The Road to the Stand
Make sure you warm up your visitors: use a flock of girls stylishly clad in corporate clothes and armed with smiles and flysheets, or stamp a trail of floor advertising to your stand, or direct visitors with arrows pointing to your stand. This will highlight you against other, more passive, exhibitors giving little thought to the first impression. Such passiveness of exhibiting firms plays into the hands of those who want to stand out at no cost. This breakthrough can be made with little effort.
Stop and Look Back
The chance to grasp a client appears when there is heavy traffic of visitors around stands. But you can’t just pull up a person and draw him to the stand, can you? Therefore, you have to make him pay attention to your stand – you must have his look fixed on your stand.
The easiest, and therefore most frequently used tool, is television. It offers hours of commercials or popular movies. The latter may gather quite a crowd near the stand. Sounds good but little use: people watch the Prisoner of the Caucasus rather than the stand. If you switch the channel to a commercial, they will leave offended. To avoid that, act more sensitively: for example, use Shurik’s voice to tell, “Friends, we are going to have a little rest, so why don’t you have a look at the stand”. The dubbing won’t require a lot of efforts or money, but the effect will be dramatic.
People’s attention can also be drawn by something moving, illuminated or flashing – for instance, mock-up equipment. Apart from visual perception, use hearing (pleasant music, announcer spots, sound effects), smell (nice aromas), or temperature sensations (a flow of cool and refreshing air on a hot day). Conceptually and technically, it is not difficult at all, and the effect may be profound (if, of course, stand assistants do a good job).
The Human Factor
There should be at least one person available at the stand. It is an incompetent situation when the exhibiting place is abandoned. Potential clients of the firm just keep passing by, and what’s more, the company’s image is undermined. To avoid such problems, the firm’s management must ensure control of the exhibition activities and provide stand assistants with an adequate load.
The personnel must be trained on how to interact with visitors. It is critical for the manager to realise that the stand work is a broader and more complicated process than just keeping a heroic watch near the stack of price lists. Visitors should be selected, invited to the stand, involved in communication, and their intentions should be cleared out. In a word, there are a lot of tasks, and none of them are easy. They can hardly be solved by a long-legged beauty from a model agency – the client must be treated by a person successful in sales.
According to PR specialists, design of verbal units in advance is an effective way to address training of the stand personnel. This is done in the following way: based on perception stereotypes, a PR specialist designs and constructs several colloquial units (welcome, initial message, further conversation, good-bye, etc.). Each unit is then drilled by stand assistants until it become automatic. This will reduce the number of communication errors and, importantly, make the work easier because telling a phrase that had been constructed in advance significantly minimises the emotional effect (e.g., exasperation or fatigue) of the speaker.
It is great if the firm has an opportunity to “get off the stand”, i.e. involve more employees in the room activities. Having provided this personnel with corporate clothes and advertising materials, you will significantly improve your participation effect. Available employees will visit your competitors’ and business partners’ stands and help your stand assistants form a steady flow of visitors.
Add a Pinch of Advertising
Today, exhibition centres have indoor advertising equipment. Don’t disregard it. Small advertising costs may yield a tremendous effect – especially if the stand features the “event within”: presentation of the firm, demonstration of some equipment, etc.
A good way to lock the firm’s name in exhibitors’ and visitors’ minds is to associate radio ads with some information important for the listeners. For example, firm Х may advertise as follows: “Ladies and gentlemen, firm Х announces correct time. Hurry up to sign good contracts!” or “If you lost each other, get together at the stand of firm X which is located at…”.
Total Recall
There are a lot of various ways to draw attention and win the audience. I will briefly tell about them.
A proven practice to work with the most promising visitors is taking photos as a memento: the stand assistant invites the guest to be photographed against the firm’s stand, then takes a picture and gives the instant photo to be kept by the visitor. Another effective way is to take a picture with a regular camera and send it with a cover letter by mail. In any case, the visitor will remember the name of the firm and associate it with good recollections.
There is yet another way to be remembered. Visitors respond willingly when invited to assemble something from paper. The stand assistant may say that the assembly record time with firm Х is 15 seconds. The visitors will work with paper brightly coloured with your logo to make souvenirs for themselves.
Papers, Papers, Papers
Visitors leave each exhibition carrying away an incredible amount of paper, and a lot of them pick up price lists, leaflets and catalogues just in case, even if they don’t really need them. That is why:
1. make your handouts to feature not only high quality and a lot of information but also stand out from others. This is not an easy thing – but quite solvable: colour paper, non-standard format, cut-off angle – there is always an inexpensive way to stand out;
2. materials should be prepared in excess (they will come handy some day) to avoid awkward situations when the stand assistant has to tell the client, “Well, you see, we have only one copy of the flysheet left, but if you come tomorrow ten minutes after the exhibition opens...”.
