April 2005
Best Practices: Raising expectations

Reed Exhibitions’ Exhibitor University teaches customers how to set and meet objectives

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

If they know one thing, graduates of Exhibitor University know that you don’t measure success at a trade show by how much money you spent or how many people were there.

“One of the fundamental values of going to Exhibitor University is that people can understand, based on their presence at the show, what to expect if they’re working at optimal efficiency. What’s the number of qualified attendees that they can sit down with?” says Chet Burchett, President of Reed Exhibitions North America (www.reedexpo.com), Norwalk, CT. “The next step is to get the people who match their criteria into the booth.”

Teaching the fundamentals of successful exhibiting is the nominal mission of Exhibitor University, which Reed launched in late 2003 as a pilot program and has since updated and expanded nationwide. The real mission is to improve Reed’s customer satisfaction.

“Exhibitor University is a way to add value to the relationship by having our customers improve their trade show experience and increase the return on the investment they make in trade shows,” Burchett says.

In 2005, the workshops will be held in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia and Washington, DC — all markets with a heavy concentration of customers. The $295 fee is waived for current exhibitors. Registrants deposit $100 to reserve a seat, and the deposit is refunded upon attending. Attendees receive an added incentive of 10 percent off new advertising or sponsorship opportunities at Reed events.

Locating the workshops regionally in the spring, summer and fall helps make Exhibitor University accessible to companies that might not otherwise pay for travel and training. On July 12th, co-location with TS2 in Washington, DC, will expose prospective customers to the program as well.

The program is a day-long, intensive workshop led by self-styled “trade show turnaround artist” Jefferson Davis, President of Competitive Edge, a Charlotte, NC-based exhibit marketing, consulting and training company. Topics include results-focused exhibiting, exhibiting by objectives, rule-of-thumb budgeting, pre-show marketing, sales-effective exhibit design, staffing for success, closed-loop lead management, and measuring and reporting results and return on investment (ROI).

Participants take away an exhibit cost control/ROI calculator, which is a series of spreadsheets to benchmark spending by category. It identifies 19 metrics to measure achievement of sales- and marketing-related objectives, depending on the company’s goal for the trade show.

“If you don’t get $3–$5 back for every $1 you invest in a measurable manner, then you’re in the wrong show,” Davis says. “That $3–$5 can be hard dollars or soft dollars.”

Davis defines hard dollars as bankable sales, and soft dollars as value received that can be expressed in numeric terms. The key point is defining measurable goals and objectives, such as the number of interactions with qualified prospects. Using a mathematical formula, Davis defines the capacity for face-to-face interactions, factoring in the total number of attendees, the number of qualified attendees, and the number of attendees the staff can effectively interact with during the event.

“If you have a capacity of 280 and a potential audience of 3,500, you only need 8 percent of that audience to get a 100 percent efficient exhibit,” Davis says.

Having raised exhibitor expectations for success, Davis is also training Reed’s sales and marketing staff to be more responsive to customer needs. Reed’s own expectations for return on the Exhibitor University investment are nonfinancial. The measure of success will be in customer satisfaction and retention. To date, about 90 percent of the first graduating classes have signed up to exhibit again at Reed events, which indicates the program is working.

“It’s early to tell, but the signs are that we have strong retention of customers who have been to Exhibitor University,” Burchett says. “We’re making the tools available to our customers. Now we have to make sure we can deliver their customer base to them.”