Trade Shows: Big Investment, Small Return

I love going where people are.

That's why I love trade shows, conferences, and industry events. Put a thousand people from the same market in one building and I'm interested. Customers are there. Prospective customers are there. Competitors, partners, and industry experts are there. And people who have problems you haven't heard about yet are there.

Then we ruin it by trying to sell everybody something.

I hate being sold to at trade shows, and apparently I'm not alone. Watch people walking an exhibit hall. They learn quickly not to make eye contact with anyone wearing a company polo shirt, because eye contact means somebody pounces. "So, what brings you to the show?" Two minutes later you're getting a product pitch you never asked for.

This is why I encourage product managers and product marketing managers to attend industry events. And why, somewhat heretically, I'm less enthusiastic about sending salespeople.

The lead-generation justification doesn't hold up

The conventional reason for exhibiting is lead generation. We spend tens of thousands of dollars on booth space, travel, hotels, signage, shipping, giveaways, and staff. Then we scan a few hundred badges and congratulate ourselves on the number of leads we generated.

The cost per lead is extraordinary. Worse, most of those leads aren't leads at all. They're people who wanted the T-shirt. Trade show booths are for trick-or-treating. Your pen, golf tees, mouse pads don't influence decisions; they are where we get stocking stuffers for our kids.

Most sales organizations don't suffer from a shortage of names. They suffer from a shortage of meaningful conversations with the right people. Those are different problems, and a badge scanner only solves the one you don't have.

I once worked with a company that sold to colleges and universities. They knew every potential customer in their market by name. Each salesperson had a territory of roughly fifty accounts. Think about that. Why spend a fortune exhibiting at a conference to "generate leads" when a salesperson could call one account a week and cover the entire territory in a year?

Nobody at that conference was a mystery.

That's why I sometimes think of industry events as lazy marketing. "Let's go to the show" feels like a strategy because it produces so much activity. There's a booth to design, literature to print, swag to order, dinners to arrange, and badges to scan. But activity isn't insight, and a calendar full of work isn't a plan.

What a trade show is actually good for

What trade shows offer that's genuinely hard to reproduce is concentration. They bring your market together in one place, at one time, in a mood to talk. That makes them a remarkable environment for customer conversations — and a terrible one for closing business.

So change the question. Instead of asking how many leads we can collect, ask how many useful conversations we can have.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Before the conference, publish an availability calendar with fifteen- or thirty-minute slots. Invite current customers, former customers, prospects, partners, and industry analysts to sit down and talk. Don't demo the product unless they ask. Don't walk them through the roadmap. Ask what's changing in their world. Ask what problems they're running into. Ask what their organization is doing differently this year than last. Ask what they've tried and what happened.

In three days, a product manager can have more meaningful market conversations than in the previous three months.

I also encourage product managers to deliver a thought-provoking presentation whenever they get the chance. Speaking creates an entirely different kind of interaction. Give a genuinely useful, educational talk — not a forty-five-minute commercial — and something interesting happens afterward. People walk up and say, "We're dealing with exactly that problem. Can you give me some advice?"

Now you're having a real conversation. They'll tell you about their company, their constraints, their workarounds, and the peculiar way the problem shows up in their environment. You aren't chasing them down the aisle with a scanner. They came to you, because you said something that matched their experience.

Why this still requires a person

It's fair to ask whether any of this still requires travel. I think it does.

A lot of what we used to go to conferences for can now be done from a desk. With today's tools, I can summarize the keynote, pull the analyst reports, collect the competitive announcements, cluster a year of support tickets, and produce a tidy briefing on what's happening in my market. That's genuinely useful, and product managers should be doing it.

But notice what all of that has in common. It's analysis of things people have already written down.

The conversations worth having at a conference are about the things nobody has written down yet. The workaround somebody built in a spreadsheet because your product doesn't do the thing. The reorg that changed who signs the contract. The reason they almost switched last year and didn't. The problem they haven't named, and so can't search for. None of that exists in a document, a ticket, or a transcript. It exists in someone's head, and it comes out when a person they trust asks a follow-up question and then waits.

Here's where it gets interesting. As the tools get better at everything downstream — the summarizing, the synthesis, the drafting — the scarce skill moves upstream: getting new information into the system in the first place. Your competitors can work from the same public material you can. Nobody else heard what your customer told you over coffee on Tuesday.

That's an argument for sending more product managers to more conferences, not fewer.

The best booth I ever saw

There may still be good reasons to have a booth. I suppose a new capability or an interesting demo can create some buzz. I'd rather have sales engineering run demonstrations than tie up product management, though I'm pragmatic enough to know that "working the booth" is sometimes what gets the travel budget approved.

But the best booth I ever saw barely functioned as a booth.

Our event planner reserved a large space and put up the usual banners and signs. Then, instead of filling it with demo stations and salespeople, she filled it with couches, comfortable chairs, and tables. She hired a few temps to staff it. Product managers attended the show; salespeople didn't.

People walking the hall would stop and ask, "Can I sit here?"

"Of course."

The temp scanned their badge. That was it. No ambush, no interrogation, no mandatory demo. We gave people the one thing they desperately want at a conference: a comfortable place to sit down. And it gave our product people a natural place to talk with customers.

That experience confirmed something I'd suspected for years. Almost nobody remembers what they see in an exhibit hall. Attendees collect bags of literature they'll throw away and toys they'll give to their kids. By the last afternoon, every booth has blended into every other booth. The thing they remember is the conversation they had while they were off their feet.

What to do instead

Stop expecting the show floor to close the deal. Let the event do what only the event can do: put you in the same room as your market.

Listen. Learn. Meet and engage people. Understand what's happening out there.

Scan the badges if you must. Then have sales teams call those people a week later, when everyone has gone home, emptied the conference bag, caught up on email, and might actually be willing to talk.

Before your next show, do one thing: open a calendar and book ten conversations. Not demos. Conversations. Then judge the trip by what you learned, not by how many badges you scanned.

The real value of the trade show was never the lead. It was always the conversation.