Does your staff treat everyone on the trade show floor the same? I know that if a C-level prospect walks into your booth that gets more of a reaction then when an engineer does. But, is that it? Are all of the responses from your team a matter of instinct, or do you have an actual buyer persona made for your trade shows?
If you haven’t created buyer personas for your trade shows, here is why you should.
Let’s say that one of your more senior associate on the show floor is engaged with a prospect. You have a junior staff member who is available to talk. A director level prospect walks into your booth. Your junior associate meets the prospect and starts talking about benefit “A.”
Great, right? Except this is a director of logistics and he really would be more interested in benefit “B.” Your senior associate might have known, but your junior associate doesn’t have the experience yet. Your prospect leaves your booth and engages with a competitor who knows exactly what they would be most interested in learning.
Now all of this could have been avoided if you had created buyer personas in advance and had devised messages for two or three buyer personas.
Plan: What type of personas are you expecting to meet at this show? Look at your CRM if you have been to the show in the past and do a little research. What were the job titles that were common prospects in the past?
Decide with your sales team what would be the best way to talk to each of the chosen personas. At larger shows, we have even gone so far as to have different members of our staff targeting certain prospects. For instance, we have our product engineers talk to more technical prospects and senior staff targets more senior prospects.
Remember that everyone needs to know the plan so make sure you publish it where everyone on your team can access it. Review it at your staff training sessions.
Customize your content: You should have the same message to all your prospects, but you can cater to each prospect personas. Try to find the best content for each persona and have it ready to go before the show. If you don’t have the content, you might want to recycle some of the old content and see how you can tweak it to make it more appealing to each persona.
I am sure that you have planned to send emails to your prospects after you triage them. However, going one step forward and having supporting emails of the benefits that will appeal to each persona will improve your conversion and open rate on your follow-up emails.
If you would like some help with building your buyer personas, download our guide to building buyer personas here.