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 elationships are funny things. Elusive and fluid, these valuable connections often take priority
in our personal lives as well as our professional ones. Especially as economic indicators continue to fall below business-as-usual benchmarks, building and maintaining relationships has emerged as a key objective of companies in general, and face-to-face marketers in particular.
Recently, I’ve encountered a rash of exhibit managers who, when asked about their measurable objectives for a show, respond with variations of: “This show is all about relationships.” When I inquire about lead-count goals, or show-related sales goals, they explain, “It’s really not about that.
It’s about connecting with attendees.” That’s all well and good, but what’s missing is the measurable objective.
That is, how do you know when adequate relationship building has taken place? And what is the return on relationship, so to speak?
It’s almost as if relationship building has become the “Get Out of Jail Free” card for exhibitors unable to prove their program’s value, whether due to declining returns or a lack of hard data to begin with. Either way, in this twisted relationship-centric mindset, I fear that metrics are from Mars — and exhibit managers are from Venus.
Building relationships can’t be your overriding exhibit-marketing
objective because relationships are not an end in and of themselves. If they were, your performance evaluation would include stats about how many holiday cards and fruit baskets you received from clients and prospects.
Rather, relationship building is
a strategy, a means to an end of increased sales or market share.
You can go into a trade show with the strategy of building relationships, using tactics such as VIP promotions, in-booth hospitality, off-site events, high-end giveaways, etc. However, if “building relationships” is your objective
at the show, that objective must be measurable. Why? Because in the real world of metrics and upper management, relationships are intangible, fluffy, and ephemeral. And if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.
So if you’re going to shows with the directive to foster relationships, cut the crap and admit that in the end it’s all about sales. No for-profit company is in business just to make new friends. Next, look at relationship building less as an objective and more as a strategy — a way to achieve your company’s primary goal of increased sales or ROI. Then choose the tactics you’ll use to build those relationships at a show, and — here’s the important part — establish actual, tangible, and measurable objectives that will help you identify whether or not you have built valuable relationships via your exhibit-marketing efforts.
Those metrics might include
data such as the number of in-booth meetings (How many existing “friends” did we meet with at the show?), staff interaction rate (What percentage of prospective friends did our staffers interact with?), average length of booth visit (How much face time did we
spend forging those relationships?), brand awareness (Do more people know about our company because of its presence at the show?), brand perception (Did our relationship-building efforts result in a more positive perception of our company?), and/or intent to purchase (Did the relationships we forged translate into an increased likelihood to buy?).
Armed with those metrics, you can confidently state that your program does or does not, in fact, build relationships with members of your target audience. What’s more, you can establish benchmarks and
better analyze the tangible effect your program has on the bottom line. After all, holiday cards are nice, and relationships are rewarding. But if friendships and fruit baskets become more important than your program’s ROI, you better hope upper management likes pears as much as profit.e
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EXHIBITOR
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