Sound familiar?

Yes, Sundance is all about promoting and selling movies, but it’s also a microcosm for many of the things we regularly discuss on this trade show blog. This past month, I had the pleasure of attending Sundance along with director/writer Dan Pavlik, and a condo-full of fellow cast and crew members.  We were there to promote our film, “Nominated.”

No, this post isn’t about boosting awareness for the movie; it’s about the adventure we had there … and how it relates to trade show success anywhere.  (But, if you really want to see our movie, we’re not about to stop you.)

Let me start by admitting something:  We weren’t invited. That’s right. Our film didn’t actually make it into Sundance.  But we showed up anyway.  We didn’t go to Park City, Utah, to “sell” our movie. We went there to enjoy ourselves—to have as much fun as we could squeeze into seven days. And, oh yes, to make a few contacts.

That was the best decision we could have made. And a big reason we were so successful.

Let me ask you something: Do you go to a cocktail party and immediately start handing out business cards to anyone with a pulse?  Do you get on Twitter and immediately start hawking your “How to Get Five Million Followers Fast” webinar?

Not if you’re smart, you don’t.

You also don’t stand at the corner of your trade show booth, run up to every attendee you see and scream, “Get in here and BUY MY STUFF!”

In the same vein, you don’t go to Sundance and try to force your DVD down producers’ throats or project your film on a snow bank. Yes it’s been done, and generally, it won’t get you any love.

But what you CAN do is be the life of the party and create such a fun and memorable scene for everyone around you that they flock to your side and eventually ask—on their own—“What brings you here?” That’s what we all did … and did … and did. We used trade show tricks and magic. We used humor and intrigue. We even used Rock Band. And when the festival ended, those producers had our DVDs and business cards. Those celebrities were wearing our buttons. Those attendees knew our film’s name and assumed we had a featured spot in the festival. It was a rousing success—all because we figured out a way to make people come to us.

I’m going to let Dan tell you the story in his own words (complete with a little name-dropping) on this blog later in the week. In the meantime, think about other social situations you’ve been in that might provide a good lesson on “how to behave” at trade shows.

—Ken Newman

Magic as part of a trade show presentation is not about shock value or “wow” factor. It’s about storytelling. Once you get that, everything else will quickly fall into place.

I’ve you’re using a magic show to bring people into the booth, that’s fine and it can work when done well, but it’s far more effective to think of it as a show that uses a variety of really interesting visual demonstrations to reinforce story. Here’s an example: While presenting I’m telling a story about a product and want to emphasize the message with a magic device. So, instead of simply holding up fingers for Points 1, 2, and 3, I hold up a coin that suddenly becomes a second coin that suddenly spawns a third out of thin air. All the coins are rare and valuable, and since we’re talking about generating money, it reinforces my point without putting people to sleep with PowerPoint or a bullet list.

If I’m talking about a particularly complicated methodology that somebody has to go through, I could enumerate those points as No. 1-12 and bore myself and the audience to tears … or I could use the same simple brand of magic to entertain and inform while I cover the necessary technical ground. I’ll bring audience members up on stage. I’ll make them part of the magic. And I’ll make them part of the complicated explanation and a part of the fun. Together, we’ll all tell the story in a humorous fashion.

And long after the presentation is done, THAT story will be remembered.

Imagine you’re at a party and someone says, “Hey, tell us that crazy story about what happened to you last week!” Immediately, there’s 25 people listening to you. Now, you’re not a standup comic or a magician, so you just tell that story in as colorful a way as you can. That’s what people forget to do at trade shows.

What’s endlessly fascinating to me is you can go into a trade show booth an find a bunch of salespeople standing around a guy who’s telling them a killer story. He has that micro-audience eating out of the palm of his hand. Everybody’s laughing and hanging on his every word. But that same guy then gets up on stage 10 minutes later, puts on his wireless headset and mike and bores the bejesus out of the audience. This is the same guy, but where did that great sense of humor and storytelling ability go? Instead, he’s up there telling us about Slide 74.

It’s the same thing when a magic show lacks connection to story and message. A lot of people have a negative bias towards magicians and think it’s just “silly stuff.” That’s because magic can seem silly when it’s not serving the client’s purpose.

Demonstrate a technological solution with a straightjacket escape. Make something appear to represent a product’s answer to an industry problem. This isn’t magic for magic’s sake. It’s in support of story. Remember that,  and your trade show presentation will be TRULY magical.

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.

Well, Ray … simply put, don’t use PowerPoint. I’ve seen more PowerPoint used badly at trade shows than anywhere else. Even a tight, concise presentation can be sabotaged by poor PowerPoint usage. It’s just not enough to throw up bullet points, text, graphics and beauty shots of the product. That’s exactly what it is: throwup. The audience’s eyes glaze right over—especially if you’re reading from the PowerPoint as if it were a TelePrompTer.

The only time to use PowerPoint is when there is something you have to show that words cannot adequately describe. Use it for counterpoint, irony, humor and surprise. I started off a recent live presentation with a 60-slide PowerPoint presentation. Sixty real, honest-to-goodness slides about the company. But it was a joke.  I put those 60-slides on automatic at overdrive PowerPoint speed. The whole thing ran about eight seconds from start to finish, with frenzied music underneath. At the halfway point it stopped and said, “YOU’RE GETTING THIS, RIGHT?”  Then it did 30 more slides with an epic music finale and one final slide that said, “ANY QUESTIONS?”

