Conferences: having a booth or attending with a fast pitch?
Industry conferences are an opportunity to meet people of a well defined segment of your market.
As a company you can participate in several industry conferences throughout the year.
You have two alternatives for participation:
- Rent a booth, staff it and spend plenty of money (even more by being “Gold” or “Platinum” Sponsor)
- Just attend the conference and mingle amongst the attendees an participate in their conversations.
Both methods have specific different advantages, but which type of participation has the higher Return On Investment?
What are the different challenges between having a booth and just attending ?
Having a booth
Attendees addressing to you on your booth will have specific or certain interests in your products or solutions. This brings a high possibility of lead generation.
However being on a booth creates a distance between you (or your sales people) and the attendees.
You or your staff is immediately tagged as “Sales” by the other attendees. This will make it more difficult to communicate openly with them.
Opening doors will be harder as having an open an unbiased conversation is difficult to start being in your sales booth.
Just attending
By attending the conference, you are one of the “members”. You are not clearly showing the image of a salesrep but you portray yourself as if you were a colleague. This makes starting or participating in conversations is much easier. During these conversations you can grab the attention by making interesting statements based upon your or your company’s experiences.
As conversations can only happen during the coffee breaks or lunches, time is limited. Amongst all the participants you need to select and find fairly quickly the possible interested parties. This can only be achieved by talking to as many attendees as possible and include a short fast pitch for your products or solutions.
The main goals are:
- To leave a positive impression behind
- To obtain business cards as many as possible.
Nothing more as the lead generation has to happen afterwards when calling afterwards the people on the collected business cards.
Getting into many short conversations is hard work as you have to try to meet with all the attendees, still avoiding getting tagged as a salesrep.
ROI
What brings the best Return On Investment?
Difficult to say as it depends on you or your people:
If you have the gut and the gift of getting into a conversation with anybody, then just attending will have the best ROI. Additional benefit: you have no hassle with planning and setting up a booth: just register in advance (pay) and be present.
On the other hand, if you haven’t got the drive or don’t dare to just get into a conversation with everybody, then you better have a booth.
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Of course the real way to get value from a conference is to be one of the speakers.
You are perceived as the expert especially if you don’t use PowerPoint.
Happy Marketing.
Rod