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.

I wish everything were an auction

A few months ago, I had a discussion with John Ives about his startup, Storage Markets, and the challenge of setting price for an unprecedented offering. I'm now experiencing exactly the same thing with Albeo.

LED lighting is dramatically different from traditional lighting. Here's a list of differentiators we use occasionally:

• Reduced energy consumption; 10 times less energy than incandescent
• Reduced maintenance costs; 10 to 100 times less maintenance
• Reduced thermal loads; 10 to 20 times cooler than other lights
• Longest lifetimes; for 50,000 to 100,000 hours
• Highly resistant to shock and vibration; no glass or filaments to break
• Extremely safe; low voltage, no EMI, low temperature
• No recycling costs; no mercury
• Full scale control of light level; adjustable from off to full on
• Smallest form factors
• Widest range of operating conditions; -40 to 70 degrees C
• Easy to integrate with electronics; micros and sensors
• All colors available; high color purity, all whites

Clearly, LEDs provide a very different lighting solution from traditional lighting. However, they cost maybe 10 times more to manufacture. So, how does one price LED offerings?

I'm going through that process now for several new products we're about to launch. Setting price is one of the most difficult things a marketer does. I strongly believe in setting price before I learn what a product costs to manufacture. It is very easy and common to base price on cost, even if one does so unconsciously because he knows the products' cost. However, our customers don't care what our products cost to make, do they? They care about what the products do for them; the value they deliver.

The ultimate way to determine the price is with an auction. Not that I want to sell our products on eBay, but why can't everything be an auction? It would make my job so much easier.

Getting the message right, revisited

A year ago, I posted about Albeo being interviewed by BCBR and us not doing the appropriate messaging prep work to get our story across clearly. Although the BCBR article turned out OK, we were determined to do better in the future.

I recently mentioned that the local TV station, 9News, did a story on us. It came up quite suddenly; they called us at 9:30 and arrived an hour later. (We had to run home to put on our dress-up clothes, since we were looking pretty shlubby.)

Before Ward and his cameraman showed up, we reviewed the key messages we wanted to deliver, and even wrote them up on the white board in the conference room where the interview took place. Jeff (Bisberg, Albeo's founder and CEO) methodically worked them into his responses to Ward's questions, and I was quite pleased as the interview progressed. By the end of the interview I was confident that, no matter what material they chose to use, our messages would get through.

Then, something weird happened. Ward realized that they hadn't yet filmed a 15-second teaser that would run in the half-hour leading up to the news program. Ward and I worked up a two or three sentence script for that while the cameraman set up the shot.

During that five minutes of shot preparation, Ward chatted about some vandalism problems occurring in his neighborhood. He lives out in the boonies on several acres of land with a driveway gate that's not visible from his house. He was thinking about putting a camera out on the gate, in addition to the current intercom, to check out visitors remotely. He remarked that there's not adequate light out there for the camera, and I pointed out that he could install Albeo lights with integrated motion sensors so they would light up as soon as someone came up to the gate. I also noted that Albeo's lights are rugged enough to stand up to potential vandals.

So, what happens next? The cameraman gets the shot set, Ward picks up the mike, throws out the few sentences that we wrote together, and ad-libs the teaser with something about Albeo's "vandal-proof" LED lights. Vandal-proof?! Among our top ten important differentiators, that may be number 25. Seriously, he leads with vandal-proof?

After carefully staying on message for 45 minutes, we slip off message for a few minutes at the end and we get stuck doing vandal-proof lighting. Obviously, we're targeting that huge prison lighting market.

Clearly, the moral of this story is that one must always stay on message. Always.

Looking forward at the next few months

Now that I'm blogging again and have joined Albeo full-time, I have several topics that I think I'll be writing about soon. These include:

• How solid-state lighting breaks the entire lighting industry product and channel structure
• Thinking about expanding Albeo internationally
• Destination Imagination
  
• Albeo's first trade show
• Guitar lessons
  

Of course, there will be much more that comes up that I'll feel the need to write about. I have to say, I certainly enjoy being back online. I hope you keep reading, although if you don't, I'll probably still post.

Catching up on open topics

There are a couple of topics I left open when I stopped blogging last year, so I thought I'd wrap those up a bit.

Yes, I still do BSS with the kids, although not nearly as frequently. We did get to tour the 9News newsroom with Ward Lucas. Ward had done a story on Albeo (make sure you check out the video), and I was chatting with him between shots, telling him about BSS, among other things. He graciously offered up the tour. Last weekend, we also attended a robotics competition, which I'll post about soon.

I also completed my personal trifecta: the Elephant Rock Century, the Triple Bypass, and the Copper Triangle. I had made a public commitment to the Triple, but privately I committed to the whole package. For those of you not in the Colorado cycling community, these are all difficult events, from 80 to 120 miles, with several thousand feet of climbing, much of it over 10,000 feet.

The experience of doing three difficult events in a season had several positive benefits:

• I worked myself into my best cycling shape ever
• I achieved a couple of personal cycling milestones on the side: (i) sustaining more than 20 mph on a closed loop for an hour, and (ii) riding up the world's highest paved road to the peak of Mount Evans.
• I had an excuse to get ride of my ten-year-old, heavy road bike and get a new climbing machine

The downside of the whole trifecta thing was that it was a tremendous time commitment, particularly when I had little extra time (hence the lack of blog posts). If you're going to ride strong over mountains, then you have to spend practice time riding over mountains.

That commitment played a part in one decision I made, which I will publish here for future reference. I'm not going to do Triple Bypass again. That's just too big of an event for a recreational rider like me. The logistics are complicated, the weather risk is big, and the potential for stomach discomfort is high (you need to eat a lot of calories to fuel yourself for 8-10 hours of hard exercise, even though you don't feel like eating anything). I have proven twice now that I can do it, but I don't get enough from it to do it again.

I think that wraps up any open topics from my last posts. Of course, it's not like these are the only things that happened over the past year, so if I recall anything you might be interested in, I'll be sure to post about it.