“Trade Shows: Single Most Important Way to Win – Virtual or In-person” with Jefferson Davis and Cindy Zuelsdorf. Check out the replay here.
💰 Jefferson is all about getting back to in-person events and ensuring you have solid ROI – especially crucial for your first event back this year.
If you are gearing up to do in-person trade shows again soon or at some point this year, you’ll love this session that Jefferson Davis and I put together for you! You hear about the number one thing you can do to ensure you get ROI out of your show? We got into so much great stuff that you’ll love:
– Shows and events 2.0… are we going smaller, different?
– Should we do the same ol same ol or change it up for the future?
– What will actually make them successful?
– Are we still going to spend 1/3+ of our marketing budget on shows?
– Should we measure things differently?
– The number one thing you can do to ensure you get ROI out of your show?
Jefferson likes to say about shows that “we survived virtual, but we thrive on live.”
Here’s the transcript:
Cindy:
Hey, I’m so glad you all are here. Welcome. If you are thinking about getting back to in-person trade shows or if you’re just going to do a few more virtual events for the year, I have the most excellent guest today, Jefferson Davis. And I met him at an AB show several years ago, and he has the single most important thing to do to make sure when you get back to live events or do your next virtual event that it’s profitable, which is so important for every single person here, especially small to medium-size exhibitors, but every size exhibitor. So today, you’re going to find out what you need to do to be sure you’re profitable when you get back to live events. Hey, Jefferson, how are you?
Jefferson:
Excellent. I am so ready to get back to live. We’ve been doing a lot of virtual exhibit training, and if we’ve learned anything about the virtual world, it’s not going to replace live shows. So virtual will not be the new normal when it comes to trade shows.
Cindy:
Okay. Okay. Yeah, I was at the DPP show a bunch this week there, and we’ve had NAB Amplify, and then I know there’s lots of other people on here who have done different shows. We had HPA and a whole bunch of stuff in the broadcast media industry. Then for all my friends on here who are in other industries, we have tons of other virtual shows and events happening too all the time. So we’re going to cover three things today, and then we’re just going to do 20, 30 minutes. You guys have time for Q&A at the end for sure, and got some little special info for you at the end, if that’s okay too. And that’s it. That’s what we’re doing. We’re here to benefit you. So starting with the first and most important thing,
Jefferson, you said you’ve got the top thing that people need to do to be sure they are going to succeed when they go back to in-person shows. Tell us.
Jefferson:
Okay. Yeah. So the question that I always ask exhibitors, I’ve spoke at exhibitor show for 16 years, I’ve done thousands of webinars, hundreds of live workshops, and I always ask a few questions and one of them is this: when you fill out that space contract and you send in that check, what are you buying? So people will say, “Concrete, real estate, location, visibility, brand awareness, leads.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, you kind of are buying those, but what are you really buying? What is the magic power of trade shows? What is it?” I would say this: trade shows are about-face, right? Face, putting your company identity, putting your product services, putting your staff face-to-face with people that can influence and make buying decisions. So that being said, what is the number one key? If there’s one thing you got to do to win… Cindy, drum roll, please.
Cindy:
Yes, Jefferson, the number one thing…
Jefferson:
You have to attract enough of the right people to your exhibit. So there’s a lot in that. Who are the right people, and how much is enough? For years, most of us, when we look at trade shows, we look at the numbers. The organizer will go, “We’re going to have 5000. We’re going to have 10000. We’re going to have 15000 attendees,” and we get all starry-eyed and we’re like, “Wow, 15000 attendees.” Well, here’s the fact, here’s the truth. I’m going to call it as it is, like Jack Nicholson said in that movie, “You couldn’t handle…” The truth is you can’t handle 5000. You couldn’t handle 10000. You couldn’t handle 15000. So the most important number as an exhibitor for you to kind of win the game is to determine how much is enough.
