Education is the Key to a Great Booth Staff

As you prepare for your next trade show take some time to educate your booth staff as to how to define a prospect. Ten seconds of talking and questions should be rolling to determine who is in front of you.

How do you capture as many qualified leads as possible? The composition of your booth staff will determine how much teaching is involved. While salespeople are great badge scanners, your technical team, your hired staff, and your upper management may shun the scanner. Worse yet are the people who scan everyone’s badge and cause chaos down the road.

Only Scan the Right Badges

The goal is to scan true prospects and not the guy who wants a t-shirt giveaway, or someone that wants a chance to win the large screen television at the end of the day. Someone who may eventually like to buy is what you aim to do.

Do you want to swipe every badge? Is it good to have as many leads as possible? Your company’s marketing executive might say yes, swipe every badge. However, sales executives will disagree because a low-quality lead will be a timewaster. “Swipe everyone.” It feels good. The incredible amount of leads will be celebrated every day of the show and even weeks later. However, has the sales team been set up for success? With no criteria to swipe they will be running after t-shirt man and the free chance to win people.

Prospects are the Secret to Trade Show Success

A better way is to swipe only a prospect. That is the job of the team’s sales people to teach the entire booth staff how to search for the prospects. Remember that selling a badge swipe is not threatening to someone who is a prospect. If a person is not a prospect they will quickly walk away.