How to Make a Trade Show Profitable

If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars for a trade show booth, get your money’s worth.

This week I spent time filling out the application to attend the largest trade show in my industry. The small booth costs $3,995, just for the raw space. Add to that the airfare, lodging, meals, and costs of having sales reps in the booth instead of in the office, as well as the time and labor before the show getting displays ready, and I spend close to $10,000 to get us there. While that’s a good bit of money, I know it is worth spending, because my team will typically do three to five times that in sales on the trade show floor, and that’s not counting additional business after the show.

However, there are a lot of companies that exhibit at this show which don’t do as well as we do—yet they have paid the same money, and often times, a lot more, to be there.  When they return home, I imagine they lament that it was not a good show for them and worry about how they are going to recoup their expenses.  This moment of hindsight comes too late.

Here’s how I recommend you make a trade show profitable—ahead of time:

Buy a booth you can afford (and then some).

The first mistake companies make is thinking that they have to go big or go home, often taking booth spaces that are far too expensive to make sense. Having a big booth may intimidate your competitors, but it does little to impress your sales prospects–and they are the reason you are there.  What customers want is a well-organized booth with all the products they came to see.  I have taken the same 10X10 booth at every show for the last seven years. It’s enough for us to display all our major product lines, and the break-even point is far easier to reach for us than it must be for companies with giant booths and a huge staff to man them.

Strategically organize your booth.

The second problem is how companies arrange their booths.  The typical set-up of a booth is a table at the front, providing a place to make literature easily available to passing prospects.  Note the choice of words here: “passing prospects”.  A table at the front creates a barrier to customers, and the best you can get with it is a prospect that passes you by.  When I set up my booth, all literature goes at the back of the table, and the table is turned perpendicular rather than parallel to the aisle, drawing customers into the booth, rather than repelling them.  I want them to look at my product first, then take the time to ask questions about it, and finally, once they have connected with my sales reps, to have access to the catalogues they can take with them to remember the connection they have made.

Don’t get me started about chairs.

I allow one chair in our booth—with the strict rule that it is for customers only. Sales reps who are sitting down look low-energy and their lack of enthusiasm translates directly to how their products are perceived by potential customers. Successful reps know every prospect passing by is a potential customer, and they‘re at the edge of the booth, working the aisle to convert prospects to customers.

Eliminate distractions.

Don’t allow technology in the booth. I know, I am ‘the Antichrist’.  But think about it this way. First came the scanner—that awful device that would save you from having to collect business cards and enter data manually when you returned to the office.  It eradicated the paperwork but it also eliminated the handshake.  Now, instead of putting the emphasis on making contact with prospective customers at shows, companies spend thousands of dollars to have their sales reps wave an electronic wand over someone’s badge, hoping it will magically make them a sale later.  Get real.  Most business originating from a tradeshow is done at the tradeshow—whether in the form of an actual sale, or a connection made between the seller and the buyer, communicating valuable information. Buyers go to a show and take away with them both product information and people knowledge.  They remember the sales reps who spent time talking with them about what they were looking for—not the rep who wasted five minutes of their time trying to get their badge scanner to work.  As a business owner, I never spend money on a scanner.  I train my reps on how to get the information in a way that will make a sale, not a database entry.

Smart phones are not allowed.

Not for my sales team. They cannot check their email, talk to the home office, text their significant other, or anything else while on duty in my company’s booth. They are there for one purpose—to connect with our customers. Anything that takes away from that is a liability. Most companies do not make this a rule, and even encourage distracted behavior by emailing their employees while they are working the show, or requiring them to have their smart phones on site. Can you really think of a person you are less interested in stopping to talk to than someone who is engrossed in the inner world of his phone? I can’t.

Leave laptops at the hotel, too.

Most sales reps will use a laptop for a purpose other than demonstrating something useful to potential customers. Take for example the reps whose booths I skipped at an art show a few weeks ago.  They were playing solitaire! As I looked at them, clearly wanting information about their offerings, they missed the cue—busy playing hands on their screen.  I left their booth, and did not even take a business card.  If they were too busy with distractions to talk to me at a venue specifically geared towards selling,  I already know what their customer service and follow-up is going to look like.

Choose wisely. Who will staff your booth?

A lot of company managers look at tradeshows as a place to send the b-team, telling themselves that they really just need greeters to distribute catalogs.  If you think of a tradeshow as a place to “hand out information,” you are wasting your money and would be better off staying home and doing a mailing.  A tradeshow is a place to meet customers, to make a valuable connection with them, as well as to start—and, hopefully, complete—sales.  How many times have you stopped at a booth and attempted to ask questions about a product, only to be “helped” by someone who did not know the products well enough to give you an answer?  How many trade show contacts have told you they would have to get you additional information after the show when you had been ready to purchase right there in the booth?  

