Work at the exhibition. Getting Ready For Euro Shoes Premiere Collection!

The exhibition is a laborious but effective way to attract new customers and increase the volume of orders. The success of work at the exhibition largely depends on preparation, when everything - from the stand to the staff - is well thought out and carefully prepared in advance. So, you have decided to participate in the exhibition, and the enterprise budget allows you to allocate funds for this. Where to start, what to look for - all the questions are answered by the SR expert - the head of the Russian branch of BEITRAINING Anya Pabst.

A few days at the exhibition is the culmination of a long process that begins a few months before the event and ends a few months after. Three main stages that can be distinguished: preparation for participation, the actual work at the exhibition and evaluation of the results. Continuous participation in industry, wholesale and sales shows is an impressive line of expenses in the budget of the company, but it's worth it: the name of the company / brand becomes recognizable, and trust in it grows both among wholesale customers and end consumers.

A detailed description of the objectives will help to properly allocate resources during the preparation phase. Information on the estimated number of visitors to the exhibition, which can be obtained from its organizers, will be of great help. These data need to be compared with how much you would like to increase sales of products, and therefore, to calculate the costs of personnel and information materials.

Get in touch

Contact with the organizers of the exhibition is very important at the preliminary stage. Not only your preparation schedule for the event, but also the costs depend on their professionalism. The main issues that cannot be resolved without organizers are rental and stand design, transportation and storage of products, exhibition services, product advertising and promotion, staff.

Human factor

The preparation of information materials and product samples is one of the main points to which attention should be paid in advance. But do not forget about those who will present your product to the client - about the staff. A beautifully designed stand and samples of the best products lose their advantages if your employee cannot immediately list all the advantages of your product, tell about the history and features of the company, and also make long-term contacts that will work for the future.

Determine in advance which of your employees will present the goods at the exhibition. You must pre-configure them to actively search for customers, passively waiting for someone from the exhibition visitors to be the first to show interest and look at the stand, it does not suit you. The peculiarity of the work at the exhibition is that the activity is carried out in a limited space of the pavilion, in the vicinity of competitors, and the presentation itself is carried out for a limited time and in front of a specific target group.

The employees at the booth - most often girls - should be part of the presentation, not a distraction, and clearly understand the purpose of the work and what the guests need to say. Check if employees are able to identify the person concerned? Can they quickly determine his needs and solvency? These skills are especially important at trade shows, when you plan to sell a significant part of the assortment in a few days of hard work. Highlight the employees who will be “unobtrusive barkers”: their task is not to stand on the stand, but to go around the pavilion, inviting visitors and supplying handouts if necessary.

External hiring is a common practice, but in this case, the main “presenter" must be an informed employee of the company, authorized to conclude transactions and representing the strategic goals of the enterprise. From the side, assistants who perform secondary functions can be invited. In this case, it is necessary to conduct at least a short “fly-by”, introducing them to the company, provide instructions and ready-made answers to the most common questions.

Who is the duty officer?

Work at the exhibition is a difficult task that carries a lot more work than a regular working day. The pavilion is noisy due to parallel presentations, the flow of visitors is constantly moving, among which it is necessary to highlight potential customers and partners. An array of new information, a lot of communication contacts, overlays in the organization - all this creates a stressful situation. Therefore, make a schedule of "duty" when employees must work out 4-5, not 8 hours, plus replace each other.

Do not forget about marketing
The last thing that is often overlooked when preparing for an exhibition is pre-exhibition marketing. The organizers cover the event as a whole, your task is to ensure that customers come to your booth. Therefore, it is advisable to inform potential partners or customers in advance. In the case of trade fairs, the target audience of which is a retail buyer, you can distribute information about your participation in the exhibition among buyers in the store itself, when they, together with a pair of shoes, receive a booklet and an invitation to visit the exhibition-sale.