Jefferson:
So what we teach exhibitors is a formula to take the number of exhibiting hours in a show, so let’s say a show has 20 open exhibit hours, say you’re in a small booth, 10 by 10, you have two booth staff and your staffing is going to be two people on duty for all the open hours, so 20 hours times two would give you what? 40 staff hours. That’s what I call your window of opportunity. That’s what I call what you’re really buying. Sure, brand awareness and all this other stuff, airy-fairy things, you can get into that. But I’m talking about the magic power here is again, getting face-to-face, one-to-one with people.
Jefferson:
So when you take 20 hours times two staff, and then from there you set a target number of interactions per hour per staffer, I always go in the three to five range, three conservative, four moderate, five aggressive. So if you have 20 hours and two staff and 40 hours of capacity for face-to-face interaction, then you’ve got anywhere from 120 to 200 interactions. Doesn’t that make your life a lot easier? You don’t have to sit and wring your hands and worry and, “Oh my goodness. Is attendance up or is it down? I heard that attendance is going to be down by 25% from the pandemic,” which it probably will be in most shows, but if you take it from this angle, you don’t really care about that number. For you, if you’re playing it conservatively, it’s 120 interactions. Now, the question becomes, who are the right people?
Cindy:
Right. We talked about your hit list, your hotlist yesterday, which I thought was perfect.
Jefferson:
Yeah. Thank you. Let me go into that a little bit. When I build my pre-show marketing campaigns, I really have two audiences. I have the larger audience, and then I go through the list, and I narrowed down to maybe a top 25. So the question I would ask would be: if you could only see, interact with 25 people during the entire show, and that was it, that’s all you’re allowed to get, who would be the most useful, the most valuable 25 that if you could get face-to-face one-to-one with them, it would make the entire show worth 10 times the investment? That type of campaign is what I call a high-profile campaign. I will pull out all the stops when I run that.
Jefferson:
But on the other one, I’m going to use more of a one-to-many media, social media, email, landing pages. I’m going to look at the show opportunities. All I’m trying to do to win the game is get as much of my interaction capacity spoken for before the doors open. So if I have the interaction capacity and I’ve set a goal of 120 interactions… And again, I don’t care if you’re in a 10 by 10, a 20 by 20, or 100 by 100. So I have this capacity, and if I can get most of that spoken for before the doors open, it’s what I call winning the game before kickoff. That’s the game I want to play. Before we even step into the ring, I want to know I’ve got this one, right? Cindy, what do you think?
Cindy:
I think it’s great, and I think that that is been true from day one is that we need to know who we want to reach and have that hotlist that we’re going to call before we walk into the show floor. I guess I want to know, and I saw a couple of comments here in the chat is like, “Well, how is that different today? Why is today different in terms of going back to live events?”
Jefferson:
Okay. Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of work on really compiling all of the research and the data coming out about shows, and it’s going to be more important than ever, especially for smaller exhibitors because there is going to be less attendance, at least in what we’re calling the bridge year, 2021 for our industry as we begin to gradually reopen. We’re calling it the bridge here. This is the bridge to get back to, hopefully, where we were in 2019. So the first thing is going to be different is going to be overall attendance is going to be down, anywhere from 20%, 40% to 50%. Again now, because you know, my secret formula, you’re not so worried about that. Other exhibitors will be ringing their hands and having the sleepless nights, but not you because you’ll know that, hey, if you can get into mind and on the agenda of 120 of the right people, it doesn’t matter.
Jefferson:
The second thing that’ll be different is, of course, the whole navigation and the look and feel. Most exhibit halls are going to have one single point of entrance, and they’re going to be monitoring capacity into the hall. There’ll be scanning badges to let X number of people into the hall. So you’re not going to see the optics of elbow to elbow like it was at NAB used to be, Cindy, right? The hall will be lighter. The aisles will be wider. What most shows are doing right now is they’re going to a 20 foot aisle instead of the normal 10 foot aisle. Some shows are even putting walls, barriers between the inline booths, which will make it even more harder because if you don’t identify and attract the right people and you do what I call exhibit by hope, which is rent space show up and hope, and you happen to get tucked into one of those inline booths where they have the eight foot barrier all the way out to the edge, you’re going to have literally a step in a quarter when the person gets near your booth.