No matter how good your products are, they will be dwarfed by the power of the people you put in your booth.  Give them the right tools, establish the ground rules, and make sure you put the best people you have in the booth so they come back with orders.  

====Vanessa Merit Nornberg=====

The Four Worst Hiring Mistakes

The problem might be you.

In this job market, you might expect that hiring new employees would be easy. But many entrepreneurs still struggle to find good people. In a recent survey of Inc. 5000 CEOs, hiring edged out even the economy and government regulation as their top concern, with nearly one-quarter of respondents identifying it as the biggest challenge they had faced in the preceding three months.

To be sure, not every candidate is a rock star. But if you keep turning up dud after dud, the problem may not be the applicant pool. In a quest to find the best workers, entrepreneurs sometimes wind up adopting hiring practices that are actually detrimental to their companies. Here are the four most common problems that afflict interviewers.

Are you a narcissistic boss?

Without a deliberate hiring strategy, founders often gravitate toward job candidates who share their personality.

Are you a perfectionist boss?

Wonder why it's so hard to find good people? Maybe you're asking too much.

Are you overthinking your hires?

So what if you make a hiring mistake? Here's how to beat analysis paralysis.

How to make hiring less frantic

Recruiting is like selling: You need to develop a pipeline and build relationships. Here's how

=====April Joyner=====

How to Make Hiring Less Frantic

Recruiting is like selling: You need to develop a pipeline and build relationships. Here's how.

At some companies, new employees are emergency purchases. With limited time and funds, entrepreneurs seek employees only when it's absolutely necessary for their company's continued growth. Then they frantically attempt to fill the positions.

Recently, that became an issue for Nick Bock. In the early years of his company, Five Nines Technology Group, an IT consulting firm in Lincoln, Nebraska, Bock didn't have to worry about hiring. He added only a handful of positions a year. And because Five Nines had quickly earned a strong local reputation, the office received a steady stream of resumés from computer engineers, even when there were no jobs to fill.

But lately Bock has struggled. Eighteen months ago, after taking on several new clients, Five Nines had to more than double its head count, from 23 to 47 employees. Bock hadn't anticipated how difficult it would be to staff up. After quickly tapping out his leads, Bock scrambled to find suitable candidates. Meanwhile, his team of engineers was putting in extra-long days to handle all the new work. One person quit. Bock tried to smooth things over by giving out bonuses.

Recruiting is a lot like sales. It involves developing a pipeline and building relationships. Bock realizes that now and has made recruiting a priority.

He schedules meetings with promising engineers even when Five Nines doesn't have any openings. And when there is a vacancy, Bock publicizes it on job boards and the company's Facebook and Twitter pages. He also asks employees to spread the word. Bock personally reviews each job listing, occasionally recommending changes to better attract the attention of skilled candidates. He also tries to scoop up talent at the earliest opportunity. If a candidate seems like a good fit, he will extend a job offer before finishing the round of interviews.

Bock's new approach has already had a big effect on Five Nines. The company now hires at least one employee every six weeks. Still, Bock thinks he could do more to streamline the hiring process. "I would love to always have one or two people queued up and ready to go," says Bock. "I don't know if we'll ever get to that, but if you don't have something you're striving for, it's easy to slack off."

Treatment:

Make recruiting an ongoing process. Maintain a list of prospective hires, even if there are no immediate openings.

Create an employee referral program. Also tap social networks, professional organizations, industry trade shows, and local universities.

Stay in contact with talented prospects through occasional lunch dates or meetings.

=====April Joyner=====

Are You Overthinking Your Hires?

So what if you make a mistake? Here's how to beat analysis paralysis when hiring a new employee.

Any job seeker knows from experience how much first impressions matter. In fact, they probably matter too much. A single interview, after all, rarely uncovers enough information to determine whether someone would be a good employee. To compensate for this shortcoming, many entrepreneurs follow the adage to hire slowly, fire fast. But hiring too slowly can be just as counterproductive as making a snap judgment, especially when entrepreneurs tack additional steps onto the interview process without clear objectives in mind.

Gary Jaffe, CEO of The Booksource, a St. Louis-based distributor of schoolbooks with 135 employees, made that mistake last fall when he began looking for a new sales director. The search ended up taking five months—two months longer than the contract period for the recruiter he enlisted. Each candidate was required to go through two personality assessments and about four hours' worth of interviews, meeting with each of the company's three managers. After sitting in on each interview, Jaffe privately questioned the candidates he found promising. His impressions of candidates would often start out positive but deteriorate as the interviews dragged on. "In the first two hours, I would have absolutely hired this person," says Jaffe. "By lunch, he was questionable."

There are many reasons entrepreneurs prolong the hiring process. For starters, adding employees at a small company is tricky. "Once you insert a new person into the mix, you change the team's dynamics completely," says Lanny Goodman, CEO of Management Technologies, an Albuquerque-based firm that trains entrepreneurs in management techniques. Previous hiring mistakes can also cause entrepreneurs to drag their feet: Because they second-guess their opinions, entrepreneurs add extra rounds of interviews and assessments.