From a position of benefit

So, the climax comes - the exhibition itself. The process of working on it includes an extensive range of issues, each of which requires a separate discussion. We will pay attention to the key point of contact with the client at the exhibition, namely the stand. How to convey the necessary information to potential customers? How to improve its perception and increase memorability of messages? How to make your stand "speak"? Here are some basic guidelines.

1. Choose the right place

The first two or three seconds of eye contact determine whether the client will look “light” or simply pass by. Studies show that the most advantageous is the angular location of the stand - at the intersection of two human flows. The design of the stand itself is designed to distinguish you among the competitors and attract visitors.

2. Do not make the client guess what you represent

3. Use a customer-centric approach

It is extremely important to show customers what distinguishes you from your competitors, what are the advantages and value of your products. Give convincing
The answer to the question why visitors should choose you and your product. Speak with the customer in a language of benefit.
If your target audience includes several categories of customers (b2b, b2c), diversify the flow of information and “translate” messages into the “language of benefit” for each category.

4. Information should be well understood from different distances.
Visitors can inspect the stand in three stages: from long, medium and near distance. Determine how far the labels will fall into the field of view of visitors, take into account the width of the exhibition aisles and the depth of the stand. When determining the height of the text, which should affect visitors at the middle and near distance, focus on eye level. How large should the font be in order to ensure readability? Experts believe that the height of the letters should be at least 10 mm per 1 meter distance from which visitors will read the text.

5. The main information should bego in 3 seconds

The decision to enter your booth or not is usually taken in a few short moments. An effective exhibition stand must pass the so-called “three-second test”. Ideally, a visitor in three seconds should:

• notice your stand;

• determine what products you represent, their merits and benefits that he will receive by making a choice in your favor;

• Highlight the name and logo of your company or brand.

6. Use simple words

The environment in which we fight for the attention of visitors at the exhibition is full of irritants and distractions. Channels of perception
overloaded, people quickly get tired and begin to reach for something simple and understandable. If possible, choose simple words, select
Gite long words and phrases, hard-to-pronounce terms, words of foreign origin, abbreviations, abbreviations. Use
words that attract attention and affect people at a subconscious level: first, main, profitable, fast, pro
stand, lightweight, genuine, reliable.

7. Do not overload the stand with text and visual objects.

Some believe that if there are at least a few free square centimeters on the walls of the stand or on an advertising medium, they must be filled with something. This tires the visitor. Be brief, choose the most important for potential partners
and potential customers. Experiments with attention overload have shown that the volume of a person’s conscious attention has precedence
deeds and amounts to 7 ± 2 units of information (the so-called Miller number), moreover, the concept of “unit of information” includes not only words.

8. Use text accompaniment

A huge flow of information is falling on visitors to the exhibition. Unusual surroundings, background noise,
the need to constantly navigate the pavilions. Keep this in mind when working with visitors.

48 hours rule

The exhibition is behind - you can take a breath. But you shouldn’t completely relax either - you should not miss the potential customers with whom you got in touch at the exhibition. You should remind yourself until you have been forgotten - and contact potential partners after the end of the exhibition, preferably observing the “48 hours” rule.

It is important to quickly process the contact information received by the employee at your exhibition. The upcoming update of the assortment, the emergence of a new collection, seasonal discounts - all this information is perfect for sending e-mail to potential buyers.

The third, final stage of work necessarily includes an assessment of the results that were achieved at the end of the exhibition. Have your expectations been met? Evaluation of the results will be the more successful the more efficiently the goals were set at the preparation stage. How many buyers were interested in you at the exhibition? How many people came to your store in a month, in half a year? Statistics is a boring, but very necessary thing for a business.

When counting contacts, be sure to find out if the buyer came to you because he had already bought shoes from you, learned about your store, show room, warehouse from friends, partners, competitors, or visited an exhibition that you spent so much effort on and finance, where he got all the information. All this will help you plan further participation in exhibitions and optimize the solution to the routine tasks that you and your employees face every day.

This article was published in the 134 issue of the print version of the magazine.