Jefferson:
Nowadays, the biggest thing we’re seeing on show floors is attendees walking around half of them with their faces in their cell phone, and they don’t even see your booth. So don’t exhibit by hope. Today, you learn the magic formula. Get enough of the right people to your booth. Get in their mind, get on their agenda before the show opens. Understand that there’ll be less traffic in the hall. There’ll be one way in, one way out, the aisles are going to be wider, and there’s a percentage of people that are going to be very reluctant to approach and engage because of everything. Now with vaccines in distribution, this is all subject to change.
Cindy:
Getting on their agenda first is the most important thing.
Jefferson:
Yeah, yeah.
Cindy:
Live is a little bit different. You told me a story yesterday though about sending a package and doing this whole shock and awe thing to actually get people in the booth, which I thought was great. Would you mind just taking a minute and summarizing that because of I think that’s something I would totally like to use.
Jefferson:
Okay. So the strongest commitment that you can get… This is what you’re looking for. So let’s say that you have an exhibit interaction capacity of 120. That’s it. So you’re going to want your list to be 500 to 800 deep of only the right people. That way, you’re laser-focused. Because your response rate, if you’re going to 800 pre-registered attendees, is it possible that you can get in the mind on the agenda of 120? It absolutely is. I’m going to share with you my second secret. I call it planning a homing device on your target visitor.
Cindy:
I like this. I think this is brilliant.
Jefferson:
Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. I worked with a company that manufactures intraoral cameras for the dental industry. You know how you go to the dentist, they put that camera on? When I first met them, they were essentially chest-thumping and talking about bits, bites and bods, and talking way over the dentist’s head, and they were exhibiting by hope. They were running up showing. And I said, “Hey, let’s start targeting.” I said, “Who is the ideal target for you?” They said, “We want dentists that have at least three operatories” So they’re looking for dentists with three operatories. We were exhibiting at the Chicago Dental Show. We got a hold of the pre-registered list. We were able to go through it and sift it down. So we put together a shock and awe type mailer. What we used then was a priority mail, not the fake ones that you see in your mailbox, but we went to the post office and got the real priority mail envelope. Then we did a pre-show mailer by priority mail. We followed it up by email and phone. So we had mail, telephone, email.
Jefferson:
There were two levels of commitment. Write this down if you’re with me, following, “Yes, I’m coming to the show. Definitely going to come see you. Don’t know what day or time.” That’s the first level. The highest, the golden jealous of commitments is a confirmed appointment on their calendar, on yours. So we went out to and we targeted 300 pre-registered dentists. We mailed them a priority mail envelope with a lump in it, and it said, “Give us five minutes, five minutes at the Chicago Dental time. We’ll show you how to cut your patient consultation in half, we’ll show you how to double your acceptance rate, and we’ll show you how to get your insurance claims processed 50% faster.” Now, do you think we knew what our customer’s pain points were? Yes, and that’s what you got to know. So when you look at your list, you ask: what does your product service do? What problems? How can I help them?.
Jefferson:
We sent this letter, and we said, “Dr. Smith, on an average day in your practice, how many hours do you spend prescribing treatment to your patients? And what percentage of those patients actually accept your treatment plan?” And we said, “So what if you could cut that in half the time, double it and get that? Give us five minutes. We’ll show you how.” In the envelope, the homing device, I worked with the sales team. I said, “Tell me about dentists.” They said, “They’re high stress, they work bankers hours, and they golf.” “Oh, okay. Golf.” So we went out and we bought golf tees, not with our branding on it, not ours, but we made sure we had the spelling correct, and we bought 100 personalized golf tees.