Can you imagine the applause? Can you imagine the additional applause when I told the audience we weren’t going to do anything like that? Ultimately, I did use PowerPoint during the presentation, but only for exquisite images from nature that enhanced the storytelling.

I tell my clients all the time that if you hired a compelling presenter, you want the people looking at that presenter. You want me to make contact with your audience-to look them in the eyes and tell them that company’s story. You don’t want their eyes shifting back and forth between me and the screen because that will dilute the message completely.

PowerPoint is not effective; storytelling is effective. If you use juggling, magic, plate-spinning or humor to tell that story, it’ll trump PowerPoint every time.

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.

The death of live presentations is the l…e…n…g…t….h.

Let me say it right now: Your trade show presentation is probably too long. Twenty minutes is too long. Fifteen minutes is too long. Ten minutes is too long. As a general rule, if audience members are looking at their watches, it’s too long.

I’ve participated in hundreds upon hundreds of trade shows, experiencing them both as a presenter and an attendee. In all that time, no one has ever come up to me and said, “That was a really great presentation, but it was a little too short.“ Ever.  In 25 years, it’s never happened.

Want to know (as a presenter) how to have your audience utterly thrilled? Tell that crowd there’s only three things you expect them to remember. Describe those three things. Reiterate those three things at the end. That’s it.

Two hours after the live presentation is over, an audience member should be able to tell you precisely what the presentation was about. These folks are completely inundated at a trade show, so if you can get them to remember a phrase or a slogan and up to three basic points, that’s a triumph.

Make Your Live Presentation Twice As Nice

If you want to get the biggest bang for your buck, don’t make me do a 15-minute show. Let me do a seven-minute show twice as many times a day. Let me build a crowd, work that crowd and then do it over again.

It’s About Questions, Not Answers

Ask more questions than you answer.  Get them to think about your company in a unique way, inspiring them to follow up with booth staff. It’s not important to explain everything. What’s important is to ignite a desire for that audience member to independently acquire any information not included in the live presentation.

So, to recap:

• “Too long” is death.

• “Too many answers” is death.

• PowerPoint as a crutch is death. (We’ll discuss this next time!)

So, stay away from these traps and have a tremendously successful live presentation. If you’ve absorbed this advice and need more guidance on where you go from here, feel free to contact us for a consult.

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.

John, way back in 1960 there was an experiment called the “Visual Cliff.” It was a study on depth perception where psychologists Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk designed a runway for infants to crawl across, “ending” with a sheet of plexiglass that created the appearance of a precipitous drop. It was really a perfectly safe surface to crawl on, but it didn’t look that way. Most babies would crawl really, really close, but they wouldn’t go “over the cliff”—even with their mothers beckoning them from the other side.

That’s kind of how people are at trade shows.

If visitors feel like stepping into your booth is like stepping out onto that plexiglass, it might not matter what you do to try to beckon them in. Let’s take your booth carpet color, for example … yes, the carpet color! If there is a dramatic difference between the color of the carpet in the aisle and the color of the carpet in the booth, lots of people won’t step over it. They see that carpet and it’s like they’re falling into the abyss. As soon as that carpet changes from the blue or gray that runs down the aisles of the trade show to the green or red that’s in your booth, people stand there and lean but won’t go any farther.

As a trade show performer, I’ve been on stage actually seeing this happen. I’d say, “Come a little closer; we have a couple of empty seats,” and they’ll respond, “No. I’m okay right here.”

They just don’t want to make that commitment. It’s as if there’s something about stepping into the booth that’s suddenly opening themselves up to the possibility of being descended upon like the wrath of God by an army of booth salespeople.

So, when I do booth consulting, one of the things I always tell people is to make the process of entering the booth as easy and seamless (literally) as possible. So, make the booth’s architecture as open as it can possibly be to create maximum flow. You want people to just stroll through and almost accidentally find themselves in the booth. Try to design your booth in a way where there are virtually no impediments in any direction for someone coming in or someone going out.

I ran a “Visual Cliff” experiment of my own—one of the trade show kind. I told a client to find out well in advance what the color of the convention hall carpet was going to be in the area of his booth. Then, I told him to get his booth carpet in the same immediate color family. A little softer blue (or gray, etc.) would be fine, but keep it close.

Now, I’m not Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk, so I can’t tell you the quantifiable difference. But it sure felt like it mattered because trade show attendees were wandering around and then, “Oops! Oh, my gosh. I’m in your booth! Would you look at that?”

The key point is that booth layout and thoughtfulness has much more to do with success than booth size and “impressiveness.”

It’s not about trying to blow someone away with the architectural beauty of your design. That’s really not the point. Qualified leads will say, “Wow! What an incredible booth” … and then walk right by it. That’s because it doesn’t have flow. It doesn’t invite you in.

At one recent trade show I attended, there was an elaborate booth with kiosks all around the perimeter. It was fancy, but because of the kiosks there was literally only about a 5-foot-wide entryway. So, it was like pulling teeth for people to get into this expensive, extravagant booth. Yikes!

And to think, all they really needed was a little thinking into the flow of booth traffic—and perhaps some blue carpet to get those leads to jump off the “Trade Show Cliff.”

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.