If you want to gain attention and goodwill from mass media, draft detailed and conclusive press releases for them. Anecdotal evidence is that a lot of journalists often use fragments from press releases in their reviews of fairs and exhibitions, and ignore the firms which failed to prepare such information.
Get the Digits
The exhibition may result in getting new clients or business partners. However, not all of them can be brought down to signing the contract, and many visitors your firm is interested in just leave carrying away the catalogue and never call back. These lost clients may – and must – be returned. For that, the good-bye verbal unit may be augmented with the request to leave their contacts. If all the previous parts of the conversation went smoothly, the visitor will not decline the request. For example, you want to get a collection of business cards. Try this technique: put up the announcement “A Souvenir in Exchange for Your Business Card” (well, you will have to spend out your stock of pens and lighters). Right after the visitor leaves the stand, the stand assistant will fill out a form with the visitor’s name, position, occupation, and telephones, as well as some of his or her impressions about outlooks for cooperation with the visitor. The information obtained about the visitors may be used as soon as at the end of the exhibition day to assess the stand assistants’ performance, and also as a database for your sales department.
How to Interact with Visitors
Below are some ways to attract visitors:
1. tags on letters informing about the exhibition and stand number;
2. send out invitations to the stand specifying location and appearance of the stand;
3. attach a souvenir, souvenir coupon or lottery ticket to the invitation;
4. offer hot tea and cookies to the visitors freezing in the line;
5. make products before visitors’ eyes;
6. offer journalists, independent experts or anyone willing to test the product;
7. when entering the exhibition, distribute invitations specifying location and appearance of the stand;
8. presentation of a new product;
9. shows on the topic of the exhibition or stand;
10. demonstration of a “miracle”;
11. a live creature at the stand;
12. floor cover leading out to the aisle;
13. use working models – scaled-up or reduced-scale models;
14. take pictures of valuable clients with the firm logo in the back;
15. use firm ties or scarves as souvenirs or stand assistants’ corporate clothes;
16. celebrate the firm’s or director’s birthday at the exhibition;
17. send a letter thanking for the visit to the stand.
Interaction with Stand Visitors
Visitors are the target audience for the exhibitor’s messages and the strongest evidence of success for exhibitions.
Visitors’ expectations include:
The need to receive general information about the company;
An exchange of professional expertise;
The will to execute direct trade agreements.
Development of professional and emotional relationships between the stand personnel and visitors helps create mutual understanding.
This is why the stand employees must:
Have a thorough knowledge of the company and its products;
Have strong inter-personal skills;
Have increased competencies to make decisions.
Communication of the stand personnel with visitors has its own critical points. A conversation at the stand must be successful from the very beginning. The initial meeting is the most critical communication phase. A lot will depend on the personnel skill to smile.
After the visitor enters the stand, give him the time to look around. The stand assistant should watch and see what the visitor will be interested in. Seize the opportunity to address the visitor.
Do not begin the conversation with “What are you interested in?” Options:
Tell something about the company or product and only then ask, “What area do you represent, if I may?”
“Oh, you must be CEO?”
“Firm N, good morning. So, which of those exhibits is good enough for your office?”
“I think I will be able to brief you about our core advantages and disadvantages for a minute and a half…”
When communicating with the client, remember a few important rules: Demonstrate how the product solves the client’s problems. Agree to the client’s objections and aggressive behaviour using this formula: “Yes, but...”
Be sure to name one disadvantage per three advantages of your product/service.
Mention typical “adverse” stereotypes before the client mentions them. Exclude judgments (good, effective, nice, etc.), adjectives and adverbs from your conversation. Replace them with verbal nouns.
Tell the price at the very end of your conversation, after you have enumerated advantages of your product. And always compare the price with a more expensive model!
Keep a non-obtrusive conversation. Use pointed questions to find out the client’s position, motives, criticism, claims, end use of the product, quality expectations, and an opportunity to sign a contract as soon as possible. Once professional competencies and decision-making authority have been identified, a certain level of mutual understanding can be achieved. Respond promptly to any claims and doubts stated, and immediately offer specific ways to resolve them.
At the end of your conversation, agree on follow-up contacts – for example, time for the next meeting or sending specific products or any technical details. Enjoy a successful exhibition!