Jefferson:
The tees costs us a whopping $6. So we’re about $4 into the priority mail envelope, $6 for the golf tee, and we put one tee in the envelope. We put a request for appointment form that they could go on and schedule online. They could call us, or they could send it to us. We mailed it, followed up, and the golf tee had their name. We said, “We have 99 more waiting for you at the booth.” We mailed that to 300 preregistered dentists. You ready for the results? Drum roll, please. 178 of those dentists show up at our booth.
Cindy:
Okay. Who on this call can think of something they could do and send out like that? I just think that’s brilliant. I thought it was great when you told me that yesterday.
Jefferson:
Half of something, send them half of something, the other half is at the booth.
Cindy:
Nice.
Jefferson:
And you don’t have to invest a lot of money, but I tell you what, I did it with another client that sells cryogenic gases. We were doing IBIE, the big baking show in Las Vegas. They wanted to get to the high level production. We sent them a, “Pencil us in for five minutes while you’re at IBIE to talk about your chilling and freezing challenges. Pencil us in.” Now, for them, because we narrowed down to 25, we federal expressed a letter of invitation with a big cherry box with our logo on it. When they flipped open the box, there was a pen and pencil set in it with their name engraved on it, but there was a problem. There’s a big hole in their box. The pen was at the boot. People want the pen more than the pencil, right? So we said, “Pencil us in for five minutes while you’re at.” 75%.
Cindy:
I think it’s brilliant.
Jefferson:
75% response. That’s what I call getting in the mind, getting on the agenda of the right people, putting a homing device on them, so when they hit that show floor, it’s buzzing, it’s beeping and it’s pulling them towards your booth.
Cindy:
Nice. So we’re going to hit our third point and then have a little bit more info and then some Q&A, but you talked about the most important thing to do to make sure your live event, your in-person trade show is successful when you get back to it this year. We’ve got booth designers on here, we’ve got exhibit houses, we have people who are exhibitors this call. Then now, you were talking about why live is different, and you gave that great example of how you can actually get someone in your booth. I really think that is awesome and everybody here could think of a way to do it. I guess I want to ask one thing because I see there’s a lot of smaller exhibitors on here as well. So when you and I were talking yesterday, you said there’s a way for the small exhibitors to kind of almost steal the show from some of the bigger exhibitors, no offense, bigger exhibitors here on this call. But what is the secret way that smaller folks can make this even better than before, Jefferson?
Jefferson:
Well, here’s the thing, you’re not going to outspend these big exhibitors> The largest client that I worked directly with over the years, hold your breath here, spent $20 million on one show. They literally had 100000 square feet of exhibit space in McCormick Place. So you’re not going to outspend those big companies, and you don’t have to. Again, the key for you as a small exhibitor is the way you can kind of slap the exhibit floor… That’s what I want, a slippery exhibit floor when the attendee comes in, if they slide to my booth.
Jefferson:
So number one is knowing your target in terms of the number. Number two is knowing who exactly represents the best type of visitor for you. Number three, knowing clearly what their pain points, their problems, their projects or goals or challenges are. Number four, reaching out and touching them multiple times leading up to showtime to get in their mind on their agenda. What you’re going for again is out of that verbal commitment that, “I’m coming to NAB show. Not sure what day, but definitely coming to see you.” The highest level you can go for, and it’s harder to get, but you got to put a lot of wood in the wagon to get that is the confirmed appointment. That way, you don’t really care because, again, the big exhibitors are typically going to get, by design, they’re going to get the best locations.