That was the case for Jaffe. After firing two of the company's executives, he had begun to doubt his ability to make good hiring decisions. "It's so frustrating when you get it wrong," says Jaffe. "It takes so much effort to fit this person, and you say, 'Why is this not working?' " He was determined to get it right this time.

One of the most promising applicants for the sales director position was referred by a trusted source. Jaffe's father, Sandy, who founded The Booksource and had been its CEO, had met the candidate in a business mentoring group. But despite the family recommendation, personality tests, and rounds of interviews, Jaffe was still unsure. So he invited the candidate out to dinner. After an evening of polite small talk and Southwestern cuisine, Jaffe finally made an offer.

But even after all that, Jaffe is again trying to fill the position. Less than three weeks after the sales director joined the company, Jaffe fired him.

No matter how many times you interview candidates, there's no way to accurately predict how well they will perform. Entrepreneurs who drag out the hiring process put off the ultimate test of a candidate: time on the job. Plus, as the months pass and pressure mounts to fill critical positions, entrepreneurs sometimes find themselves making the same hasty decisions they sought to avoid in the first place.

Treatment:

Set clear objectives for each stage of the interview process. Make sure follow-up interviews aren't rehashing the same discussions from previous meetings.

Limit the number of people evaluating candidates. It's wise to seek a second opinion, but involving more than two or three other managers can make it difficult to get a clear assessment.

Trust your instincts. As the hiring process drags on, you are more likely to ignore red flags.

========April Joyner=========

Are You A Perfectionist Boss?

Wonder why it's so hard to find good people? Maybe you're asking too much.

What matters more, skills or attitude? Entrepreneurs often say that they value intangible qualities above bullet points on a resumé. But in practice, many are hesitant to hire an employee who hasn't already held an identical job. And sometimes the quest to find the best candidate becomes a hunt for the person with the longest list of credentials.

Paul Millman has reasons not to fall into this trap. He is the president of Chroma Technology, a Bellows Falls, Vermont-based manufacturer of optical filters for scientific equipment. Before Millman co-founded Chroma, in 1991, he held a string of short-lived sales jobs, including one at a company with which he now competes. Millman had no scientific training, but he absorbed a lot selling optical filters, enough to launch a competing business.

Millman's views haven't exactly been reflected in Chroma's hiring process, however. Chroma is owned and run by its 98 employees. Four of Chroma's employees serve on a steering committee, which makes most management decisions for the company.

Last fall, when Chroma added some customer service positions, the committee created a job posting requiring applicants to have either a biology degree or at least five years of experience in the optical filters industry. The committee figured that sort of experience would come in handy, given that the new reps would also be charged with helping customers—mostly biologists—select the right optical filters for their needs. But very few people applied. The positions sat empty for six months.

Millman was perplexed by the stringent requirements. "I didn't have those credentials," he says. And in the company's early days, people routinely performed tasks in which they hadn't been formally trained. One of Millman's co-founders was even able to develop software for Chroma's manufacturing equipment, despite never having had a programming job. Plus, says Millman, Chroma already has some scientists on staff.

Every company wants the best employees it can afford, but some businesses have unrealistic expectations. "Sometimes companies expect a combination of Superman and Batman," says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, the author of Great People Decisions and a partner at the executive recruiting firm Egon Zehnder International. In reality, the best employees are those who buy into the founder's vision and are willing to do what it takes to achieve it, says Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Those aren't necessarily the people with the most experience. While studying how successful serial entrepreneurs approach decision making, Sarasvathy found that they placed a greater emphasis on a candidate's aptitude and commitment than on a candidate's previous positions.

That is wise because an impressive resumé may give a false impression about a candidate's potential, says Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Chasing Stars. In research for his book, he found that star employees from various businesses owed much of their success to their companies' processes and cultures. When these employees moved to other companies that lacked the same infrastructure, most failed to match their past performances.

Ultimately, Chroma did manage to find a new customer service rep with a biology degree. But it also ended up hiring two reps who did not meet the criteria in the job posting, and both of them have worked out just fine.

Treatment:

Decide which qualifications are truly essential and which skills can be learned on the job. An excessive list of requirements may discourage good people from applying.

Develop an on-boarding program. Even the most experienced hires need time to adjust to a new environment.

               

======April Joyner======

7 Ways to Socialize With Your Employees (and Not Get in Trouble)

Whether you need to foster teamwork, get a major project underway, or just show your team a fun time, there's a wholesome - but not utterly nerdy - way.

