By Katelyn Moran

Tradeshows are major leads generators. In fact, business-to-business marketers in the U.S. allocate an average of 14% of their marketing budgets to tradeshows (CEIR Report PE 2.1) and generate an average of 18 percent of all sales leads from them. With tradeshows presenting such great opportunity, booth etiquette needs to be fine-tuned so that your efforts reap the greatest possible rewards.

BOOTH ETIQUETTE TUNE-UP
Here are some tips to help tune-up your booth performance.

1. Your primary goal is to engage attendees. Maintain only a bare minimum of conversation between you and your colleagues. Otherwise, you could miss opportunities. For example, if you are in a full on conversation with fellow sales person and a potential customer walks by and looks at your booth graphics trying to figure out what your company does and keeps walking, that is a missed opportunity of saying, “Hello, have you heard of XYZ Company?” Generally, nine out of 10 times, a visitor will respond, “No,” and then ask what you do.

Booth visitors generally don’t like to interrupt conversations, either, as it’s not polite. So if they see the salespeople talking together, they tend to keep right on walking by, on to the next booth.

2. Eye contact – use it. Look all visitors in the eye when you greet them. And if a booth guest may not be qualified, don’t look over their shoulder at another person. Cut the conversation short by saying something along the lines of, “Thanks for stopping by,” and give them a free gift giveaway or business card.

3. If competitors arrive at your booth, be nice to them and ask them tons of specific questions about what they offer and what they plan to offer. Remember your competitors are not going to learn anything new that they already know from your website or reading materials. But since “loose lips sink ships,” don’t offer them additional fuel or information outside of your readily available sales materials.

4. When dealing with undercover competitors, if you know that competitors are at your booth in plain clothes and want a demo of your product, give them a very general overview. They have probably already seen an in-depth product demonstration of your product, anyway. If you don’t want to give them a demo, politely tell them that you know they work for XYZ company and it is not appropriate to give a demo at this time. Don’t be rude.

5. Joint ventures or the buzzword, “JVs,” will probably come up, too. When these conversations arise with other vendors seeking potential partnerships, keep them at a minimum and refer them to a representative from business development, and make sure to bring plenty of business cards from your business development person. It is important to gain potential partners in your field, but not at a tradeshow. Your company is there to sell a product.

6. Don’t badmouth your competitors to potential clients, even if a guest asks, “What do you think about XYZ Company?” Simply respond by saying something that differentiates their product from yours. For example, “We are web based and their product is behind the firewall,” or “We have a call center to answer technical questions, they use only email.”

7. Don’t be too aggressive. Do not stand in the middle of the aisle and block customers from walking by. Don’t follow them in the aisle hoping to spark an interest with your product offering. Stand at the edge of your booth or maybe a foot in the aisle.

8. Take a look at your body signals. This will determine if you are approachable. For example, don’t cross your arms, stand instead of sit in the booth’s chairs, do not lean on tables, do not stand with your back to the aisle and do not read.

9. Make sure to not leave the booth unattended. In other words, don’t leave without informing colleagues and vice-versa.

10. Do not be late for booth duty. And try to arrive at least 15 minutes early so that you are prepared and are at ease when guest begin arriving.

11. Do not complain to your colleagues or customers about how slow the show is or about how many hours you have been on your feet. Be positive and share your positive outlook with others all around you.

12. Don’t eat or drink in your booth. Unwanted accidents in the area or on your person are not fun!

13. Turn off your cell phone and have other booth representatives do the same. Using cell phones makes you will look busy and unapproachable.

14. Look at attendees badges and call people by their names.

Some great words of wisdom from motivational speaker Zig Ziglar are worth calling to mind during your booth etiquette tune-up, “You must give to get. If you help enough people get what they want, you'll get what you.” So practice the above maintenance tips to tune-up your next trade show and reap improved performance results.

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