It’s that time again when marketing, sales and management go to war over that dinosaur of marketing tactics, the tradeshow. Tradeshow season is the bane of every inbound marketing CMO because it is the antithesis of everything we hold dear; yet all too often we are forced to keep it as part of the yearly marketing spend. Tradeshows have the highest cost per lead with the lowest convert-ability yet every sales rep and senior executive almost demand that specific tradeshows be held in almost reverential esteem. With these measured statistics why would you still want to spend 10’s or even 100’s of thousands of dollars on a single event to basically satisfy an ego requirement?
Motivations vary by department:
- Sales will start out by saying they need the face-time with their customers and prospects, yet rarely can be found at the booth during scheduled times and always are first in line to the myriad of vendor parties, especially when the tradeshow city is one known for entertainment or is an exotic world-class destination.
- Management wants to scope out the business development opportunities (read vendor consolidation opportunities in both the who can we buy and who will buy us variety), but also love to flaunt the ego of my booth is bigger/better/more busy than my competitor’s booth.
- Marketing wants leads but at what cost and other tradeoff to balance quantity with quality? Classic marketing professionals will love the glamor and sheer quantity of leads while boasting of booth traffic generated by that celebrity look alike, magician, scantily clad model or cool give-away. Inbound marketing professionals do everything in their power to avoid the spend on physical tradeshows and funnel the budget into activities that drive more traffic to value exchange items on their website (i.e. virtual tradeshows, content syndication, webcasts).
Tradeshows done right can be good for select industries with select events at select times. Tradeshows done wrong are a nightmare of expense, finger-pointing and wasted resource. Tradeshows done for the sake of visibility are just an ugly mess of partial successes in the name of post-event cost justification.
This tradeshow season please take an objective look (read “get hard statistics on leads , convert-ability, pipeline development, and closed deals”) at previous events before committing once again to each event and then get all stakeholders (sales, management, marketing) in a room and collectively/objectively make decisions.
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