Jefferson:
As a smaller exhibitor, you know how they fill out shows? The organizer essentially puts the big rocks in first. They tend to put them off the main aisle depending on how it’s laid out, and then they fill the show in with your medium and then your small ones. So don’t freak out about your location either. A lot of times, I have exhibitors… We’ve evaluated… I got my E3 shirt on. We’ve evaluated 35000 booths. We’ve stood in front of with an iPad, like Cindy mentioned. You’d be amazed at how many times we come up to a small booth and they’re in a bad location, and the booth staffer is sitting in the booth, head down on his cell phone complaining about no traffic and blaming the show. And I asked, “What did you do before the show to kind of set your foundation?’ They’re like, “It’s not my job to promote. It’s the show organizer’s.” Talk about shooting yourself in both feet twice.
Cindy:
Oh my gosh. Right? Sad. It’s makes me cry, actually. I’m going to cry.
Jefferson:
Yeah. Yeah, it is really hard to see. But as a smaller exhibitor again, just keep in mind, you don’t need hundreds or thousands of people. For most of you, like Cindy said, if you take that top 25 lists there and you could only get those 25, you would have an incredible show. The other thing that I want to stress is to think about your target audience in a triangle. At the base of the triangle would be your customers, your active and your inactive. You want to be touching them always around a show because that’s when the competition’s knocking very hard at the door. Circle the wagons around your customers. But also, they represent cross-sell opportunities, advocacy opportunities, maybe chance to get testimonials.
Jefferson:
The low-hanging fruit… I’ve helped clients deliver $800 million in signed contracts from trade shows that we can track, $800 million. Most of that didn’t just fall out of the sky. It was prospects that are already in your sales pipeline. Get with your sales team and ask, “Who are you currently in dialogue with? And how can we use the energy and the excitement and our product demonstration and our technical team and our CEO?” Use the show to move them one step closer. Then that third side, so base of the pyramid, customers, right side, prospects, left side, potential new opportunities. If you take a balanced approach to customer prospect new opportunities and you do the things we’ve talked about, you’ll win at every show you do.
Cindy:
I love that. I love that, Jefferson. You said it so well. Some of this just feels like common sense, but some of it, at least as we’re all sitting here getting ready to get back to our live events, we need a plan because there feels like so much we can do and it’s really taking the things that work and applying them. So to recap, we talked about the number one thing you need to do to succeed, which you said is get those people, engage with them before the show, and what’s new in live events. So we looked at that, and we also talked about the bonus around small exhibitors that they can actually steal the show, which is super cool. I see a lot of you have questions here. I wondered if I can just take two minutes and show you something that’s super close to my heart and share that.
Cindy:
I’ve been taking the things that we do with our clients and putting them together so that this would help you get organized so much before your show. So I’m just going to share my screen super fast here for a second. I put the course together that gives you everything you need to prep for a show, so you can use a white paper or guide. But in particular, the one on your best lead follow-up, or what we’ve been talking about here is your trade show promo, these courses will get you ready for your show and you can take the things that we do with our clients and learn them yourself and put them to work. So Kristin’s going to pop a link for that in the chat here. But I just want to share with you guys everything that we do because you can take that and use it for yourselves. A lot of you on the call, we work with day in and day out, and then there’s folks here who you can learn from what we’re doing, take it and actually make it into your swipe file and take it in and use it.
Cindy:
So the course is super affordable. So it’s not just for business owners and CEOs. It’s actually for the people supporting the business as well. So I just wanted to share that because if you’re feeling overwhelmed with your marketing at all, or you don’t know what to do and where to head with it, this is the perfect thing for you. So I wanted to share that. Let’s come back to your questions. Kristin, there’s so many questions. Do you want me to read them off, or do you want to pop on camera and read them to us and help us out? What’s easy for you?
Kristin:
I can read some questions if you’d like. Is there one in particular? Was there a person you’d like me to highlight?
Cindy:
I haven’t looked at the chat. Just give us some questions. I saw a bunch of comes through. Let’s hear them.
Kristin:
Yosenia asked, “What are your thoughts about matchmaking platforms to help drive quality connections? Is this nice to have or is it a must-have?”
