Staffing for Success
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Sales and staff – success at your exhibit
Your staff are a fundamental factor in the success of your exhibit. Your staff are responsible for drawing in customers, effectively engaging with them and creating future leads. Due to their importance, it is necessary to ensure that your best staff are rostered. The attitude and etiquette of your booth staff is an important segment for exhibiting success. Some tips to help ensure your staff will generate a crowd of visitors to your booth are:
- Wear a visible name badge so people can see it when shaking your hand. Visitors like to familiarise themselves with whom they are potentially dealing with. It’s a comfort thing.
- Only make commitments you can keep. Visitors will remember a commitment you don’t follow through with and this can create a bad reputation for yourself.
- Exhibiting is a team event. Other staff are relying on you, just as you as are relying on them. Visitors like to see a team effort that is working towards one common goal. Ensure your team speak and engage with each other in a respectful and friendly way at all times.
- The exhibit is your office away from the office- as visitors see your environment, they see your company and make a judgement as to whether they want to do business with you.
- SMILE! 90% of the time if you smile at someone they will smile back. This will instantly make your visitors feel like you’re welcoming them and will want to visit your stall.
4 Easy steps to guide your staff to success:
- Engage: In order to engage with a visitor, prepare your staff with practice questions that won’t get a yes or no answer. This will spark an interest in your product.
- Qualify: Based on the visitors answers from step 1, determine if it is productive to continue to step 3. Is your product right for your visitors needs? Are they a potential customer?
- Demo: Demonstrate your product based on just the visitors needs, not everything you know- you don’t want to fluster them with too much information! Make sure staff are prepared for common objectives and questions.
- Close: Finalise sale with visitor and move on to next lead.
If your booth staff are motivated and are willing to work hard for a common goal then it will be the best investment you could make in regards to future profits. A lot of money is spent on ensuring that your trade show is successful but this can’t be done without great staff who actually bring in all the leads. An incentive program for your staff is always a good idea to turn some mild mannered employees into enthusiastic go-getters. This could easily double the amount of qualified leads you could get.
