If the only thing you’ve done with your NAB Show leads so far is hand them off to your sales people, or dash off a quick email blast, it’s not too late. Join us to find out what’s working now for trade show lead follow up.
NAB Show – Lead Follow up Webinar April 2018 from Cindy Zuelsdorf | Kokoro on Vimeo.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Hi, I’m Cindy Zuelsdorf with the NAB Show Exhibitor’s webinars and Kokoro Marketing, and I’m here today with Michelle Maddox from Imagine Products. She’s the Marketing Director at Imagine Products, and today we are looking at your lead follow-up.
Michelle and I were chatting at the show, and we were talking about lead follow-up, and just wanted to share with you guys what’s working now. So how’s your day going, Michelle?
Michelle Maddox: So far so good, it’s kind of rainy here, but other than that, it’s going well, thanks.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: All right. Well, let’s get right into it. So when we were chatting at the show, you said something really interesting. You talked about lead follow-up, and how people just really want to feel special, and how do you do your lead follow-up in a way that’s personal and really relevant to that person?
Michelle Maddox: Yeah. For me, it starts at the show, actually. I learned my first couple of shows that I get home and I can’t remember anything. You’re kind of inundated with so many people and so much information, and I think that’s how your customers feel, too. And so one thing that I learned to do is, when I get a business card, I take a second and I make a little note on it.
You can download your copy of our Lead Follow Up Plan here:
Even if it’s something short, like an ‘R’ for reseller, if they’re interested in being a reseller for us. And that way, then I can come back and I can kind of craft an email specific to them. And honestly, I had a couple business cards this year that I didn’t make a note on, and I thought, you know, I’m still just going to thank them for coming by the booth and say, “If you have any other questions, I’d be happy to answer them.”
That kind of reopened the conversation up, which was really helpful, because I couldn’t remember what we had talked about with those particular customers. They said, “So, thanks for showing me this and that, and I did have one more question.”
And that kind of jogged my memory. I do think people just want that special touch, if you’ve got the time to do it. Just to make them feel like, hey, we did have that connection, you know? It was genuine, and I think they appreciate that a lot.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Nice. Nice. So on the webinar today, we’re going to go through a short list of action items that you can take right now to make your lead follow-up successful, and so that was sort of point number one here on our list. And that’s personal emails. And I just love, Michelle, that you get right in there and email each person, and sometimes, I know for me, there’ve just been too many.
And so one tactic you guys can use, of course, is just split them up with your team. Or, if you don’t have a team, if it’s just you, and I know there are a couple people on the call who are like, “Hey, I’m all sales and all marketing.” I get it. And so another way to do that is just pick a number, like I’m going to pick the top ten percent.
Going to go through and put them into piles, like you said, Michelle. I have my resellers in this pile, my prospects in this pile, my hot prospects in this other pile, right? Press over here. And pick the top ten percent, or pick a number like 30 or 50, tackle those. And then you can kind of work through them after that.
And if you take the time to do it, like you said, Michelle, your customer is really going to feel that personal touch. Doesn’t need to be a long, glorious email, it can just be like, hey, it’s a little touch.
Michelle Maddox: Yeah, absolutely. I also think there’s no time … It doesn’t expire. And I get stuff from companies for months and months about NAB. I think, even if you’re two or three weeks out, and you’re still emailing, that’s fine. Maybe if it’s just you, that’s okay. Maybe take like five and say, I’m going to do five a day until these are done.
And that’s easy. I’ve also written one email and sent the exact same email with different personalized touches to different groups of people, just because that makes my life a little easier. But it’s just those one or two little personalized touches inside that email that has all of the same information, that makes a difference.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Yeah, yeah. It’s true. Just so you guys know, we are using the chat, and if you have any question at all, just pop it in the chat. We’re going to also have QA at the end, so if we don’t happen to hit your question as Michelle and I are talking, we will take care of everything at the end and answer everybody’s questions.
And then also, you’ll be able to hit Michelle up on Twitter, or email, is it, or LinkedIn?
