Going to start with the honest statement: I'm not a huge fan of trade show booths. I understand the value of a booth, trust me, I've done thousands of them. My issue is when you have reps who just sit there. Walk any show floor and you'll see people sitting down, on their phone, on their computer. If someone walks up, it's "hey, scan it, here's a pen."
Then compare that to what some of these shows cost. I recently spoke with someone who had a booth at Black Hat for $300,000. I asked what they got from it. A couple hundred scans, and about a month after the show, nothing had turned into an opportunity. "It was a brand awareness thing." And "our competitors were there, so we have to be there." I generally say this to folks: if your competitor buys a billboard, do you have to buy a billboard too? You can't compete dollar for dollar with every competitor because they showed up.
So when I work on a show, the booth is just a home base and the real plan surrounds it. Recently at Unbound, I ran a hugely successful sponsor playbook with Reachdesk. Here’s the run down on what we did.
Pre-book the meetings
We went into Unbound with 35 meetings pre-booked before anyone ever got to the show floor. This is the part people tend to skip, and it's the part that makes the biggest difference on post show pipeline.
People always say, "but what if we don't get the attendee list?" They shouldn’t be deterred though, it really doesn't take too much to figure it out. There's an event app. There's a camera. We have Claude. You can pull that information out, enrich it, and push it into Salesforce or HubSpot. When I tell people this, the reaction is usually, "oh, I didn't think about that." It's right in front of you, so people overlook it.
Getting the list is the easy part, though. You still need a real reason to reach out and genuinely good copy. Otherwise you're just another email.
Give people something worth walking over for
Conference show floors are crowded. If you show up looking bland or the same as everyone else you can’t expect much interest. You need to really think hard about what is interesting and memorable. Give the attendees something that is worth stopping and chatting over. Our activation this year was custom denim jackets, built around the idea of going from URL to IRL. Everything we see is digital, so how do you bring people together in real life?
We created custom patches that folks could iron on. It was memorable, customizable and created a moment where they could pause and interact with our team. Those little things are so important in creating an experience, and feel worlds away from just getting a pen.
Treat the booth as home base & lean in to auxiliary events
The booth was simply where people knew to find us. Easy to find, a place to sit down and chat for a bit. The real work happened in the meetings, the breakfast, the lounge, and the follow-up.
We ran a breakfast and a lounge with massages, build-your-own flower bouquets, necklace building, and water bottles. All these auxiliary moments created a halo effect around the brand. People were able to interact with us multiple times and further those connections.
At the end of the conference we had held meetings with anyone we prebooked and had set many, many more. We met with high value prospects multiple times between breakfasts, massages, at the booth, etc.
When the booth is being broken down most teams are counting the number of scans. Our team already had qualified pipeline. That is the difference between fantastic ROI and just getting a list of emails.
Key metrics
- 35 meetings pre-booked before the show floor opened
- 60 meetings by the end of day 3
- 30% meeting to qualified opp conversion 2 weeks post show
Reachdesk
