However, Brodo suspected a clever giveaway alone would not be enough to increase brand awareness, unless that giveaway said something about Richardson, its services, and what it could do for potential clients. With that in mind, Brodo devised the “Don’t Bobble Your Sales Training” promotion for ASTD 2002.

“The bobbleheads were really a switch in my philosophy to think outside the boring business-to-business box with giveaways,” Brodo says. “It set us up to have some fun at the show and to generate some awareness for the organization.”

Brodo and his team set goals for the 2002 ASTD show, hoping to increase brand awareness and generate 100 sales leads, a 25-percent increase over its 2001 benchmark.

2002: The Trusted Advisor

Before hitting the show floor, Brodo and the Richardson team had to decide just who or what they wanted to represent with the bobbleheads. Their top priority was to convey a message about the company’s core training products and services. But rather than design a generic salesperson figurine, Brodo’s team chose to bring specific aspects of the sales process to life with a Trusted Advisor that personified the qualities Richardson’s products instill in its clients’ sales teams.

“The Trusted Advisor is a position most salespeople strive to obtain with their clients,” Brodo explains. “They want to be not just someone out there selling something to clients, but someone whom clients can come and talk to. That was the concept of the first bobblehead: someone who creates that kind of strong relationship with his or her clients.”

Richardson worked with AGP to clarify design specifications. The Trusted Advisor would be a suited male, briefcase in hand, smiling and ready to respond to a client’s needs — a seasoned professional. Richardson placed an order for 500 of the nodding figurines.

While the Trusted Advisor was in production, Brodo and his team designed and sent a direct mailer that explained Richardson’s offerings, what the company planned to feature at the show, where its exhibit was located on the show floor, and how attendees could register to win a promotional bobblehead. A prototype of the bobblehead was pictured on the mailers, which were sent to 2,000 pre-registered attendees approximately two weeks before the 2002 ASTD show. Richardson followed up with a promotional e-mail blast one week later, using the same message and format.

All told, this attention-grabbing marketing campaign came in at approximately $3,500, leaving about $4,000 in the budget for the cost of ASTD booth space, setup, and miscellaneous expenses.

Once the show opened, it didn’t take long for Richardson to realize it had a wildly popular promotion on its hands. Word of mouth quickly spread, and soon attendees were lining up at the booth to get one of the spring-loaded figurines. While Brodo initially intended to have attendees complete registration forms to win a bobblehead in hourly in-booth drawings, plans quickly changed. Overwhelmed by booth traffic, Richardson employees decided to forego the drawings and simply started giving bobbles away just to keep people moving through the exhibit.

Richardson staffers gave as many product demonstrations as they could manage under the circumstances, and distributed other promotional items. But it was unquestionably the bobbleheads that grabbed attendees’ attention at the show.

Compliments on the little head-nodders came in from everywhere. According to Brodo, “As I walked around the show, people would be calling out to me, ‘Hey, you’re the bobblehead guys, right? Love those bobbles! What a great idea.’”

Before it was over, Richardson employees had distributed all 500 of the bobbleheads and collected more than 200 sales leads, twice as many as the company hoped for, and 166 percent more than the previous year.

2003: The Win-Win Negotiator

Excited by the popularity of the bobblehead campaign, Brodo committed to creating a new bobble for the 2003 ASTD conference. But this time, he wanted to capitalize on the bobblehead buzz and use it to promote the company’s new products.

“As we prepared for the 2003 ASTD show, we looked for a way we could tie the bobbles in with new offerings we were launching at the show,” Brodo says.

Richardson had developed a new sales-negotiation e-learning course in late 2002. Brodo and AGP designed the Win-Win Negotiator bobblehead to bring attention to the recently developed course and to represent the kind of negotiation process typical to optimal sales procedures. For the Win-Win Negotiator, Richardson designed a hard-working, accessible salesman sans suit jacket. Furthermore, the company doubled its order to 1,000 figurines, and bumped up to a 10-by-20-foot exhibit.

Richardson again sent out pre-show mailers and e-mails informing targeted recipients of the company’s offerings and its show-floor location.

Just as they had in 2002, the bobbles drew multitudes and raves. The Win-Win Negotiator helped pull in 637 leads at the 2003 ASTD show, an increase of more than 40 percent from the campaign’s inaugural year and more than 200 percent from pre-bobblehead shows.

2004: The Call-Center Agent

While the bobbleheads were telling Richardson’s story by representing the skills the company teaches in its training programs, Brodo wanted to make sure they were more than clever, dust-collecting toys. While preparing for the 2004 ASTD show, he began to think about how he could add additional value to the promotional campaign.