Michelle Maddox: Either one is fine-
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Where-
Michelle Maddox: LinkedIn, email, Twitter, Instagram-
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Okay, Twitter, email, we’ll put those in the chat as well, and then my info as well, so you can hit us up afterward. So feel free to throw your questions into the chat. So, the second point we talked about, Michelle, when we were talking on Friday, we kind of got together and chatted through some of our top tips on Friday.
We talked about segmenting leads. Tell us a little bit more about how you split your leads up.
Michelle Maddox: Yeah, so we always get the lead gen system from NAB or IBC, and so you’re scanning badges. And I used to do questionnaires on there, and I’d have my team go through and say which product they were interested in. That never worked as well as I wanted it to.
So this year we tried something different, which I felt worked much better. I just left it open for notes. And so we tried to tag-team people in the booth. So while one person was demoing, another person was scanning and taking notes. And I think, Cindy, you used the term concierge, which, I love that. That is awesome.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Yeah.
Michelle Maddox: If you have the ability to do that, that’s great. And if not, you know, just scanning and making a quick note right after. I always send a really lighthearted email after NAB, and then I’ll go through and segment out people and really focus on everybody who was interested in PrimeTranscoder. I’ll go and send a very specific email to them about, here are five points about PrimeTranscoder. Here’s where you can purchase it, here’s where you can download the demo.
So yeah, I think segmenting is important, especially … For me, it’s all about at the show. If I can … As much pre-work as I can do when I’m at the show, the more successful I am when I come back from the show.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Gotcha, gotcha. And lead scoring can come into play on this too, and lead scoring doesn’t have to be a big crazy rubric and difficult thing. It can be, they went to the show, they get 50 points, they call us, they get 100 points, they open an email, they get one point. You can do that stuff.
You can do simpler things, too. Like, rate them on a scale of one, two, or three. If you choose, for example, to use three as your hot lead, that’d be one way to do it. Because you can add the points up, and the more points, the more important it is that you contact them sooner. Right? That would be one way to do it.
Another way to do it is put ones, those are your hot leads and stuff. So lead scoring can really work for any size company. Oh, something you said about, at the show when you’re writing on the cards, I found myself without a pen once in a while, at the show. And so I learned this from someone I work with, he said he’d take his cards, and if it’s someone he wants to call back, he’d indent the card with his thumbnail one time.
Michelle Maddox: Oh, wow.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: But if they were really a hot lead, he’d indent the card two times, or maybe three times. Because you can always feel that afterward, and I thought it was so brilliant. So I wanted to share that as well.
Michelle Maddox: That’s really smart, I never thought about that, but that’s kind of a covert way of doing it, then having that note on there. I’ve also known people that had a little business card holder, and on the right, they were their hot leads, and on the left, they were maybe not so hot leads.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Nice.
Michelle Maddox: So that might work too.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: That’s awesome. I use an app on my phone, so I take my phone and scan the card right there on the spot, and it sucks it into the database I use, which is great, because then, if you can do that, you can just, right there on the fly, and stuff, when you have a breather during a show.
Hey, let’s jump into our third little topic, and that is, Michelle, you were telling me how you started Imagine Products, and what you did with social media, and I love that. Can you share that with everybody?
Michelle Maddox: Yeah, absolutely. So I was still in college when I started at Imagine Products, I was an intern. Dan and I met at a show that they were having … Career fair, that’s what it is, at the college. And he hired me as an intern, and then two weeks later I went to NAB for the first time. So I knew nothing about the company or the industry.
It was a baptism by fire kind of situation. I was standing in the booth trying to figure out what the heck I could do to be useful, and I just started Tweeting at people, actually, on the show floor, and just thanking them and saying, “Thanks for coming by the booth.”
I always put the booth number and what they talked about. And people loved that! They loved that personal connection, and then that was getting us more retweets, people were sharing it, they were thanking us back. And that really helped connect with those people, and I think it impressed my boss because now I work here full time.
So I thought that was really good. If you have somebody that can do that on the show floor, I highly recommend it. It makes it a little more interactive.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: That is great. So at the show, part of this really cool work that I’m doing with NAB Show… one of the fun things I got to do was hold marketing clinics with some of the first and second-year exhibitors. They’d come in and bring their top marketing issue and we’d dig into it, and when they left, they had a plan.
