The larger the booth, the bigger the booth staffing challenge.
Every exhibitor needs capable booth staffers to greet, persuade, and convert booth visitors. But large exhibitors require a veritable army of staffers, or else they won’t achieve their trade show goals.
Use the following proven tips to select, train, and manage your large booth team, so your exhibit investment pays off in spades:
Selecting Your Big Booth Staff
Not everyone is cut out to be a booth staffer, and even fewer will be great booth staffers. How do you find enough great staffers for your big exhibits, and all the shows on your schedule?
- Choose booth staff for their eager attitude first, then choose for their skills. Skills can be trained, an attitude cannot. A willing booth staffer can take many times more leads than someone who doesn’t want to be there. An unwilling booth staffer can infect other staffers with a negative attitude.
- While booth staffers most often come from your sales department, you can also find winners from marketing (product marketing, marketing communications) who are more likely to follow the booth staffing process and capture leads. Get more excellent booth staffers from your customer service and quality departments. For big shows, bring in top management for key customer and partner meetings.
- It’s easy to think that booth staffers all have to be outgoing extroverts. However, introverts can be exceptional booth staffers because they stay focused on the process of starting and converting leads, rather than chatting with their colleagues.
- Be open to hiring professionals for certain booth staff: presenters, crowd gathers, and for international shows.
- If you can, choose exhibit staffers who match the demographics of your target audience.
- If your company exhibits at different vertical market shows, select booth staffers who are experts in that industry.
- Develop and appreciate your own A Team, who are proven booth staffers that relish the opportunity to engage, persuade, and convert prospects at shows.
- Every company has turnover. So, keep trying out new staffers to evaluate. Some will become stars on your A Team later.
- Ask your best booth staffers who they recommend – often their fellow employees who envy them have told them they want to staff shows, too. And your best booth staffers will know if these wannabes are well suited for the job.
- Avoid these two “money saving” traps:
- Choosing a free booth staffer who does not require travel. If they are not skilled, or even a good match for the show’s audience, that small savings may damage the results of the entire show you invested many times more to exhibit at.
- Not bringing enough booth staffers. You may save a grand or two on travel, but then not take full advantage of the tens of thousands you already spent on booth space, shipping, drayage, and the like. That produces a lower show ROI.
Training Your Big Booth Staff
Training is essential, and yet it’s too often under-employed or skipped altogether. Skipping training your booth staff is like actors at a stage play skipping learning their lines.
- There are multiple ways to train your booth staff – use one or more of these:
- Train overall booth staffing skills in person a week or more before the show, especially role playing how to engage a show attendee and convert them into a qualified lead. This works best if your company employees are all local.
- Train over video conference, especially with distant booth staffers and hired exhibit staff.
- Train in the show hall or exhibit early the day of the show, for those who missed the pre-show training, and to get familiar with how to use the exhibit as a sales tool and to demo products on site.
- Train with recorded training videos, or interactive training modules, especially if you do dozens of shows and are constantly bringing on new booth staffers from around the country or world.
- If your company is spread out geographically but gathers once a year for an all-employee meeting, ask if you can offer an in-person booth training session there.
- Train your staff about your expectations for them as staffers:
- Let them know your company’s overall goals for the show.
- Tell them how many qualified leads you expect each exhibit staffer to take.
- Tell them they have been chosen to help achieve important company goals, so don’t party late into the night.
- Share how big an investment your company has made that depends on their efforts to succeed.
- Train for the booth staffing process, best summarized by Marc Goldberg: Engage, Present, Qualify, and Close.
- Train how to take and record a qualified lead with your lead capture system.
- Train for product and customer knowledge, and tailor it when exhibiting at niche industry shows.
- Train for how to overcome common objections.
- Train for new products, including what breakthroughs make them unique, and how to smoothly demo them.
- Train for how to use the promotions or activations or experiences as part of their overall attendee engagement.
- As you bring on new booth staffers to your team, assess what skills they have and what skills you need to train them on: the booth staffing process, product knowledge, customer and industry knowledge.
- Who does the training:
- You do, based on what you learn here, elsewhere, and your own experience. Team up with your sales manager, and your best booth staffers.
- Outsource to a professional booth staff trainer.
- Rely on the generic booth staff training provided by some show organizers.
- Ask your exhibit house for help.
Managing Your Big Booth Staff
Once you have your trained booth staff in place, how do you get the most out of your team? By properly managing them before, after, and during your shows.
Managing booth staff before and after shows:
- Make a streamlined process for getting booth staffers approved by their managers to take the time off and travel. Then, start asking for your booth staffers months before each show. You will gain huge cost savings from buying airfare earlier, plus get hotels closer to the show venue.
- Develop a team of booth captains who can manage a show when you can’t go. Even when you will be at the show, delegate to veteran booth staffers who can manage tech and other touchy logistics, so you can remain focused on your booth staffers needs.
- You may be tempted to schedule your best booth staffers for shows every week, but that can lead to burnout, and keep them from accomplishing their main job.
- Constantly evaluate staffers based on who gathers the most qualified leads, except for key spots like product demos or crowd gathering or answering expert questions or presentations.
- Incentivize the right activity: Give prizes and recognition for booth staffers who take the greatest number of qualified leads. Ask management to recognize them publicly.
- For each show, provide your staffers with their expected schedule, and details about the show, their travel, and the show venue.
- Keep a chart of your booth staffers’ clothing sizes, so when you purchase logo shirt attire you have that in hand.
Managing booth staffers during your shows:
- When you have 10 or more staffers in one booth, it’s possible to select specialists for different roles beyond your all-purpose booth staffers:
- Crowd gatherers, who are comfortable engaging strangers in the aisle.
- Reception desk staffers, who greet visitors and direct them to the right place and person.
- Product demonstrators, who know your product well and can make your competitive advantages come alive.
- Presenters, taken from your subject matter experts or trainers, that can captivate a crowd and build your company credibility.
- Closers, who win deals in your conference rooms.
- Hospitality, who graciously provide food and drinks to existing customers, all the while gently cross-selling your products and services.
- Technology, who trouble-shoots errant computers, screens, and wi-fi.
- If a booth staffer is not doing as well as you expected, see if there is a specific role they would be best at. For example, they may be reluctant to engage people in the aisles, but do a fantastic job demoing product.
- Host a pre-show breakfast meeting to get your staff ready, and to get advance warning if anyone is not showing up for staffing duty.
- An hour after the show starts, check your leads for completeness: See if any booth staffers are not providing the details (contact data, ratings, notes and checkboxes) that determine lead quality and follow up. Coach any staffers immediately.
- Two hours after the show starts, check your leads to see any booth staffers (especially new) are not capturing any leads. If you did not assign them a role that won’t be capturing leads, ask them what is going on. If necessary, coach them how to get over their fear about engaging attendee in the aisles.
- Provide a schedule of which booth staffers are working which days and times, and potentially where in the exhibit. Give them breaks that work around your busy periods. Send some staff home last day if show is not going to be busy then. Post the schedule on the inside of your storage room door.
- Give them a great dinner at the end of the show. Even better if top management attends, and picks up the tab.
Attendees have said that up to 85% of what they remember is based on the booth staff who engage them. Follow these tips to ensure your large booth staff team is ready, willing, and able to turn your trade show goals into fantastic results.