The Restorany Astany newspaper, 14 May 2009
Make sure you warm up your visitors: use a flock of girls stylishly clad in corporate clothes and armed with smiles and flysheets, or stamp a trail of floor advertising to your stand, or direct visitors with arrows pointing to your stand. This will highlight you against other, more passive, exhibitors giving little thought to the first impression. Such passiveness of exhibiting firms plays into the hands of those who want to stand out at no cost. This breakthrough can be made with little effort.
Stop and Look Back
The chance to grasp a client appears when there is heavy traffic of visitors around stands. But you can’t just pull up a person and draw him to the stand, can you? Therefore, you have to make him pay attention to your stand – you must have his look fixed on your stand.
The easiest, and therefore most frequently used tool, is television. It offers hours of commercials or popular movies. The latter may gather quite a crowd near the stand. Sounds good but little use: people watch the Prisoner of the Caucasus rather than the stand. If you switch the channel to a commercial, they will leave offended. To avoid that, act more sensitively: for example, use Shurik’s voice to tell, “Friends, we are going to have a little rest, so why don’t you have a look at the stand”. The dubbing won’t require a lot of efforts or money, but the effect will be dramatic.
People’s attention can also be drawn by something moving, illuminated or flashing – for instance, mock-up equipment. Apart from visual perception, use hearing (pleasant music, announcer spots, sound effects), smell (nice aromas), or temperature sensations (a flow of cool and refreshing air on a hot day). Conceptually and technically, it is not difficult at all, and the effect may be profound (if, of course, stand assistants do a good job).
The Human Factor
There should be at least one person available at the stand. It is an incompetent situation when the exhibiting place is abandoned. Potential clients of the firm just keep passing by, and what’s more, the company’s image is undermined. To avoid such problems, the firm’s management must ensure control of the exhibition activities and provide stand assistants with an adequate load.
The personnel must be trained on how to interact with visitors. It is critical for the manager to realise that the stand work is a broader and more complicated process than just keeping a heroic watch near the stack of price lists. Visitors should be selected, invited to the stand, involved in communication, and their intentions should be cleared out. In a word, there are a lot of tasks, and none of them are easy. They can hardly be solved by a long-legged beauty from a model agency – the client must be treated by a person successful in sales.
According to PR specialists, design of verbal units in advance is an effective way to address training of the stand personnel. This is done in the following way: based on perception stereotypes, a PR specialist designs and constructs several colloquial units (welcome, initial message, further conversation, good-bye, etc.). Each unit is then drilled by stand assistants until it become automatic. This will reduce the number of communication errors and, importantly, make the work easier because telling a phrase that had been constructed in advance significantly minimises the emotional effect (e.g., exasperation or fatigue) of the speaker.
It is great if the firm has an opportunity to “get off the stand”, i.e. involve more employees in the room activities. Having provided this personnel with corporate clothes and advertising materials, you will significantly improve your participation effect. Available employees will visit your competitors’ and business partners’ stands and help your stand assistants form a steady flow of visitors.
Add a Pinch of Advertising
Today, exhibition centres have indoor advertising equipment. Don’t disregard it. Small advertising costs may yield a tremendous effect – especially if the stand features the “event within”: presentation of the firm, demonstration of some equipment, etc.
A good way to lock the firm’s name in exhibitors’ and visitors’ minds is to associate radio ads with some information important for the listeners. For example, firm Х may advertise as follows: “Ladies and gentlemen, firm Х announces correct time. Hurry up to sign good contracts!” or “If you lost each other, get together at the stand of firm X which is located at…”.
Total Recall
There are a lot of various ways to draw attention and win the audience. I will briefly tell about them.
A proven practice to work with the most promising visitors is taking photos as a memento: the stand assistant invites the guest to be photographed against the firm’s stand, then takes a picture and gives the instant photo to be kept by the visitor. Another effective way is to take a picture with a regular camera and send it with a cover letter by mail. In any case, the visitor will remember the name of the firm and associate it with good recollections.
There is yet another way to be remembered. Visitors respond willingly when invited to assemble something from paper. The stand assistant may say that the assembly record time with firm Х is 15 seconds. The visitors will work with paper brightly coloured with your logo to make souvenirs for themselves.
Papers, Papers, Papers
Visitors leave each exhibition carrying away an incredible amount of paper, and a lot of them pick up price lists, leaflets and catalogues just in case, even if they don’t really need them. That is why:
1. make your handouts to feature not only high quality and a lot of information but also stand out from others. This is not an easy thing – but quite solvable: colour paper, non-standard format, cut-off angle – there is always an inexpensive way to stand out;
2. materials should be prepared in excess (they will come handy some day) to avoid awkward situations when the stand assistant has to tell the client, “Well, you see, we have only one copy of the flysheet left, but if you come tomorrow ten minutes after the exhibition opens...”.