We did 20 minutes, boom. But I bring this up because at the end, we’d do a selfie. And so I’m still posting those from the show. I didn’t get through them all yet because I just didn’t want to do them all on one day, so I’m kind of rolling them out.
And I’m thinking, do you think you have to do it all during the show … If we have some exhibitors on this call, do you think it’s fine for them to do stuff like that later? What’s your feeling?
Michelle Maddox: Oh, absolutely. I think people, especially people that can’t go to NAB, I think that they’re so interested in it. I always come home, and one of the first things I do is, I put all of our pictures up in a NAB, whatever the year is, album on Facebook.
And that gets so many views for us. And I do a behind the scenes; I do what we do at night. A lot of the networking stuff. Because I think people don’t realize that, for the exhibitors, it is not just on the show floor. I did multiple 12 and 14 hour days that week.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Totally.
Michelle Maddox: And I think that people are interested in that, they want to see that, they want to see how we unwind at the end of the week when it’s finally all over, and what we’re toasting, and things like that. I get more likes on my giant beer at the Hofbrauhaus than some of the other things. I think that’s really important. I think connecting with your customers and your audience, and making yourself … kind of more humanized, you know? This is a big deal, we’re here for a whole week, and we’ve made a lot of connections. I think people love that, I think you can push those posts out anytime. I’m still working on things, we did a podcast, and I’m going to turn it into a video, and I’m going to be pushing stuff out for weeks to come, and I think that’s totally acceptable with NAB.
All the big companies do it, I will still be getting emails in June saying, “Hey, remember what we did at NAB? You liked this, you should come and look at it again.” We’ll get that and we’ll send that out all until, pretty much, within a year and a little further after that.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Nice. Nice. I love that. Yeah, because it’s relevant, and people are super interested. I’m glad you mentioned about the behind the scenes thing because you said that you often do that in your first email. So one of the topics we wanted to touch on is, when do you send your first email out?
When do you do that first touch, and what kind of stuff do you include in it?
Michelle Maddox: I try really hard to do it that first week after NAB. That’s just my strategy, but like I said, there are some companies that I will get a first touch 30 days after NAB. As soon as it fits into your schedule is probably the best answer. I like to do a really light-hearted … We won a couple awards this year, so I put that in our email blast.
And then I said, “Hey, if you want to see all of our pictures, they’re on Facebook.” I really didn’t do a whole lot of selling or marketing in the first email, as far as specific products are concerned. It was more like an overview of the entire show, and the company in general. Our open rate’s really high, and a lot of people really are interested in that.
And set up, take down, things like that. They want to see how all of those work, because it’s a huge show to put on. It’s a huge deal to put on NAB, and putting together a booth of that size is a big deal, and I think people are really interested in stuff like that.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Yeah, yeah. I love the behind the scenes stuff, too, that’s always so interesting to see process and how stuff works. I like it. A lot of the clients I work with at NAB are smaller exhibitors, some of them are larger as well. In any case, whatever size that company is, one of the things we’ll do is send out a quick email with a photo of everybody in the booth, because that helps the reader remember, oh yeah, I talked with those guys, I remember.
Just gives that visual in addition to the other info that’s in the email. Or maybe even like a little animated GIF that’s people waving, or something like that. I did that in my email, I have little me waving and stuff. Just boom, that you can send out quickly, and that way you don’t have to overthink it. So if you guys on the call are feeling like, oh my gosh, I don’t have it together yet, no worries.
If you have any shot of the booth, or some staff that were in the booth, you could put that in an email today, and just say, “Hey, great to see you at the show, if you need anything else, just reply back to me.”
Michelle Maddox: I think that’s a really good point, too, because as overwhelmed as the exhibitors feel, I think that the attendees feel the exact same way, and sometimes you need that visual reminder of, oh, I did talk to that person. Now that I’ve seen them, I do remember this company, I remember that product I was interested in. Because you’re connecting with a person, not necessarily with a product.
