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Exhibit sales automation has become increasingly critical to the growth and profitability of trade shows. This blog will discuss issues and share best practices on issues like:booth sales models; upcoming technologies; software integration with other systems; ROI and TCO analysis. |
Filed under: Uncategorized Rajiv Jain @ 9:16 am on 07/12/07
Credits – This blog posting is inspired by “Who Moved my Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson, M.D.
On my way to an appointment recently, I was listening to the audio book “Who Moved My Cheese?”. As this 46 minute long narration played, I kept thinking about expositions & events and how well this concept applied to our industry. If you have not read this book (or listened to it) then I would highly recommend that you do.
Like in most other industries, “Cheese” in exposition & events industry refers to our market segments, customers, revenues, profits, & market share.
Do you move your Cheese?
Do you proactively look for new “Cheese”? Do you continuously modify your approach toward your market? Do you look at new way of doing business, new ways of delivering more value to your attendees, exhibitors, and other constituents?
Has you Cheese ever been moved?
Has your market, customer, or profit ever decreased or even disappeared? This may be due to a new competitor or, more often, due to other external changes, such as changes in the behavior of your customers, their expectations, and other more valuable alternatives that become available to them, etc.
In many situations, we get complacent when we find our “Cheese” and put our “running shoes” away, i.e., stop making efforts to explore new and better way of managing our events and delivering value to our customers. We do not “smell” our cheese often, i.e., we do not take stock of the situation often to see what changes are happening with our customers. How is the behavior of our customers changing? How are they buying other things, such as music or books? How are they using other services, such as online banking? How do these experiences change their expectations from us? Do they expect exposition and events to provide them a different experience?
Do our exhibitors expect to buy booths from us the way they buy music from iTunes (or books from Amazon), which is very easy & frictionless? Do they expect to pay us online, at their own convenience the way they pay their utility bills using online banking? Can our exhibitions and events continue to deliver them more value than alternatives such as online advertising?
Do we know our attendees well? Do we understand the type of products and services they are looking for by monitoring their behavior on our web sites or on our show floors? Do we know when one of our customers does not register for an event that we think will be valuable for him? And then do we have systems and processes in place to proactively reach out to that customer with a message that is pertinent to them to attract them to attend our event?
We assume that our cheese will always be there. That is, our customers will keep coming to us; our exhibitors will keep buying booths and other services from us and our attendees will keep attending our events. And one sad day, in many cases after the event, we might look at our scorecard and realize that our cheese has been moved.
Change happens. We need to anticipate change. Keep monitoring our market and the behavior of our customers. And as we see the signs, keep making changes in our efforts, way of doing business, and offerings.
Filed under: Booth Sales Automation Rajiv Jain @ 3:52 am on 28/11/07
Booth Sales processes can be automated to varying degrees using online systems; from 100% automated (with no human intervention) to lesser automated online requests or reservations.
First, how much or how little controlis the show organizer willing to give to the exhibitors? Most mid to large size shows like to give limited or no control to the exhibitor, i.e., exhibitors cannot select and complete the booth sales on their own. Typically, these shows follow a two-step process. In the first step, the exhibitor may request or reserve a booth online. And in the second step, the show organizer would confirm or assign the booth to the exhibitor. This always allows the show organizer to have an upper hand.
Second item to consider is “online fund processing”. This includes online credit card processing as well as online check processing, which is relatively new. If a show organizer is conducting business online then it is expected that they will allow their customers (in this case exhibitors) to pay online. In many cases, we have seen this to increase the cash flow by 4 to 8 weeks.
Last but not the least is “benefits”. Online systems provide a number of benefits to show organizers and exhibitors. It drastically shortens the sales cycle and results in accelerated booth sales for show organizers. It makes the processing of buying booths and other ancillary products/services easier for exhibitors. In most cases, these benefits out-weigh the extra cost/fees involved with such online systems.
Filed under: Uncategorized admin @ 7:47 am on 26/09/07
Welcome to the Exhibit Sales Automation blog. I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts on best practices and technologies that improve, accelarate and automate exhibit sales. I would like to invite you to post your comments and feedback.
