Tom, you don’t have to pay a fortune to get people to pay attention.

You can re-skin your booth. You can have a smaller trade show footprint (and in doing so have a smaller carbon footprint). You can use a small space to reduce your costs while keeping your booth packed with people, which looks better anyway.

Too many companies choose large booths because it’s a status thing. Look how big we are! That model just doesn’t work anymore. It’s not essential and it’s not cost-effective. Think about it like this: People will always cram into the smallest room at a party. The same psychology exists at a tradeshow. There’s nothing more depressing than a 50×50 booth with four people walking around … and three of them are the exhibitors. When you have a 10×10 and people are bumping into each other and crowding around a single kiosk or a single monitor to watch a demo, that creates a wow factor and the impression that “there’s something really exciting going on here!”

I say use a small footprint and then put more money into what’s going on IN your booth.  Consider a three-hour training session for your staff.  Then, create real excitement in your booth with a live presentation.  I’m seeing more live presenters than at any time in recent memory performing in the smallest booths at the show. At a recent trade show, the big players had 60×60s and 80×80s—enormous footprints with 12 kiosks. But there were a considerable number of big companies with booths as small as 8’ X 10’.  One had a magician. Another, a juggler. A third had a professional speaker on a podium telling a half-dozen different stories in rotation, with each mini-presentation lasting just a few minutes. Each one played to consistently large crowds.

At this same exhibit, our client had one of those 8’ X 10’ booths.  With a registration desk and two demo stations, that left virtually no room to spare.  I did my presentation on a small riser at the very edge of the booth, stopping attendees as they walked by.  I delivered a short, entertaining pitch to anywhere from 10-60 people per show.  Those people would then come into the booth, get their badges scanned and many would hang around and talk to our booth staff.

Our client for this three-day event got over 2,000 leads. Considering the size of the booth, they paid a heck of a lot less for their leads than the large booth next door.  And, they got much bigger bang for their buck.

So, no, you absolutely don’t have to have the biggest footprint at a show. If you make the biggest splash, create the most buzz and get the highest value for your investment, then that’s a success.  A big success.

Note from Ken: If you’re interested in booth re-skinning or a smaller,  more efficient booth design, a great resource is Tim Patterson with Interpretive Exhibits.

Do you have an industry-related question you’d like answered on “Hey Newman”? Send him an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.

Robert, three-quarters of the leads generated at trade shows are never followed up on … and when they are followed up, it tends to be way too late. So, what does that mean for you? It means don’t bother to spend the money on lead generation if you’re just trying to impress the people in the next booth with a big statistic. Those 2,000 leads you got don’t mean anything if you don’t do something with them.

It’s essential you have a mechanism in place for when you’re receiving the leads, whether that’s using barcode scanners or a little Q&A afterward to ascertain if this lead is something worth pursuing over the next week, two weeks, month or year. You need some way of categorizing your leads as “HOT,” “warm,” “cold” and “dead fish.” (Well, maybe not the last one.)

Take those leads and, for example, send each one a postcard with a funny photograph from your presentation. People aren’t very accustomed to getting real mail anymore, and sometimes that can be far more attention-grabbing than just seeing another e-mail in the inbox. But at least promptly send an e-mail with a memorable photograph in it. Thank that potential customer for coming by the booth. Tell them you really appreciate it—and have that note waiting for them Monday when they get back from the trade show.

First contact should come within days of the trade show’s end. When two or three weeks or God forbid a month goes by without contact, you just end up lumped together with all the other SPAM.

I use a postcard as an example of something that makes people stop and take notice. When I get a postcard I say, “Wow, that’s amazing.  I haven’t gotten a postcard in a long time.” It will make me not want to throw it out, particularly if it’s a funny image that makes me laugh. And when it’s flipped over, there’s just a quick note:

“Thank you for stopping by the booth. We’ll get in touch within a week or so to follow up.”

It’s just a warm way to reach out to people. Warm is good. Prompt is even better.

People go to such lengths to get traffic in their booth—renting the leading scanning devices and hiring crowd gatherers … and then it either all sits untouched in a database or collects dust as a stack of business cards or filled-out lead cards. Somehow, nobody does anything with them after putting in all that initial effort. Worse, they’ll group them by territory and send the info out to their sales staff, who expect these to be qualified leads. But after a few phone calls those salespeople realize these were just a bunch of people who stopped by to get a T-shirt. They’ll quickly feel like they’re wasting their time and stop making attempts, which ultimately throws out the good with the bad.

That’s why they need to be categorized as real leads, as opposed to just inflating the body count. Sometimes you’ll know immediately when you have a hot lead. In those cases, there’s no such thing as getting hold of somebody too soon. (Well, let them de-board the plane and get home first.) But there’s nothing better than arriving and finding a note waiting for you.

Do you have an industry-related question you’d like answered on “Hey Newman”? Send him an e-mail and get your inquiry answered on the blog.