Assuming that you’ve talked to somebody. So we always push out the booth crew, is what I call them. Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Cindy.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Now, we’ve got a question on here. You’re asking how to make the animated GIFs. And so, a couple of ways to do that. I use Telestream’s ScreenFlow, but you can use other software as well. Camtasia… probably iMovie does it too. But in ScreenFlow you just bring the file in, and then I just take a really, really short clip, literally a couple of seconds, or just a second, and then trim everything else out. And then you do file, save as, or export to GIF.
Right? That’s it. Super simple. The other day I had one company I was working with where they’d done an interview with a magazine, and so I didn’t actually have the footage … I could watch it on YouTube, but I couldn’t download it, unless I was going to start playing some tricks on how to download it.
So for that, I just did a screen capture of a couple seconds of it, and then edited it down. So that’s how you do the animated GIFs. If you need more technical info, you can hit me up, and I’m happy to walk you through it as well. Yeah, great question. Super great question about that.
Michelle, circling back to our email. You talked about doing a lot of personal emails. Do you also do an email series, do you do an e-blast, or only personal emails, what’s your feeling about that?
Michelle Maddox: I try to do a combination of both. I’ve found that if I email about every three weeks, I do like a monthly newsletter of what’s going on, and I don’t just cover my company. I try to keep it educational and informative and entertainment, you know, entertaining for the industry as a whole.
There were a couple things at NAB that I saw that we just felt were cool. We will push that out. Or if one of our partner companies won an award, or they’re doing something interesting, we will include that in our newsletter. I do personal, and I do general, both. It comes down to time, and what else I’ve got going on.
I know that’s everybody’s answer, so I think that you want to find that sweet spot. You don’t want to hit our customers up so much they’re like, “Okay, I … No, I don’t want to do this anymore and I’m going to unsubscribe.” You don’t want that to happen. There are going to be unsubscribes, but if you can keep them low, I think that’s preferable.
But yeah, doing the personalized ones when you can, and doing the general ones, and then I’m trying to do some more drip campaigns. I’ve not been that religious about it, but I’m trying to get better about it, so I think … Find a strategy and stick to it, and maybe work it until you find that it’s good for you.
I’ve found three weeks is perfect for our audience. That’s what we stick to, usually.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: I like it. And I like the combo of the personal emails, where you’re just going into your own email client and emailing people, and picking up the phone and calling them, right? So you have that personal touch. And then what you said, drip campaigns, or some kind of automated system, I’m a huge fan of that, of course.
So that you have both. So if you do get overwhelmed and busy and can’t follow up on everything, that you do have some kind of automated system in place as well. And you can use that to your advantage as well, so if you didn’t get a chance to segment your leads at the show, if you are just standing there with a ton of names and zero data about them, I’ve been there.
Where I worked with someone else and they didn’t take notes at the show. In that case you can actually use some of the automated systems to help you segment and follow up to make sure that info’s relevant so that you aren’t just crushing them with a novel of info. You can make it really specific to what they want.
With some of the automated systems you could say, “Hey, thanks for coming by our booth, and if you need any more info on product A, product B, product C, or technology A, technology B, technology C.” And when they click technology A, boom, they’ve just segmented themselves. Now you can automatically put them into sequences that you maybe have set up now.
Or you’re going to set it up next month, when you have time, for product A or technology A, and you send them a little tidbit. And maybe it does, like you said, Michelle, include info about another company. Because we always want to be helpful, “what’s in it for me,” (WIIFM) – meaning what’s in it for the customer, the person reading it.
They want to read it and see, what does it do for them, and if that’s in the content, then they’re going to keep reading. And so that’s a great way to segment and use automated tools along with, I love your personal touch stuff. You talked about a tool that you use for your emails. Can you share that with everybody?
Michelle Maddox: Yeah, we were using Constant Contact, we grew out of that a little bit. And now we’re using Delivra, which is an Indianapolis-based company, and I love them. I can call them up anytime; I almost always get somebody on the phone immediately. And they are more than happy to help me with any issues.
