Long lasting and loyal exhibitors do not exist anymore. Exhibitors are under pressure to find better and cheaper providers all the time, and stand builders must accept this uncertainty. This will result into some stand builders going out of business as being unable to adapt themselves to this new way of doing business. But there will also be some stand builders with a dynamic customer acquisition strategy, which will be able to use this uncertainty to win new exhibitors out of their competitors. Whose stand builder do you want to become?
There are plenty of way for finding new exhibitors for your business and I will list some of them. Most of successful organizations will use a guerilla strategy, meaning they will use a mix of sales acquisition techniques in order to sell their services and find new customers:
- Word of mouth: obviously, if you are doing a great job at a reasonable price, you are likely to be recommended to other exhibitors
- Official vendor for a tradeshow: it is for sure a very proven technique as you are recommended by an external organization. However, costs for being listed may be expensive, or you may simply not be able to be listed as only a handful of providers have access to this privilege
- Other exhibitors visiting your stand: do not forget to inform your team to have some business cards available when setting or dismantling the stand. Another technique also consists of having your building team wearing some tee-shirts with your company logo/name
- Contacting exhibitors directly: it is probably the most efficient way of doing new customer acquisition but it is very time and cost expensive. In the graphic below, you can see all the different things you have to do by yourself in order to find new customers (steps 1 to 6). Only very large stand builders can afford themselves paying pre-sales people to create exhibitors lists, and then sales people to call each of those exhibitors and send them brochures. If you do not have time or the resources to do this, we can do this for you quickly and affordably: just contact us at http://www.superstand.com/contact