pre show, we call that technical term. There's the show itself at the show. And then there's the after show, the post show. So think about pre at and post show pre at, post pre at post. That alone make three columns on a spreadsheet and make a to do list under each one is likely more than most people do prep wise, I'm telling you. So just thinking about their activities that need to go pre. There are activities that need to happen at the show. Then there are activities need to happen post. Okay, so I'm going to give you a couple in each column. But I want you to think about this, just framing everything up. So what should you do before a show? I'm going to give you a couple of very tactical things to go do before a trade show. The first thing that you should all do is you should all follow the hashtag of the show. Almost all trade shows have a hashtag. So if you go to the North American Dealers association, that's for car dealers, it's called nada. They'll have a hashtag that says pound or hashed pound. Welcome. Welcome to your 50s, boomer. Hey, boomer. I'll say it myself, sorry. Hashtag pound is more fun anyway. Hashtag n a d a 25. Hashtag nada. 25. You can actually follow that on LinkedIn. Go to hashtag nada25. And people will start to post and as they post part of the pre shows, you start to interact with the posts that are going on. This is typically at least or four weeks out and then it gets really heavy, usually two weeks out. So that four to two week window, sometimes six weeks. But four to two weeks before a show, you should follow that. And then the rule, you've got to interact by interact. I'm not saying you scroll and like scroll like scroll. Like you've got to talk to people, engage with people and connect with people. If you see they're going to be there, meaning send them a connection request and tell them, hey Susan, I'm so. So you're going to be at at Nada. I'm going to. Would love to, you know, put a face with the name and connect with your live. And we're out there. Okay. That's the first thing. That's one little thing to do in the pre show. Second thing in pre and then I'll move to the at and the post. Second thing to do in the pre show is you have to create a personal scoreboard for yourself. You have to have a KPI schedule for yourself. Don't get this from marketing or your boss. This is you. You need to have a personal goal going into a trade show. And all that means is when I come back, what has happened. Okay. And measurable things, numeric things. An example would be if I'm going to go to the NADA trade show in 2025, I want to come back with two meetings scheduled and two new connectors in my connector business plan. The names I can put on there. I want to find two new connectors. Names I can put on my business plan. I want to have two meetings scheduled with end users before I. Before I come home. There you go. Just some KPI. And you can do all sorts of other KPIs of people that you met. And you can do contracts, closed or open opportunities. But you got to scoreboard the thing. I don't care what they are. I mean they don't have to be enormous. But you got a score where you got to go in with a goal in mind so you can see how you're doing. Most people stop at logistics. Hey, what time we land? We got. Okay, good. Who's getting the Uber? Yeah, Tyler's got the Uber. Tyler's got the Uber. He's really great at it. Boy. Go Tyler. Right. We got dinner resis for Thursday. Like that's the planning and then you just show up. Okay. And you put the booth together and go, so have some numeric outcome plans. That's for some pre show. There's a whole bunch more in the operating system that we use at Blind Zebra, but those are a couple. Okay, next at the show. I love this one because I'm usually on the other end of it. You to find speaker or two, okay, that is talking about something that's interesting to you. I want you to go to their talk genuinely like you want to go listen to them. Then I want you to, after the talk, go meet them personally. But here's the deal. Usually when a speaker gets done, there's a little half moon that forms around them. Sometimes a line, usually it's a half moon. People are waiting to talk to them. Here's the trick. I want you to always be last to talk to the speaker. Always let everyone go first. You always be last. I'm telling you this as someone who's usually the speaker, not the person at the trade show. Here's what happens. Inevitably at a trade show, the room needs turned over. The next event is coming and people are leaving. So you let everybody else go. Then you'll start to get kicked out or the speaker needs to leave. And if you're the last to go, guess what? You get to walk out with the speaker. And sometimes you don't get to just walk out with the speaker. You get to walk all the way down the hall to the next thing and engage in a conversation. Speakers at trade shows tend to be people who are influencers in a market and who are wonderful connectors. They're influencers and connectors. You've got to get to know these people. And this is a way to do it. Go listen to a speech, let everybody else go first, walk out with them. Then you can do follow up connection stuff after the fact. But it's a great way to engage with connectors and a lot of those people then because I know all of you all have podcasts because Bill and I have been told you telling you to get one, talk to a speaker, walk out with them, tell them you got a podcast, ask if they'd be on it, interview them on your podcast, put that out to your market and the next thing you know, you actually get some leads by yourself. Looky there, you didn't even need a marketing brochure to do that. Ta da. Okay, so that's that last one I'll tell you is post show. You're gonna hate this one. You're gonna hate it. You're gonna hate it in The Blind Zebra sales operating system in the trade show tool. The first line in the post show says always follow the wheels down rule. Always follow the wheels down rule. What is the wheels down rule? Follow the wheels down rule. What is wheels down? When you leave the show and you're going to the airport and you're flying home, you have to get all of the follow up completed. Email sent, calendar requests sent, information sent, proposals sent. Whatever was committed to at this show has to be completed before the airplane wheels hit the deck at your hometown. That's the wheels down rule. You got to get all your follow up done before your wheels down at home. And you are gonna hate me. You're gonna hate me. You just are. And then you're gonna love me. Because then you're going to go in Monday. And what's waiting for you Monday after a trade show? Everything. Everything's waiting for you. All the stuff, all the stuff that you didn't get to, all the emails to reply to, all the stuff is waiting for you. And because you followed the system, you're going to be done with all your trade show follow up. You'll be so glad that you did. And guess what your competitors are doing? They're not doing the wheels down rule. They are waiting till they get home, then they're delaying 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 20 days. Then they're following up. And it's too late because you've already had three meetings with your prospect and they're just now following up. Hey, sorry, a little delayed. Real busy when I got back from the trade show. You know, you win, you win. And it's great for customers too because it just keeps you top of mind. Okay, Wheels down rule. I'm telling you it works. It's fantastic. Okay, okay. That my friends, is the two minute drill. Even shorter than 20, right? Check out the Blind Zebra sales operating system. Just go to blind-zebra.com learn the process to get certified. Now this isn't an individual certification. This is for companies to buy and invest in you. In fact, to get certified, a company has to send at least two people to get certified. And then there's a year long commitment. So this isn't like you just run along and get certified. This isn't a direct to consumer deal. It's a business to business deal. But boy, it can start with you. It's already started. A couple of you podcast listeners have already come to India and gotten certified. So do that. Okay, that's it. That's the two minutes row Taada. More fun stuff coming that's it. See you next time. The Advanced SL podcast. Cheers.