I’ve messed with HTML code before and gotten myself into trouble, and very little scolding from them, they’ll fix it for me. I really like them; I think they’re affordable, I love their templates. They’re so simple to use, and any tie we send out an email, we see a spike in sales and a spike in demo downloads. So email is a big thing for us.
Like I said, you got to find that sweet spot. You don’t want to pester people, but you want to keep yourselves in the forefront of their minds.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: So Delivra, does it … Spelled just like it sounds?
Michelle Maddox: Delivra. It’s D-E-L-V-I-R-A. Yeah, Delivra.com.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Okay, cool.
Michelle Maddox: They’re great.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Okay, good. And to your point about following up on people with information, and then they start doing more downloads and more demos and stuff like that, there’s someone that I was working with that was having three, four downloads a month, and then we put a drip campaign in place and it bumped up to like 30.
And that is because it’s helpful, and people go, oh yeah, I meant to download that stuff. So that is a really good way to do it, and I’m glad you mentioned it. And the one that I use, just to share with you, I use InfusionSoft, and I’m biased to that because I’m an InfusionSoft Certified Partner, so I sell that as well as set it up and stuff like that.
That’s the one I like. There are so many good choices out there. Tons of tools are great, and the important part is what you’re bringing to the table, Michelle, it’s like how to use it, and how to deliver the info and how to make it relevant. That’s the important bit of it, is the content we’re putting into the tool. So yeah, definitely.
All right. So for everybody on the call… Michelle, if you were going to just give someone one thing, like if someone showed up and they maybe haven’t had a chance to do any follow up, or if they’ve done one quick thing, what would you tell them to do as a first step?
Michelle Maddox: I always come home and get organized. I think that that, it helps you visualize what you need to do, and it makes it a little more attainable, so you don’t just look at this stack of business cards and you’re like, man, I don’t know when I’m going to get to that. Hold yourself accountable, make a goal, organize yourself, split them out into segments if you can, or different groups.
And then just say, I am going to get these five done before lunchtime, that’s my thing, because the afternoon gets crazy for me. I’m always doing different things. So my goal is always, I’m going to get this done before lunchtime, and then if it doesn’t happen, you still have the afternoon.
But I think being organized is probably the best thing, and just do your best. I really don’t think there’s a timeframe for NAB. I’m planning NAB 2019, I was planning it before 2018 started. NAB is like around the calendar now, anymore. I don’t think there’s a timeframe. Do what you can, hit them up when you can, get organized, all of that will make it a little bit easier.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: OK, so we’re going to recap, and then I know there are some questions, we’re going to go through all of the questions, so just feel free to stay on and we’ll take care of everybody. So we talked about doing personal emails, that that really is one of the tactics that we want to use.
Splitting up the leads, which is a great thing to do, segmenting. Thinking about tying in social media during the show, but after is totally good as well. And then also using a tool like Delivra or InfusionSoft or Constant Contact, or Marketo, or depending on your company size, to have an automated system to work in … I like to think of it as in parallel with our personal touches.
Get organized, right? So those are some of the top tips. And then yeah, Fallon, if you can go ahead, we did put together a little follow-up plan list, so we’re going to shoot the link into the chat, and you guys are welcome to download that, that’s a little plan that we’ve put together as well.
All right, I’m going to go through the Q&A. So let’s see, what’s a good tool for drip campaigns? We kind of hit that, so Delivra, Constant Contact, InfusionSoft, Marketo, HubSpot. Some of those are choices out there right now. That’s part of my specialty, is working in marketing automation, so if anybody wants to just chat offline, happy to do that as well, just a conversation’s all good.
What’s the business card app we use for scanning? So the one that I use, then, is InfusionSoft. And you can kind of see it on the screen there. So we take a picture of it, you just would hit the photo, take a photo button right there, and then it takes the info into your database. There’s tons of other products out there that do that as well.
Do you use anything like that, Michelle? A card scanner or something?
Michelle Maddox: I don’t, but I just jotted down InfusionSoft. I’m not using anything yet, but maybe I will for IBC.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: And there are other ones too, there are third party ones that you can tie into Excel, or something like that, too. So there’s a lot of choices out there as well that can do that. What else, just shooting through here. Some of these, I think we answered during our conversation.
