Networking opportunities
Attending a trade show enables you to connect with a wide variety of professionals from different industries and backgrounds, fostering new business relationships and partnerships that may not have been possible through conference calls. It allows you to gain valuable industry intel and market research, all while building long term relationships.

Facetime
Face to face interaction is very important in human relationships and therefore enterprise sales. Trade shows give you an opportunity to meet prospects, clients, and other professionals in person. Facetime leads to easier communication, understanding, and report building. Repeated facetime (seeing you repetitively at multiple shows) will build familiarity, this helps a prospect feel confident that you are here to stay and not just passing through. Quite often seeing you will tweak their memory that they owe you an email, or a followup call. Facetime also makes people think twice before selecting a competitor over you, because they know they’ll see you at the next show and have to explain their decision in person!

Fewer distractions
During a conference or video call, people are going from meeting to meeting. It’s hard or impossible to have side conversations or judge body language, even if you can get a coffee or a face to face with someone local, people are distracted by work, family, and other responsibilities. Time is precious and attention is spread thin. Conversely when people attend an out of town trade show, their main focus is to learn, sell, and build relationships. Trade Shows include multiple events that offer opportunities to learn about the human behind the prospect. Everyone is stuck in an unknown city for the doration, offering many more hours available for meetings at the lobby bar, and for coffee and dinner meetings at the surrounding restaurants. This is where actual relationships and deals are made. You might have fifteen meetings stacked at the show, but a year from now you’ll only remember the dinner and personal conversations!

Efficiency
During a trade show if a client or prospect hears something you say that might be of use to a colleague or friend, they can walk you over to another booth or another table, and make a warm introduction! You now have a face to face opportunity to build a new relationship with an ideal prospect. If that same information is learned over a zoom call, the prospect might say they will introduce you to their contact, then a week later you remind them if you remember, and even if you do get an introduction email or a call lined up: there is no face to face and potentially the prospect fades away.

Done right a trade show is one of the best tools for lead generation, filling an enterprise sales funnel with well qualified leads, and selling. Done poorly, a trade show can be a huge waste of time and money. So how do you make the most of this opportunity and investment? Let’s break the show into five stages: Selection, Planning, Lead-up, The Show, and Follow-up.