Jefferson:
I am all for it. I speak to the show organizers through IW a lot, and I try to get it through their brains that… This is the question I asked them: when it comes to the expo part of your annual meeting, what business are you in? A lot of them struggled to answer the question. I was speaking on 9/11 in Washington, DC, about three years ago, 150 organizers, and I asked that question and they’re like, “Delivering great experiences.” I don’t want airy, fairy answers. I want, what business are you in? And I said, “Here’s my take. You’re in the business of matching supply and demand when it comes to your exhibit hall.”
Jefferson:
Anything you do to augment and make it easier for the buyer to find the supplier, good. Anything you do to make it easier for the supplier to find the buyer, good. Anything you do to block that, bad. So the number one thing I’m pressing show organizers on right now is to get product interest on the attendee registration form when the attendee registers and start sharing that with exhibitors. I want to know how many people attending the show have an interest in my category. More shows are starting to do this. So, yes, Yosenia, if the show has a matchmaking, has the ability electronically where the attendee enters their data, the exhibitor renters theirs and it magically pulls the two of them together, that’s where we need to go as an industry. It’ll make it better for everybody because the truth is…
Jefferson:
Here’s what they’re not telling you. Write this down. This is going to blow your mind. The average attendee that goes to a live B2B show only crosses the carpet line of about 26 booths over their entire time in the show. And this one’s really going to get you. 60% of their stops are pre-planned.
Cindy:
That’s amazing.
Jefferson:
… see things as they really are, right?
Cindy:
That amazing.
Jefferson:
By the way, I want to backtrack for a minute on Cindy’s course. Before we even really knew each other, I bought her book, “7 Marketing Basics,” here.
Cindy:
Thank you.
Jefferson:
I would consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable on all this stuff. I mean, I’ve only been done it for 100 years. I mean really, 30. But I went through here, and I’ve got highlights and went through it, and I pulled things out even for me, somebody who’s been feeling like I’ve been around the block, and I pulled some killer ideas. Cindy’s also working with Keap, which I have recently onboarded that CRM. And exhibitors, Keap. Cindy, you might even want to mention a little bit about that because Keap is an unbelievable machine.
Cindy:
Nice. Thank you for that. Yeah. Keap is the software that we use for marketing automation, but you can track your sales opportunities, and you can do all your trade show promo, your trade show follow up, lead scoring. It’s magic. The course that I mentioned, “7 Marketing Basics,” you can take that info and use it with any tools that you have, whatever tools that you have. But as a bonus, we always show how to set it up in Keap. And if you ever want to take a look at that, we’ve got a special package for you that gets you a ton of campaigns that we already built out with our other clients, and you get to have those if you purchase it from us and some extra setup time and stuff. So just shoot us a message in the chat and Kristin can answer your questions. We’ll just answer questions. It’s not a pressure thing. It’s just like, “Here’s what we got to offer. Want to share it.” Thank you, Jefferson. Super nice of you. Awesome.
Jefferson:
Well, the two things I want to say about Keap that really blow me away, one is what you just mentioned, campaigns. Once you learn how to create a campaign, it can run your… So you can have a pre-show marketing campaign when they visit the booth, capture, send information, a follow-up. The other thing, write this phrase down: web pages are pretty, but landing pages are profitable. That’s one of the things I love about Keap is the ability, right within the platform, to create landing pages, single-focused, single offer web pages or pretty landing pages that are profitable.
Cindy:
Nice. Well said, dude. All right. Thank you so much. Now, I know there’s more questions in here. One of the comments that came back that I wanted to circle back to is that some people are enjoying a little bit of a break on the finances that get used up on shows. What did you say the number is that people spend on their marketing budget on shows?
Jefferson:
Oh, yeah. We didn’t touch that. The average exhibitor spends 41% of their annual marketing budget on exhibit and event marketing, 41%. The next highest spend area is less than 10%. So the lion’s share of the marketing spend goes to exhibit event marketing.
