Interpack

With at least three opportunities looming on the horizon to show off to your best advantage – Easyfairs Packaging Innovations (NEC, March), Interpack (Düsseldorf, April) and back to the NEC for the PPMA Show (September) – some expert advice on the basic dos and don’ts surely won’t go amiss. And who could be more qualified to pass on some of the tricks of the trade fair than the show organisers themselves?

Before grappling with the knotty subject of whether you should risk inviting along your top customers only to expose them to your competition, or mulling over the finer points of stand location (some exhibitors swear by snapping up the sites nearest the loos), giveaway items, staff uniforms et al, the unanimous advice is: don’t decide on anything until you have a clearly defined end-game in sight.

“Plan, plan and plan again,” urges PPMA director Chris Buxton. “You need to set your objectives for the event and to realise that those can cover many different areas. Expecting everything to be handed to you on a plate just won’t happen.”

The process should start as soon as the contract is signed, Buxton recommends, and ideally it should be co-ordinated by a project manager responsible for orchestrating a disparate team effort, incorporating production, logistics, marketing and HR, to take the exhibiting company right through to long after the show is done and dusted. While most exhibitors manage to fulfil the ‘before’ and ‘during’ phases of their show plan – anything from organising on-site lifting of the machinery that will be demonstrated, to issuing visitor invitations in good time and, better still, firming up on appointments, or simply keeping the stand tidy – far too many neglect the after-life.

Follow up leads
“Seventy per cent of leads received at shows are never followed up,” bemoans Buxton. “Think of all that lost potential; it’s just apathy and poor salesmanship. It’s so obvious that they should work out when people are going to be back in the office and contact them straightaway.”

Buying into the pulling power of any show is a matter of judgment; to then leave that investment to sink or swim, however, is anything but. Having rented the floor space, built the stand, paid for the hotels and covered all the other sundries, the all-in cost of an average 35sqm stand at last year’s Total event would have been around £30,000. According to show director Ian Crawford, however, some exhibitors fail to bridge the gap between writing the cheques and ensuring they produce a reasonable dividend.

“It’s frankly disappointing if they pay their money to us and then expect us to do the whole job for them. When you book into a hotel, it isn’t going to tell you what to do, where to go, what to order for your breakfast – it’s those basic bits that are the important ones in determining how your time is best spent there.

“The most fundamental way in which people can go wrong is not setting themselves targets: How many people do they want to see per day? How many new customers do they want to see per day per salesman? How many of those are going to be followed up that day? What are they going to do at the exhibition and afterwards for that customer? If they plan this beforehand, then they’ve got the basis for assessing whether it’s been a good or a bad show.”

Nor should size of outlay be the determining factor, stresses Easyfairs managing director Peter Heath, whose talking shop business model has successfully capitalised on the problematic cost-and-return equations of machinery-dominated events.

“The challenge for us as a business is that, because we make it easy for people to budget for their participation, some might think there’s nothing left for them to do. By putting in some effort, however, you can go from having a good show to having an unbelievably good show.

“The tips are no different to those you’d give to any part of business. Broadly speaking, think about what you want to achieve; involve the stakeholders; set some clear objectives; get the buy-in from all teams; get them all to deliver against what they need to do; and follow through. It’s actually not that difficult and can make a massive difference in the overall impact and net result of your show participation.

Pre-show marketing
“Fear of loss is typically how business works, so a lot of reasons for taking part in a show can be based on a negative: we went last time; the fear of not being seen; marketing departments justifying themselves. In reality, positive pre-show marketing is a no-brainer. I’ve known exhibitors pick up orders before the show even started, simply because they’d promoted the fact that they were going to exhibit.”

As organisers are far more likely to take the blame when exhibitors fail to achieve their objectives than they are to take the the credit when they do, it seems remiss that more time isn’t spent on coaching initiatives.

While Reed usually holds an exhibitors’ open day four months out from show, “these are attended by very few, because a lot of them think they know how to do it, have been doing it for years and so don’t see the necessity for it,” says Crawford.

Nursemaid for first-timers
For most firms, the principal recourse is the ‘exhibitor manual’ a pretty daunting instruction book covering everything from on-site electrical charges to where to order the pot-plants. Messe Düsseldorf does at least try to nursemaid Interpack first-timers with a pre-show hot line and individual on-site mentoring.

However, bitter experience is invariably the usual educator for most companies. Practical advice can certainly be gained via the Association of Exhibition Organisers, but its existence might not immediately be obvious to companies outside of the events industry. Likewise, there are trade publications and even a couple of exhibitions that are all about exhibiting. You’re not alone; the trouble is that you probably won’t realise that until it’s too late.

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CASE STUDY
Automated Packaging

Regular exhibitor Automated Packaging (AP) was at last year’s Total Show to launch its new £70,000 FAS SPrint system for packing frozen food products at a rate of 120 bags per minute. With six other machines to demonstrate, AP took an 112sqm three-sided open stand towards the front of Hall 4.

Product manager Clive Pearson established a four-man team, including an external project manager, to develop and execute the pre-show planning.

“Most shows that we do are 20sqm shell scheme events, which we manage ourselves. For something of this size, we don’t have sufficient resources to dedicate the time required,” he explains.

Fast forward to the event itself, where Pearson’s team delivered a stand that gave prominence to FAS SPrint, incorporated an easily accessible reception area, reflected a highly visible corporate image, and was open and airy so that staff and customers could walk across the stand and around the machines on display.

“Our goal was new business,” stresses Pearson, “and the key thing is to be proactive. We use ‘catchers’ and ‘spotters’: a mix of our own people and agency staff who are out in the aisle immediately on the perimeter of the stand, walking up and down and interacting with visitors as they pass.

“We’ve worked out a series of remarks and questions that enable us to qualify the person or the company they work for as being a potential buyer. Once that’s been determined, the objective is to hand them over to a sales rep.”

AP did no off-stand promotion, opting instead to hand out fortune cookies inside its own plastic bags – both items directly relevant to the kit on show.

In addition to a pre-show briefing document detailing every aspect of the company’s participation, including staff mobile numbers, there was a nightly de-briefing and a post-show report.

Having aimed to generate 160 enquiries, AP came away with 235. With corporate flag-waving part of the objective, AP’s expectation of direct business veered towards the conservative. “On average, we’d be pleased to see one sale from an exhibition like this within a year, and potentially two within 24 months,” says Pearson.

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DOS & DON’TS

• Only take part for positive reasons. If you don’t believe you should be exhibiting, it will become obvious to customers
• Plan your participation as early as possible and promote it to the hilt ahead of the show (invites, ads, press releases)
• Establish a budget. But have a contingency for unanticipated developments and opportunities
• Don’t rely on the show organisers to do your business for you. As a breed they are myopic about numbers (of square metres, exhibitors, visitors) – what you do with the relevant proportion of the visitor attendance is up to you
• Represent your business appropriately on-site. Giveaways are OK if you must – but appropriate and never tacky (a co-packer employed sexy girls to hand out foil-wrapped condoms: memorable, but not for the right reasons)
• Make the stand as welcoming as possible, including well-informed staff (brains are better than beauty)
• No sitting around on the stand reading newspapers, working on lap-tops, drinking coffee – and no smoking
• If you say you’re going to follow up, then do it ASAP