A vendor’s trade show ROI comes down to driving quality traffic to the booth. Building it does NOT necessarily mean customers and prospects will come to the booth. Think about diverting your focus and your budget from routine logistics to customer attraction.

A little planning can improve your trade show ROI. You can get a lot more out of it by simply investing in a little thought upfront. The key is, don’t leave “ROI” to chance – decide why you’re going, what you want to accomplish, and then plan accordingly.

We should all be getting more out of trade shows. The combination of intellectual firepower, access to technology, and networking opportunities is grossly underutilized. You can prepare for trade shows in a way that maximizes the quality interactions necessary to deliver the ROI you deserve from your investment.

We make decisions based on our emotional brain, not our rational brain. Changing behavior (e.g. sales) isn’t about dumping the largest amount of features on the prospect – its about finding alignment between what you believe and what they believe – the “why” of what you might do together.

Remember a decade ago when we were talking about how to capture all the revenue from customers changes? I think that’s what printers are thinking – we’re investing our time and labor into something (a private web to print storefront) therefore it should be charagble. We’re thinking about it from our perspective instead of the customers – value has migrated from manufacturing to the ease of order entry – you have to invest where the customer value focus is!

Easy sells, easy differentiates, making things easy is actually very hard. Making complex things easy is really hard. Customers want easy and they don’t care how much complexity is behind the easy.

Sales is not about mindlessly listing features and benefits. No benefit matters unless its RELEVANT to the customer or prospect you’re talking to. How do you know if specific benefits meet the needs of the customer? You have to talk less and listen more.

Its time to embrace the inevitable. Commerce is moving online whether you’re comfortable with it or not. Get comfortable. Get moving. Waiting for your customers to ask is playing defense and putting you at risk of being replaced by a more forward thinking competitor.

Our collective challenge as an industry is to take our focus off manufacturing. Yes, look upstream to your customers and downstream to the message you’re presenting to the market about who you are.