Are Trade Shows Blackmailing You?
Earlier this week, I asked "Are Trade Show Leads Worth It?". The answer is pretty clearly: "No." As evidence of this, witness the poll on that post. As of this writing, only 14 percent of respondents thought trade shows lead were worth the money, while only 24 percent said "it depends" and a whopping 63 percent said no.
Why, then, do so many companies attend trade shows? In some cases, the answer is fear. They're afraid that if they don't show up, the press and analyst community will doubt their commitment to the market. This fear was best expressed in the following comment to the original post:
When it comes to sales leads and their conversion, they are absolutely a waste of time and money. However, my company made a decision to stop going (we're a multi-national, multi-billion euro manufacturer of industrial controls). The press we got because of our absence was horrible--made it sound like we were getting out of the business. So, moral of the story is that press is involved. Still doesn't make it worth the expense, but in our business, bad press is just that...bad.By the way, the trade show organizers almost undoubtedly fed that story to the press in order to protect their business model, which depends upon all the vendors in the segment believing that attendance is mandatory. They know that when one or two big vendors don't show up, their trade show will be history.
When trade show organizers have everyone properly cowed, they can pretty much charge as much as they want. Another comment to the original post explained the business model that the trade show organizers are trying to protect:
They invest as little of their own cash to run the show as possible and place the burden on those who participate, aka buy a booth...the focus for tradeshows has changed, it has become more focused on making money off of the participants (booth holders) and less about the real value to those who attend/walk the floors (customers of booth holders).Now, this is not true of EVERY trade show. There are some trade shows that have a very different business model. For example, At the Selling Power Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco earlier this month, it's my understanding that the booths were free, but vendors had to commit to bringing a certain number of customers. It was a VERY different experience from the typical trade show, since there were far more customers than vendors.
However, many other trade shows are practicing a not-too-subtle form of extortion in order to force you to attend. If you find yourself in this situation, and don't want to play along, you can't just not show up and hope for the best. Quite the contrary, you MUST go on the attack. Here's how:
- STEP #1: Announce Your Non-Attendance. Issue a press release explaining that the trade show is a rip-off and that attending is a waste of time. Use the data you've gathered in previous years to prove that it doesn't make business sense to attend.
- STEP #2: Create a Counter Presence. Though you're not attending, you need to counteract the rumor-mongering of the trade show organizers. Rent a suite across the street and offer 24 hour free food and alcohol to the press/analyst community. Customers, too, if any show up.
- STEP #3: Do Cheap Competitive Analysis. Since you've already got some people in town, register one or two at the official conference and have them walk the show floor to gather competitive intelligence. Don't bother to pay for a crowd, though, because most of what you need is on the web anyway.
By the way, it is possible to use a trade show to sell. I'll explain how you do this in a future post.