How you staff your booth matters even more than you think

In conversations I’ve had with clients, the subject of staffing their booth usually comes much, much later down the road when we discuss projects. Shipping, graphics, booth size and location, branding and promo items all matter – considerably, and rightfully so. That said, if your team on the ground isn’t functional, it might not go as well as you might like, and that will NECESSARILY have an impact on your ROI and your company’s bottom line.

How do you plan to staff your booth? How do you qualify leads and how do you figure out, quickly, if a prospect is interested in making a deal or is just there to collect free swag?

Our head of marketing once wrote that head of teams displaying at shows need to ask themselves: what type of booth staffers do I have on my roster for my trade shows? She identified these types of staffers:

• The “I hate traveling”- reluctant staffer,

• The “oohhh we’re going to Vegas?” – vacation mode staffer,

• The “I’ll see what I can do, I’m really busy” – working on site staffer,

• The “It’s easy just scan a lot of badges” – lead-retrieval trigger-happy staffer, and I’ll add another one below…

• The “I’m new here and I have no idea what I’m doing yet” staffer.

  
  

It seems like for many trade show staffing isn’t a strategy but an afterthought and because of that, they fail to staff the booth appropriately and fail to clearly communicate goals and strategy to their team members. Remember, a trade show is a massive investment for some companies – and we want them to maximize that investment.

1. Be clear in your objectives and your strategy

Some booths are designed to draw in and qualify sales leads, while others are used primarily to meet with existing partners and still others are designed to engage as wide an audience as possible. But, if you don’t know what your objectives are at a trade show then how, as a leader, is your team supposed to understand? Concise, measurable objectives (i.e., meet with 25 existing clients in our meeting space) you can guide your planning and utilize your human resources most effectively. Is your goal signing up as many sales leads as possible? Great! Setting up your most engaging and extroverted sales associates on the outside to grab information and quickly qualify leads can bear real fruit – but they have to ask the right questions.

2. Select the right staff

Knowing your staff’s strength and weaknesses can go a long way toward proper deployment. Maybe you have a very technical booth that requires one of your engineers or technicians provide a presentation. One way to go about this that a client of ours recently used their sales associates on the four corners of their island booth, with the mandate to funnel purchasing-, director-, and C-level contacts to the inside of the booth, where they would be engaged by engineers and technicians alongside senior management in a relaxed semi-private meeting space, giving the booth a solid workflow and allowing the company to quickly qualify sales leads. It worked wonders and allowed our client to generate 147-percent more leads than they had the year prior.

147 percent is more than double, BTW. Just sayin’. Success!

The upshot is that by planning how they were going to staff the booth, the client was able to take advantage of a good design on our part and generate more leads than in the past.

3. Understanding your objectives

What are you trying to accomplish and how would you like to go about doing it? Asking yourself some high-level questions to help shape those objectives. Questions such as:

• What show are they attending?

• Who is their target audience?

• What are their objectives?

• What does the exhibit look like?

• What are the targeting strategies?

  
  

Knowing the answers to those questions can help shape your strategy and your design for that show.

For instance, if you want to focus on lead generation, an open, welcoming booth with lots of entry space is ideal, whereas if a client wants to focus on expanding their core business with existing clients, maybe they prefer a private meeting space and boardroom for meetings and negotiations to take up more space in the booth. We ask those questions of all of our clients in our initial discovery call, and we are often surprised by the answers – which makes the need to ask those questions all the more important.

More questions you have to ask yourselves:

• What are they selling, promoting, or presenting?

•  What marketing materials are available to offer or to know about in the booth?

•  Are there contests or promotions that they need to know of?

• How will breaks be scheduled?

• A copy of the floor plan and conference schedule so they can anticipate lulls, if any, during conferences and/or workshops on show floor.

• What will they be wearing? Suits, shirts and ties, matching uniforms of some kind and/or branded polo shorts are all possibilities and how you deploy the aesthetic will go a long way toward shaping your booth’s perception by visitors

  
  

Most importantly, how do they generate leads? How do they qualify those leads and how do you plan to turn those leads into concrete business?

All these factors have to be considered.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? You will use your staffers’ skills appropriately when it comes to running a business, so doesn’t it make sense to tailor your booth staffing to the requirements of that booth? Giving that thought will go a long way toward seeing success in your booth. And consequently, failure to consider that factor can set you up for failure.