A couple weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Russ at the last Utah Geek Dinner. Russ works for Politis, a Tech PR firm that had a client who exhibited at CES the previous week. He spent the whole week arranging meetings with the press and possible retailers and the week ended up being a success for them.

As we were talking about all the cool new stuff at the show, he mentioned that CES has an exhibitor turnover rate of something like 40-50 percent from year-to-year and that the reason was that companies pay tons of money to exhibit at these shows, but then just show up and sit around at their booth, waiting for customers to show up and make them rich. When their spaceship never comes, they write the show off as a waste of money and don’t come back the next year.

Fast forward a few weeks to the present. I work for a software company called WingateWeb that makes event management software and am currently sitting at the RSA Security conference in San Jose. Though I am here for work, I have had a bit of time to walk around the show floor and pop-in on a few of the sessions. (Though I missed Bill Gates’ keynote, but I saw the line to get in when I was arriving at the conference center and it wasn’t quite Steve Jobsian in nature) As I walked around the show floor, I saw exactly what Russ and I had been talking about in action. Tons of booths just had salesmen sitting around doing nothing at best and seemed much more interested in talking and laughing amongst themselves than they did in actually selling anything at worst . There were even a few booths that I stopped at and looked around in for a few minutes without having anyone even acknowledge my existence. Annoying to say the least.

Knowing how much money these exhibitors pay to be at these shows, I was amazed at how little they seemed to care about how much benefit they were getting. The main benefit of tradeshows/conferences is networking. Not networking in the abstraact sense, but literally finding as many people as you possibly can that will help your company make more money. They bring together thousands if not tens of thousands of people all interested in the same sort of things, yet many of the companies seemed to be there haphazardly. No plan, no goals, and no idea of what they were doing there other than to “get out and increase brand awareness.” Lame. Lame, lame, lame…. and lame.

To not specifically plan out who they are going to talk to, what they are going to accomplish with each person that comes by their booth, and not have specific goals that can be measured really makes tradeshows a gigantic waste of money. Especially considering that on top of the price of your exhibit space, you have the cost of the exhibit itself, travel expenses, and lost productivity. Tradeshows are way too expensive to not have specific goals and a plan to achieve them. How often do companies have such a captive audience of leads that they can easily and quickly qualify on the spot and in person. Also I would suspect that the conversion rate of leads met at tradeshows is much higher than leads in general. Afterall, the lead is there because they are interested in your industry and (hopefully) product.

In a more general sense, it is so important to take advantage of any face-to-face interaction. So much of our communication now is impersonal (email, conference calls, IM’ing, etc…) that we need to take advantage of the time we spend in front of others. This is specifically important for software companies and especially web-application companies since so much of our business can be done without personal contact. Not just in a sales perspective either, but in all aspects of life. Since I only see my family a few times a year, I really need to take advantage of the time I have in person with them.

We learn so much about people by being around them, even if it is in shorts stints. We can read faces, body language and any number of other intangibles that are lost in a world of impersonal communication. We can’t thin-slice as Malcolm Gladwell puts it. In person is the way people were meant to interact so let’s not waste the time we do have to interact like so many exhibit booth staffers seem to do. Those we interact with will notice the change. This applies to any part of our life, not just our professional part.

Categories: General