There's something to be said for birthday lunches or beers after work at the pub across the street. Simple, casual, all-staff events can foster a lot of camaraderie. But they can also exclude certain people – non-drinkers, parents with small children who need to get home right after work, and plenty of others. And who hasn't heard stories of company holiday parties that ended in disaster when someone (or several someones) tosses back a few too many? 

We've been digging through the Inc. archives looking for the best examples of team-building social activities companies with great corporate culture have used. But not every social event is right for every company. So we've included some motivating factors for getting the staff together before prescribing social plans.

Goal: Nurture the sweet feeling of success.
Solution: Host an annual poker night.

Each February, Inphonic CEO David A. Steinberg holds a poker party for his top executives at Washington, D.C.'s Historic George Town Club. As a reward for their long hours, his executives are treated to scotch and cigars as they bluff and bet with members of InPhonic's A-list board of directors – top venture capitalists, famous politicians, and John Sculley, the well-known former CEO of Apple and Pepsi. The tradition feels bigtime and established, the kind of ritual befitting a company that keeps stern oil paintings of past CEOs in its wood-paneled boardroom. But InPhonic, which is in the very modern business of selling mobile phone handsets and services over the Web, is no such firm. It has existed for the grand total of five years and sports a founding CEO of the ripe age of 35. Instead, the annual poker night is one more way Steinberg creates the image of success and carefully guards it until, like wet cement, it sets and becomes real. Steinberg, says Sculley, "does a wonderful job of making you feel like the company is bigger and further along in its life than it is at the moment. It sort of felt like we were all grown up and we were only two and a half years old." 

Goal: Making your business feel like a happy family.
Solution: Integrate casual game nights into a family-friendly office.

The Booksource, which is based in St. Louis, sells discounted books for use in schools. Employees describe this 36-year old family-run business as exactly that — a family. Weekly bingo nights, bowling outings, and the annual company picnic (which was held at a winery last year) create a true sense of community among co-workers. The family-friendly feeling extends into the office, too. The "Baby Policy" allows parents to bring their newborns to work for up to six months, or employees can choose to receive a $50 weekly reimbursement for day care. Read more.

Goal: Get a serious work project started with a tight-knit team.
Solution: Hold a company retreat.

What does your company really need to accomplish, fast? Bruce Withrow, the founder of Meeting Facilitators International, helps his clients start to plan their retreats by asking this question first: "If I could wave a magic wand and put it into your hand, and you could make a successful conclusion to your retreat, what would it look like?" It's important to be as specific as possible. "To just say 'strategic planning' isn't enough," says Withrow, who plans between 50 and 60 retreats every year. "It's such a plastic word that means so many different things to so many different people. What is it that you think is missing? What is it that you want?" CEO and founder of Tutor.com George Cigale says of his company's past retreats: "Slowing down time allows you to think a little bit differently about the way you communicate and depend on each other." Before you stress about where you will go and what you will do, remember that, from a business perspective, this is probably the least important part of planning your retreat. Cigale's company has held retreats at a dude ranch, Las Vegas, Florida, and, when the budget was a little tighter, at a conference center near the company's offices. But he considers each retreat to have been successful. It's fun to play golf, but is it really necessary? If you can afford it, adding some fun to the trip does have advantages. First, it can help get your employees excited about the retreat and somewhat compensate for pulling them away from their homes and families. Second, it can provide time for informal discussion and help your team get to know each other better. "Just the time together at dinner and talking about the Olympics or whatever, I think that that helps with communication," Withrow says. Cigale recommends sticking with about a 20 percent fun, 80 percent work ratio. 

Goal: Simply understanding your employees better.
Solution: Do lunches with a focus on sharing.

How Entrepreneurs Become Visionary Leaders

Picture your business helping millions of people solve a problem. Here's how to make that thought into a reality.

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual’s life. Very early, it made me understand that success is simply not doled out but it must be earned through hard work, persistence, educational commitment, and even a little good luck and timing.

I worked for Microsoft until 1996, till I had a different angle to view life. I wanted to be an entrepreneur and control my own destiny. In some ways I was tired of making billions for Bill. I started off with a company, Infospace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy.

Sometimes we never see what failure is and often fail to recognize it. Before defining failure we need to discuss what success is. Success is not about how much money we have in the bank but it’s about how many peoples’ lives we have impacted through it. Success is experienced when we do things which have never been done before.

If we want to impact hundreds or millions of people we have to do things differently. If we look at the problem as an infrastructural problem we cannot make an impact because it requires a lot of effort. But when we convert this problem into a knowledge problem, suddenly the problem is manageable.

Hence, it becomes important to realize what failure and success means to a person and what he does with it. It is the duty of every entrepreneur to go through this process of growth in order to fulfill his dreams.

An entrepreneur is not a person who starts a company but he is the person who actually solves a problem. It’s all about execution and it is a state of mind. A person who sees a problem is a Human Being; a person who finds a solution is visionary; and the person who goes out and does something about it is an entrepreneur.