No matter how well you conduct pre-trade show planning or how well you execute trade show logistics and designing your booth display, the ultimate success or failure for your trade show campaign will come down to the people who execute the plan on the day.

It is easy to forget your people when it comes to the trade show event because there is so much else which needs to be handled and managed, however they are the most important element in your entire strategy, so you need to choose your staff carefully and invest time and training effort to make sure they are at the top of their game.

Assigning and Accepting Responsibility

Trade show exhibiting is not something which should be done as a “throwing some mud against a wall” exercise in the hope something sticks. Trade shows must be integrated into the broader marketing strategy of the company and to this end, what is expected out of a trade show should be identified as should the steps that are needed to attain the trade show goals.

Once the objectives of the show are identified, how they will be achieved needs to be determined and this may mean Representative A needs to speak to 100 attendees on the day and refer 10 to Representative B; B meanwhile needs to arrange for 10 follow-up sales presentations from all the referred attendees they get from frontline booth staff.

How you arrive at your stages and the numbers involved will vary from business to business and show to show, however there are two common denominators for optimal success. Firstly, engage your booth and support staff in identifying show goals and the steps required to achieve them and secondly, once identified the individual should accept responsibility for their part of fulfilling the overall plan on the day.

By engaging staff in the planning sessions and requiring an acceptance of individual responsibility it motivates individual performance which in turn will feed into team results.

Delegate Tasks and Redundancy

This is closely related to assigning and accepting individual responsibility, however it is crucial that you have staff with the maturity and experience to perform their roles. Staff who are appropriate for the role by training, experience and temperament should be used to maximum effect – it is no use assigning a wallflower as a greeter at the front of the booth display, nor should you expect your star salesperson to be firing at their best all day without being able to take a break.

You need to ensure you have the right skill sets within your team and that they are assigned to perform jobs which require their particular skills. This said, you are going to be very fortunate if you can provide full coverage across the entire day or show duration without losing some members of your team for some of the time. This is when it becomes important that there is a good cross-section of skills shared amongst the team and this usually occurs through design rather than happy accident. Ensuring that team members share their experience and understanding with one another is something that can happen at eth trade show itself, but more likely this will happen in training sessions and post-show briefings.

Author Bio: Lawrence Reaves works with ExhibitWholesale, a leading provider of trade show displays and accessories such as pop-up displays and trade show flooring. ExhibitWholesale can be found online at: ExhibitWholesale.com .

Category: Marketing
Keywords: tradeshow staffing, tradshow staffing advice, staff for tradeshow, staffing a tradeshow