If you want to gain attention and goodwill from mass media, draft detailed and conclusive press releases for them. Anecdotal evidence is that a lot of journalists often use fragments from press releases in their reviews of fairs and exhibitions, and ignore the firms which failed to prepare such information.
Get the Digits
The exhibition may result in getting new clients or business partners. However, not all of them can be brought down to signing the contract, and many visitors your firm is interested in just leave carrying away the catalogue and never call back. These lost clients may – and must – be returned. For that, the good-bye verbal unit may be augmented with the request to leave their contacts. If all the previous parts of the conversation went smoothly, the visitor will not decline the request. For example, you want to get a collection of business cards. Try this technique: put up the announcement “A Souvenir in Exchange for Your Business Card” (well, you will have to spend out your stock of pens and lighters). Right after the visitor leaves the stand, the stand assistant will fill out a form with the visitor’s name, position, occupation, and telephones, as well as some of his or her impressions about outlooks for cooperation with the visitor. The information obtained about the visitors may be used as soon as at the end of the exhibition day to assess the stand assistants’ performance, and also as a database for your sales department.
How to Interact with Visitors
Below are some ways to attract visitors:
1. tags on letters informing about the exhibition and stand number;
2. send out invitations to the stand specifying location and appearance of the stand;
3. attach a souvenir, souvenir coupon or lottery ticket to the invitation;
4. offer hot tea and cookies to the visitors freezing in the line;
5. make products before visitors’ eyes;
6. offer journalists, independent experts or anyone willing to test the product;
7. when entering the exhibition, distribute invitations specifying location and appearance of the stand;
8. presentation of a new product;
9. shows on the topic of the exhibition or stand;
10. demonstration of a “miracle”;
11. a live creature at the stand;
12. floor cover leading out to the aisle;
13. use working models – scaled-up or reduced-scale models;
14. take pictures of valuable clients with the firm logo in the back;
15. use firm ties or scarves as souvenirs or stand assistants’ corporate clothes;
16. celebrate the firm’s or director’s birthday at the exhibition;
17. send a letter thanking for the visit to the stand.
Interaction with Stand Visitors
Visitors are the target audience for the exhibitor’s messages and the strongest evidence of success for exhibitions.
Visitors’ expectations include:
The need to receive general information about the company;
An exchange of professional expertise;
The will to execute direct trade agreements.
Development of professional and emotional relationships between the stand personnel and visitors helps create mutual understanding.
This is why the stand employees must:
Have a thorough knowledge of the company and its products;
Have strong inter-personal skills;
Have increased competencies to make decisions.
Communication of the stand personnel with visitors has its own critical points. A conversation at the stand must be successful from the very beginning. The initial meeting is the most critical communication phase. A lot will depend on the personnel skill to smile.
After the visitor enters the stand, give him the time to look around. The stand assistant should watch and see what the visitor will be interested in. Seize the opportunity to address the visitor.
Do not begin the conversation with “What are you interested in?” Options:
Tell something about the company or product and only then ask, “What area do you represent, if I may?”
“Oh, you must be CEO?”
“Firm N, good morning. So, which of those exhibits is good enough for your office?”
“I think I will be able to brief you about our core advantages and disadvantages for a minute and a half…”
When communicating with the client, remember a few important rules: Demonstrate how the product solves the client’s problems. Agree to the client’s objections and aggressive behaviour using this formula: “Yes, but...”
Be sure to name one disadvantage per three advantages of your product/service.
Mention typical “adverse” stereotypes before the client mentions them. Exclude judgments (good, effective, nice, etc.), adjectives and adverbs from your conversation. Replace them with verbal nouns.
Tell the price at the very end of your conversation, after you have enumerated advantages of your product. And always compare the price with a more expensive model!
Keep a non-obtrusive conversation. Use pointed questions to find out the client’s position, motives, criticism, claims, end use of the product, quality expectations, and an opportunity to sign a contract as soon as possible. Once professional competencies and decision-making authority have been identified, a certain level of mutual understanding can be achieved. Respond promptly to any claims and doubts stated, and immediately offer specific ways to resolve them.
At the end of your conversation, agree on follow-up contacts – for example, time for the next meeting or sending specific products or any technical details. Enjoy a successful exhibition!
The Restorany Astany newspaper, 14 May 2009
Date:
Thursday, June 18, 2009