What other questions do you guys have? Go ahead and put them into the chat box if you have other questions, and we’re using the chat, so if you can use the chat box as well. Evernote is good for scanning cards into the database. Yes, I love Evernote. Total fan. The show notes that Michelle and I put together are on Evernote, and we shared them that way.
Okay, and Firstlink is not recommended, according to one of our participants here as well, so that’s good to know. So Evernote, nice. Awesome. Nick!
Nick: Cindy!
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Come on in, what would you like to say? Hi.
Nick: Hi, hey. How are you doing, Michelle, how are you doing?
Michelle Maddox: Good, thank you. Nice to see you, Nick.
Nick: You too, you too. Again, I just wanted to chime in real quick; this is our last entry into the webinar series for the NAB show season. I just wanted to say thank you to you both, and Cindy, thank you so much for being the most terrific hostess. This has just been a great experience; I hope it’s been a great experience for all of the participants, all of our exhibitors.
I hope this was a great pre-show tool. Hopefully, this is great for a post-show wrap-up. I just wanted to say, Fallon, if you could put my information in the chat, and if anyone has any post-show questions, any questions moving forward for 2019, which, just like Michelle has said, we’ve already started planning previously to 2018, and now in planning mode again.
So again, I just wanted to say thank you and if anybody needs me, feel free to please reach out.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Nice. So any other questions from our callers from our audience today? Yes, so Nick, if you are still here, we have a question saying, can you explain the inclusive material handling for 2019?
Michelle Maddox: I think that’s the big question on everybody’s mind, I’m interested to hear that answer too.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: And so if you’re able to answer that now, Nick, great. Otherwise, we can circle back to people, whatever’s comfortable for you.
Nick: Sure, yeah. And we can do that as well. But what I will say is, we, working with a partner of ours, Tradeshow Logic, that interviewed a lot of exhibitors on-site, both last year and this year, identifying that material handling was one of the larger exhibitor points of improvement, pain points, what we identified them as.
So the material handling is something that, we’re trying to make it as simple and as painless as possible for exhibitors, having that three eighty-five, three dollars, eighty-five cents per square foot for unlimited material handling, so it’s going to save a lot of exhibitors, both large and small, hopefully lots of money.
We project savings for a large majority of our exhibitors, and we’ve set up a dedicated email account with our partners at Tradeshow Logic, that’s nabcares@nab.org, so a very, very simple email address to where they can actually … All of their material handling questions for the 2019 show and moving forward can be answered by our partners, who are helping us set this up.
But we think it’s going to be a painless and money-saving tactic to employ for 2019 and moving forward.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: So Nick, there’s a couple people chatting and wondering if it might increase the cost for them, and I’m going to guess that for some of the small exhibitors, they’re concerned that it’s going to bump their costs up. I just wondered if you wanted to comment on that.
Nick: Well, that’s certainly possible. Again, without knowing someone’s booth size or their typical usage of product, a lot of our smaller booths, obviously, are accustomed to privately-owned vehicles hand-carrying in during move-in, a lot of linear booths, 10 by 10s, 10 by 20s.
So that is certainly possible. I wouldn’t know, I’d have to do a case-by-case discussion with individuals. But we are projecting an 87% savings across the board for the-
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Amazing.
Nick: Entire exhibitor community for NAB show. Yeah.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Amazing. Now, some people are chatting in and saying they’re appreciative of this, and that the industry’s talking about it, and other people are hoping that other shows follow suit as well. And then we do have some other people chatting and saying their material handling fees were zero, so they’re worried about it.
So we have a kind of mixed group of comments. I would say, you’ve already said, Nick, people, can reach out to you if they want to talk-
Nick: Yeah.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Talk further. Is that fine if they reach out to you on this as well?
Nick: Certainly, reach out to me, and certainly, as I said, nabcares@nab.org, we established that private, dedicated email line for those exact questions.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Nice.
Nick: But of course, feel free to reach out to me as well.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Okay, good. And we put that email address in the chat as well, so you guys can snag that out of there. Good, good.
