I'm usually very polite with my answer, but I'm always tempted to say: "Why? What does it matter what the overall show attendance is?"

If there was ever a statistic that carried little weight (except to those show-related services based entirely on the "gross crowd size" — cab companies, restaurants, hotels, restroom attendant staffing, etc) — this is it. Yet this is the number most people care about.

The more I exhibit, the more I come to realize that the majority of our industry is focused on the wrong things. We hope for huge crowds, with people pushing to get into our exhibit, like shoppers on Black Friday. This just doesn't happen (except in very rare cases).

Shows do draw crowds, no doubt about it. But unless we focus on our target, we'll expend a lot of resources and energy to do things that distract us from achieving the best results possible.

Case in point: When I served as the exhibit manager for Kerry Ingredients, we were one of the "anchor" exhibitors at the IFT Food Expo (where food technologists and food scientists go to hone their skills). Each year, we subscribed to a report from Exhibit Surveys Inc. that broke down the overall attendance into numerous categories. One category that served to be a great predictor of our expected busy-ness was "product interest." This category measured what attendees were interested to see when they came to the show.

By matching together their interests with our offerings, we could see how many attendees might have an interest in what we were touting. During the years of our broadest product offerings, having one of the show's largest exhibits, we had about 30 percent commonality with attendees.

This particular show attracts around 15,000 gross attendees (plus or minus a couple thousand) each year. About 6,000 of those are other exhibitors, and about 1,000 are spouses on vacation, students/academia, dead people, pets, and others with no buying authority.

When you filter those out, you're down to 8,000 net attendees. We had commonality with about 30 percent of them, which meant 2,400 people were interested in what we had to offer. In other words, we were targeting only 15 percent of the gross audience in attendance.

We were an anchor. We were one the largest exhibitors there. Yet more than 4 out of every 5 people we encountered would have nothing in common with us. In that scenario, why would I care about the overall attendance? I need to find those 2,400 individuals, regardless of how many others are milling around clouding up the waters.

This is what we need to do a better job of as exhibitors — we need to focus on our established target. If a large exhibitor like Kerry Ingredients, with a 30 percent overlap, will have nothing in common with 85 percent of the show's attendees, then it is even more imperative for smaller exhibitors with less overlap (sometimes this overlap can dip well below 1 percent of the total audience) to focus specifically on their target.

• Know who your target is: Hold internal meetings and get a good picture of precisely who you need to see at the show.
• Know how many of them will be there: Consult with the show's organizer once you've established your target's profile.
• Reach out to this target before the show: You need to make sure you are on their "must visit" list before they ever leave home.
• Make sure pre-show messages generate action: Break through the clutter and grab the attention of your small target audience.
• Craft the words on your exhibit to attract your target: Make sure your messaging attracts the right crowd and, equally important, encourages non-targets to self select out of visiting your booth.
• Keep that target audience in mind: Make sure your offerings and messages promote the benefits most important and relevant to your target audience.
• Train your staff to qualify visitors: They need to be able to quickly, efficiently, and politely qualify and disqualify booth visitors to find the "needles in the haystack" you're looking for.
• Take detailed notes of important conversations: Have tools ready for your staff to use in the event they actually run into one these needles.
• Pick up the post-show conversation where you left off: Do not make an important visitor "start over" with you by either not following up at all, or following up with a generic "thanks for visiting" email or form letter.

Unfortunately, our industry loves to focus on the massive crowds, tempting you to try to be universally popular by staging glorious, over-the-top activities. While these may indeed grab headlines and attention, it's the exhibitor who can focus on his or her target audience that will have the best chance of walking away from the show with a positive ROI.