B2B events are back in the second half of 2022. And after two years of a pandemic, the industry is now struggling to work through an economic slump. There is much riding on these events in terms of prospective customer potential. Given the steep dip in profits over the last 6 months and the costs for sending a team to travel, any sales leader will need to justify the ROI.
If you and your team are prepping up for expo events to make prospecting headway, you need to be sure that you have all the right tools and intel to make easy conversations that convert fast.
Demos and business cards apart, how will you achieve the amount of prep that will get you to stand out from competitors? Here’s a few tips to get there.
1. Start with why
If you’re a rep who thinks they’re at an expo for “having a presence or exposure”, you most certainly have it all wrong. Spending ~1000$ for the travel of an SDR, the sales team works with a sense of purpose. Plan your travel with a more targeted approach, with clear goals – such as generating more leads, appointments. Good sales leaders offer a sense of direction at any given growth opportunity instead of a mere ‘let’s see what happens’.
2. What do customers want?
Enhance your strategy by being in tune with what your customers want. Build context and insights about the attendees for an upcoming event, by tracking them using B2Brain. Instead of getting lost in rabbit holes of data on the Internet, leverage the power of B2Brain’s AI to curate everything from a company’s budget for allocated purchases to product launches and hiring. All of this intel, converted into Talking Points, is your key to good conversations.
Subsequently, continue to get insights on those attendee companies and make your follow-up messages a few notches more compelling.
3. Learn the rules of engagement
It’s important to keep in mind that a meet and greet is only the beginning of the prospecting dance. Engagement, much like foreplay, takes a while to build. Think of it as one tiny step at a time. Eye contact, question, response, a nod of agreement, and so on. You can only advance to the next stage if this one is successful. So don’t feel entitled to an instant sale. Small wins equal small steps when it comes to establishing a rapport with a prospective client.
4. Spend time on big fish
Visitors often ride different waves of traffic at an expo: peak times like just after a session or demo, a mid-morning saunter, or joining larger crowds in the evening. But at an event like this, there is usually plenty of downtime. This is when you need to zero in on people who matter, who will lead to those conversions and find use in your service or product – genuine buyers or even those who will reach an expansive audience to tell the world about them like an influencer.
We recommend you develop a strategy to spend time with people who are going to make you money. For instance, you could have a hand signal for a team member to recognise a ‘schmoozer’ and take him off your hands if you have bigger fish to focus on at the time.
Here’s to making the most of expo opportunities in the second half of 2022. Are you ready? Let’s go.