Michelle Maddox: I want to say one thing about our point of view for that. We are one of the companies that, we don’t spend a lot on it, usually, but what we discussed was how much time it could save us. So we do generally hand-carry in, and it takes hours, and we’re exhausted and sweaty and tired and dirty, and so eliminating that, consolidating our day a little bit and having it brought into the booth.
You won’t have to spend as much time doing that, so one of the suggestions we made when we were selecting our booth was maybe having a specific time, so that I could have an appointment Friday morning at 9 a.m., for example, would be our time slot to have all of our stuff carried in. And then you’ve got all day, and if I don’t have to spend three to four hours carrying stuff in, I will be done with booth setup a lot earlier and I can move onto maybe laying by the pool, or getting ready for the show, or whatever it is that you might want to do.
Nick: Right, yeah.
Michelle Maddox: That’s something to consider for sure.
Nick: Yeah, just to piggyback off of Michelle’s comment, too, when we … Cindy, and you spoke about having, working with a lot of smaller exhibitors, people that are in 10 by 10, 10 by 20 linear booths, where that person is the end all be all of the booth, right? They’re the person …
They may not only be the salesperson, the marketing person, they’re also the logistics person, they’re getting all product to and fro the Las Vegas Convention Center for the show, so that person, not only are they having to worry about overseeing, or actually physically doing the move-in, but that’s also four hours or five hours on the back end where they don’t have to worry about the move-out either.
And you can start worrying about the actual implications of your lead follow-up, rather than, okay, how am I getting all of my crates back home. That’s part of it too. And then having the unlimited handling of the product is … Maybe that allows folks to totally redesign their space, whereas they’re worried, saying, hey, we don’t have the budget to bring in all the product we want.
But now, maybe that leads to some more exciting product displays moving forward.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: I like that. So you think that it could, for some people, open up the options regarding their booth, and will maybe make things more possible for them.
Nick: Yeah, yeah. I think it opens up a lot of new booth design possibilities for 2019 for a lot of folks that maybe felt constricted before due to some budget.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: You know, and Michelle, when you were talking about the time savings, one of the things I think about with any expense, whether it’s a marketing expense or whatever it is, we can think of it as an investment too, it depends on what words you want to put to it is, what’s your time worth? What’s our time worth?
If you look at your own time, folks on the call here, would you say it’s worth a hundred dollars an hour, two hundred dollars an hour, five hundred dollars an hour, whatever? Go crazy. Whatever that number is if you can take that and do what you do best, and then offload the things that are mundane tasks, that could be a good thing.
So it’s just another perspective.
Michelle Maddox: Yeah, I agree. I think Nick’s right. I am the end-all-be-all, I do all of the logistics for NAB. So worrying about, how am I going to get the muscle to get some of our stuff in that is quite heavy, I don’t have to worry about that now. That takes my attention to something else that might be a little bit more important, to be quite honest with you.
The other nice thing is that maybe I don’t need so many people to setup. So maybe you can offset some of that cost with, instead of having four or five people for setup, you’ve got two or three because you don’t have to worry about carrying the hundred pound boxes and being exhausted after lugging all that stuff in.
That is one thing we’ve considered is, making our setup crew a little bit smaller, because the load-in is the biggest deal for us, and the same thing on the other end, the load-out. Carrying those boxes and getting it all the way out to the truck, all the way out into the parking lot is a big deal.
And it’s certainly something that you have to consider when you’re setting up for NAB and when you’re planning it and putting everything together.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Well, I see we have a lot of mixed feelings in terms of people’s opinions in the comments, and I appreciate everyone’s candor, and it is hard to know how to make the best decision to meet everyone’s needs, and yet, I believe that’s what everyone’s trying to do here, is try to come to a choice, a decision that is the best for all exhibitors, and hopefully, hopefully it can benefit everybody as much as possible.
So that said, thank you all for being here to look at lead follow-up, and if you need anything more, hit us up on LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and thank you, Michelle.
Michelle Maddox: Thank you, thanks for having me. This was fun.
Cindy Zuelsdorf: Thank you.
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