A True Trade Show Story: What Not to Do
Here is my horror story
It was my first trade show. I was a young businessman who had landed a large account. Now the year before we had bought about $250,000 in
promotional
T-shirts from our main supplier (which was respectable) and $50,000 from our secondary supplier. (If you haven’t figured it out yet, I started out in this industry as a t-shirt printer!)
I decided to take a walk to the stand of my main T-shirt supplier. (From whom we had bought about $250,000 over the course of the year) What happened? I was on my feet for about 10 minutes and was completely ignored. (Keep in mind that the average attendee will only wait 3-5 minutes without being served.)
Ok, so I left and came back a few hours later. Sure enough, I was back in the booth for another 10 minutes, completely ignored. Man I thought I was a big shot to these guys but they didn’t know or care who I was.
So this is what happened next. I went two islands to my secondary supplier (from whom I ordered a small amount during the year). They came up to me right away and talked to me like I was the biggest customer they’ve ever had!
To this day, I remember our conversation. They gave me a nice pen, thanked me a million times over, and asked me what they could do better.
The result? The following year I bought $1,000,000 worth of promotional items
Tshirts [http://www.poorrichardspromos.com/tshirts.html] from them and just $50,000 from the other guys.
But it didn’t stop there either. 12 months later, the representative from my old supplier showed up at my plant. He was completely blown away by the expansion. He was eager to find out why our sales with them had dropped so drastically. My answer? “We got a better deal from the other guys.” He still thinks that he lost the business because of the prices.
That day I learned a valuable lesson. I decided that when I started exhibiting at trade shows I would do everything I could to prevent this from happening to me. Like many other companies, I have many clients that I have never met face to face. Keep this in mind…trade shows are a great opportunity to build on our relationship or destroy it.