Conference Vendors’ Insider Tips to Sell More at Conferences, Conventions, Trade Shows, and Expos

Who should listen: Professionals who use conferences and trade shows as part of their marketing and sales strategies.

Key idea: Careful planning, execution, and postconference follow-up are the keys to making your attendance at conferences and trade shows a success.

Action item: Find an opportunity to attend a conference or trade show and apply the tips, tactics, and strategies we’ve explained.

At ReminderMedia, we are super excited that conferences have come back! We’ve been attending conferences and conventions for years, but, because of the cancellations made necessary by the pandemic, we’ve missed the experience, energy, and engagement with our clients and prospects.

But now we’re back in action, and we’ve already had success selling our products at several conferences with more scheduled for the upcoming weeks and months.

Since these events are coming back, we thought it would be valuable to our listeners if we shared some of our secrets for success when selling at these often intimidating venues. The keys for being able to hold your own on the expo floor and making an ROI worthy of attending again are planning and (as is the case with most of what we talk about on Stay Paid) your attitude.

Preconference preparation is about:

• Knowing your goals. Whether your goals are more opportunities, sales, new contacts, or another KPI, crunch your numbers and do some reverse engineering to determine how you need each day to go for you to meet your goals.
• Planning your table visitors’ experience. We talk about swag (yes, you need swag), who should be at the table, the role of each person at the table, your script, and a few more ideas to make the experience go smoothly and to maximize sales.

At the conference, it’s important to:

• Stay in front of your table. Seriously, if you expect people to come to you, you’ll be lonely.
• Have a special offer. It should be an offer that is strictly for attendees during the conference.
• Use a tangible product. Even when you have an intangible product, you can create a visual to help explain your product or service.
• Use tactics that will bring people to your table. If we told you everything in these notes, you’d never listen to the episode!

Finally, after the conference:

• Follow up. Don’t wait to follow up. Warm leads will get colder the further out they are from the conference.
• Honor the special offer. You don’t want attendees to get used to the idea that they can always get your offer after the conference is over. Instead, develop a second offer that is a little less attractive than the first and provide it to latecomers.
• Review and assess. You want to repeat what worked and adjust what didn’t.
• Always thank the event coordinator. Developing relationships with event coordinators is a way to discover valuable information only they know.

During this episode, we fully explain all these secrets (plus a few more) and the unique ways we put them into practice. We hope you enjoy it, and if you have tips and tactics you want to share, include them in a review of the show on Apple Podcasts. (Not sure how to leave a review? Click here.)

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