Cindy:
Right. So some people are happy that they didn’t spend that money this year, and some of the folks we work with have gone ahead and taken that money and redirected it toward other marketing; so marketing automation, webinars, online events, and we help people everyday get those things together. But I don’t know. Do you have a comment about that, like the budget’s been on hold a little bit and now we’re getting back to live events? What are your thoughts?
Jefferson:
It really comes down to, has your company been impacted by the pandemic? Obviously, if you’ve lost customers and you’ve lost revenue, you’re probably going to come back a little on the conservative side. On the other hand, if you’ve stayed even keel or increased your revenue, then full-court press, roll because knowing that many of your competitors are going to be, as I like to say, squeezing the nickel until the buffalo screams, good time to step into the breach. There’ll be less noise out there. So it’s a good time as a marketer to step in and grab that extra share while everybody else maybe is cutting back. Be like Warren buffet. There’s a reason he’s one of the richest guys in the world.
Cindy:
Well said. Kristin, what other questions do we have?
Kristin:
I’m seeing multiple comments more than anything, and you’re welcome. You know, please share your insights. The comments have to do with really appreciating the savings of not spending all that money on the trade shows and how it’s such a significant part of their budgets. So if you have anything else to add, that’s great.
Jefferson:
Speaking of budgeting, the average exhibitor, when you look at where the dollar goes at trade shows, it goes into nine different buckets. One of those buckets is promoting. The average exhibitor only spends 7.5% of their budget on promoting to drive traffic. The whole theme of this session today has been to win the game, you got to get enough of the right people. I would suggest you start at a minimum of 50%. One of my success mentors always said, “Hey, if you want to succeed, find out what failures are doing and don’t do that.”
Cindy:
Negative role model. That’s what I think of those as a negative role models. See that? We’re going to do something different.
Jefferson:
You got it.
Cindy:
Nice. Nice. Hey, here’s a comment in here and this is specific to the folks in the broadcast industry. Everybody’s welcome on this call, so I’m not meaning to exclude anybody. I’m just going to take a moment to address this comment, is that over the last several years, NAB’s audience has grown to where it feels like the people who are just working in broadcast don’t see enough of their people. The audience is diluted, if you will. So I think that’s true. I agree. And I go back to no matter what show you’re working in and you have a big audience, it’s back to using that golf tee or something like that to hook people and get them in. But fair point. So thank you for sharing that here in this group. I agree with that. Yeah.
Cindy:
All right. Well, today, you got to find out about the number one thing to do to succeed, what’s new for live events. Bonus: small exhibitors can actually steal the show. If you ever want to talk to Jefferson, his contact info is in here. You can hit him up. He knows everything about every kind of trade show on the planet because you’ve been to all of them all over the place. If you want to start a conversation with me, just shoot me a message here and glad to talk. If we can save you a ton of time with my course, steal that, use it, put it to work, oh my gosh, it will save you a ton of time. Also, I just want to share it with everybody as well. So I’m super glad you’re here. Jefferson, final words for everybody, final takeaway, if you’re only going to do one thing, what is it?
Jefferson:
Well, it’s like Cindy just said. Peter Drucker, one of my favorites, said, “There’s only two things that drive revenue in a business: marketing and innovation. Everything else is an expense.” We’ve been talking here about marketing. Exhibit obviously as part of an overall marketing campaign. That’s where to invest your time because marketing is the engine that drives the business. The paradox during tough times is that the first budget that gets cut is marketing.
Cindy:
Yeah.
Jefferson:
Don’t follow the followers.
Cindy:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I love that. On that note, thank you. Thank you to everybody who’s here, Shell, Chelsea, Daniel, Jim, Julia, oh my gosh, Pat, Dez, great to see everybody. Thank you, everybody on Zoom. Thank you, everybody, again Facebook live. Oh my gosh. If you have a topic you want us to cover in the future, hit me up and let me know and thank you. Have a great day.
Jefferson:
You too. Thanks, everybody.
