Trade shows are not always about sales leads

We're doing our first trade show at Albeo in a couple of weeks. It's a large lighting industry show, Lightfair, that targets lighting specifiers, mostly architects and lighting designers. When I have discussed this show with various people, I frequently find myself explaining that the purpose of our exhibiting at this show is not to generate near-term revenue or sales leads.

There are innumerable reasons to do a trade show, and certainly one possible reason is to generate sales leads. But it is not the only reason, nor necessarily the most important.

For example, I had a memorable trade show experience earlier in my career. We were marketing fiber optic transceivers to the data networking, voice networking, and data storage segments. Similar to Albeo, we were a venture-funded startup, competing mostly with other venture-funded startups like ourselves.

We did two trade shows a year. One year, over all of marketing's strenuous objections, our CEO insisted that we gather as many leads as possible during the show, and follow up on and qualify every lead.

We dutifully gathered several hundred leads, and began calling every one after the show. Not surprisingly, through the first 50 or so, we found exactly zero new, valuable opportunities. Why? Because the characteristics of the industry and our segment were not consistent with using trade shows as a sales prospecting tool.

In each of the three segments we served, there were, at most, eight companies in the world that could generate significant demand for our products. At each of these companies, there were maybe two or three design teams that were responsible for projects that might include a product like ours. In other words, our sales force already knew every possible customer and was aware of every existing project that represented any meaningful revenue. If we weren't working to close those known deals, then we were working on the wrong things.

Then why participate in trade shows, you might ask? One important reason is because that worldwide handful of potential decision-makers wanted to be reassured that they're buying from a market leader and a company that was going to be around for the long term, and a trade show was an effective tool for positioning ourselves as that leader. It enabled us to show advanced, market-leading product or technology concepts, for instance. And the mere implied expense of exhibiting communicated some level of financial stability.

In Albeo's case, any sales leads we generate at Lightfair would represent possible 2009 or 2010 revenue, which is not our greatest concern. Rather, we're launching several new products into a new market segment, and a large trade show like this one represents an efficient way to get the message about this launch out broadly and quickly to multiple audiences. So our most important metric is not the number of sales leads, but rather our success in connecting with the editorial community, the venture community, and some other important audiences. Our success metrics will be around these efforts.

Oh, and did the total failure rate in those first 50 qualification efforts convince my past CEO that it was a futile effort? No, he was convinced we were missing that one golden nugget, so he made us complete the task, which took several days. Let's just say he and I didn't see eye-to-eye on much, and we soon parted ways.

Destination Imagination

Recently, my son Ryan completed his Destination Imagination (DI) project. DI is a creativity and problem-solving organization for kids of all ages. Before Ryan participated, I had never heard of it, but now I love this thing!

The five members of Ryan's DI team chose the "Hit or Myth" challenge to prepare over the course of a few months. With no help from adults, they had to:

• Choose a myth that they would prove or disprove using the scientific method (OK, that sold me right there)
• Write an 8 minute play, during which they would perform an experiment, of their own design, to prove or disprove the myth
• Construct their props out of recycled material

There were several other requirements, as well. The team then performs their play for judges in a big, all-day event at a local school, and the top two teams from each age group proceed to state and national competitions.

I was amazed at what his team of five third-graders came up with. The creativity was stellar. During their play, they proved that a tongue sticks to a frozen metal pole by using a pig tongue and a section of metal pipe that they had stored in dry ice. They wove this experiment into an eight-minute story about Queen's Day in Amsterdam, and had a cardboard replicas of the Amsterdam Palace and tulip fields.

He loved the entire experience, and we're both very excited for next year's DI challenge!

What's Their Message?

OK, I don't really get the La Quinta ads. (You can see all of them on La Quinta's site.) I had seen two of these on TV, one where a guy's pen leaked in his mouth when he chewed it, making his entire mouth and lips blue, and another where a man forgot his luggage and was forced to wear his coworker's dress. The tag line for these ads is "wake up on the bright side." The leaky pen guy laughs off his blue mouth because it's now the company color, and the guy in the dress brags about how good he looks in it.

So, they're kind of cute and kind of funny, but these situations make these guys, and everyone around them, look like idiots. They don't make me think, "Hey, they really made the best out of a bad situation." They make me think, "Hey, these guys are idiots."

So what's the message conveyed about La Quinta? I can think of a few candidates:

1. Idiots stay at La Quinta.
2. Horribly embarrassing things happen at La Quinta.
3. Embarrassing things happen at La Quinta, but by waking up "on the bright side," you're able to deal with these embarrassing things by being an idiot.

I suspect that none of these is actually the intended message. The message that I don't see is "wake up on the bright side."

The ads are cute, but their message eludes me.