Conferences and meetings are one of the best ways to gain new long-term clients. However you have to do it right or you’ll just be one of a hundred vendors who is handing out t-shirts, glossy marketing lit, and free pens.
My advice is to not just have a booth on the exhibit floor. In fact, I’d strongly suggest not having a booth at all, especially if the manufacturers that you represent will already be exhibiting . By confining yourself to the exhibit zoo, you are putting yourself and your company on the same level as all the other animals, fighting it out for slim margins. It’s not where you want to be if your services are really valuable.
Instead, make a presentation at the conference. A presentation that will be of practical value to your audience, not a glorified sales pitch. The people who are won over by a sales pitches are not the type of customers that you want anyway—these are the people who shop only on price and not on ROI or quality of service. It requires more work and research on your part, but it allows you and your company to standout as leaders in your field, who are able to rise above the fray of selling and have real expertise. It also involves you in the issues that your customers are dealing with in a very practical way.
Presenting requires that you look ahead. For example, as I write this (mid-April), the call for proposals for the MOREnet Technology conference in Oct is due within a few weeks.
When I make a conference presentation, I usually start out by clearly identifying what my company does and explaining that I am there to give back and share information with the professional community from which our customers come and I am not there to give a sales pitch or advocate for a certain technology or line of products. I then give the most objective presentation of the information possible, presenting all the potential approaches and technologies available for the subject at hand regardless of what product lines we carry.
When people understand that you are not just another sales guy reading off the bullet points, hoping to make the sale and move on, but that you know your stuff and are willing to share the information you have gained from your experience, then they are much more likely to establish a relationship with you and your company. By giving an objective presentation and not a sales pitch, you are winning your audiences trust as a source of information and gaining credibility as an expert. That is much more important to your long-term bottom line than pushing a particular brand or solution. Much has been said about the power of trust in working relationships, and in my experience, trust allows you to make work and selling easier.