Richardson had recently produced a new call-center telephone-sales program. Hoping to change things up a bit, the company turned away from the personification of general sales skills with rather bland-looking bobbleheads, and toward particular sales positions with distinctive looks, perhaps appealing to a slightly younger demographic.

Brodo worked with AGP to create a cool, youthful, goateed, shades-wearing, and suited but open-collared Call-Center Agent persona to promote the new training program for the 2004 show. Brodo also added something extra to accompany the bobbles.

“We had done a little case study describing the call-center agent e-learning course and realized we could combine it with the bobblehead to explain how it tied in with Richardson’s offerings,” Brodo says. ”We decided to give a case study out with each bobblehead.”

Emboldened by the continuing success of the bobblehead campaign and Richardson’s general growth, Brodo used an increased promotional budget to order 2,000 of the ceramic figurines, and to again double its space, opting for a 20-by-20-foot booth at the 2004 ASTD show.

For the third year in a row, the Richardson bobbleheads proved popular and effective. The company handed out almost all of the bobbles and nabbed more than 1,000 sales leads in the process, a 57-percent increase over its 2003 ASTD results.

2005: The Prospector

By now, the campaign had proven rock solid. In 2005, Richardson developed The Prospector, capitalizing on its recently launched Web-based prospecting program.

Brodo decided to have AGP produce a female figure for the first time to entice more women to the Richardson booth. The new figurine was a seated bobble, complete with desk, telephone, keyboard, and a flat-screen monitor that displayed a screen capture from the e-learning course Richardson was promoting.

Brodo followed the same process of pre-show mailers and case-study distribution. Once again, the effort topped even the prior year’s remarkable lead total by 10 percent, representing a massive 1,367-percent increase over the 2001 baseline.

2006: The Sales Coach

Last year, Richardson fine-tuned its bobblehead extravaganza even further. While delighted with the traffic and the buzz created by the promotion, Brodo wasn’t entirely satisfied with the amount of time spent face to face with booth visitors, nor with the quality of the leads that had come out of ASTD. The campaign had undeniably generated new business, but Brodo wanted to maximize the bottom-line effectiveness of the bobblehead excitement with higher-quality leads.

Consciously changing the approach to target quality over quantity, Richard-son employees asked attendees visiting its exhibit at the 2006 ASTD show to participate in a contest, correctly answering a sales-oriented question to win a Sales Coach bobblehead. While the questions weren’t difficult, Brodo hoped the requirement would increase the percentage of booth visitors who were actually in sales coaching and management, an important target market for Richardson. Furthermore, he hoped the addition to the process would calm the booth atmosphere, resulting in more face time with prospects.

“It was a way to slow things down a little bit, keep people in the booth longer, and let our booth staff talk with them a bit more,” Brodo says. “I think it worked well. We walked away with higher-quality leads. We were able to better understand attendees’ needs, which is ultimately the goal.”

Brodo had AGP produce 2,000 Sales Coach bobbleheads — 1,000 each in a male and female version. Richardson also added two informative white papers to the ASTD offerings, including one titled, “Creating a Coaching Culture.”

As a result of the new strategy, which focused on increasing face time with attendees, Richardson’s total lead count dropped a bit in 2006 to approximately 800. Despite the 27-percent drop, the promotion’s quality-over-quantity approach generated approximately 20 percent more top-quality A leads than previous incarnations of the campaign.

Bob-Bob-Bobblin’ Along

In the last five years, Richardson has gone from being an unfamiliar name in sales training to the third most recognized name in the field. And as silly as it sounds, the bobbleheads have played a big role in raising that brand awareness.

“Not many people believed promoting a service by giving away something like bobbleheads would generate interest and excitement while maintaining credibility and the brand message,” Brodo says. “This promotion has allowed me to become more creative in my approach and to start to really think out of the box.”

Overall, Richardson has spent approximately $42,000 over the course of five years, creating six bobbleheads, generating buzz and traffic aplenty, and netting an overall 1,718-percent increase in A leads. But has all the hoopla lead to increased sales?

Two major clients, together spending more than $3.5 million with Richardson, have each told Brodo that they probably would not have known about the company had it not been for the bobbleheads. Meanwhile, Richardson has added more than 35 new clients from the ASTD show since 2004.

With results like that, Richardson plans to keep its bobblehead in the game, and is currently designing new bobbles for the 2007 ASTD show in Atlanta. Assuming the trend continues, the company is bound to generate enough A leads to make your head spin — or in this case, bobble. e