It is commonly said that you only
get a few opportunities to sell, but actually as business people we are
constantly selling: selling our products, selling our services, selling the
reputations of our companies, and our individual strengths as human beings. On
a one to one basis, your customers will either like you or not, you will make a
connection or you won’t. But isn’t that life?
There are times when the time you
have in which to impress is limited. Well planned exhibitions and trade fairs
can, and should be, intense places for your sales staff. So whatever you can do
to alleviate the pressure on them by turning the focus on to the product or
service you are selling, or by operating good customer receiving services on
your stand, will help to maximise sales performance. Yes, you’ve got it. I am going to give you a
few examples!
The first exhibition I did in the
carpet industry was at Batimat in Paris in 1997. Six gruelling days of meeting
and greeting and selling from 8am till 6pm, preceded by coffee and croissants,
and followed by wine and fabulous French food. The company had agreed to
exhibit at short notice after gentlemanly pressure from our French distributor,
and it was my decision to go or be damned. So I thought going was the better
option, and we arrived at the booth to find that the 6m x 3m raised floor
surface for our 500mm square carpet tiles was made up entirely of wooden
pallets! So I left it to the gentlemanly distributor to sort it out because his
business was flooring contracting and installation. Mine was just selling the
stuff, and I had only been with the company for two months.
As a result, it won’t surprise
you to know that day one of the exhibition was an unmitigated disaster, with
tiles coming loose and causing trip hazards, and the whole stand looking
generally amateurish. So by lunchtime I decided to phone the boss who was due
to arrive a couple of days later. We took the only decision that we could, and
insisted that the floor be re-installed. And rather than wait, we had the
distributor bring in a fitter to do the work as we continued to exhibit. An
accidental stroke of genius. The refit drew a crowd, and we were inundated for
the rest of the day. We repeated the refit at points during the exhibition and
it helped customers to understand why the way we cut our carpet tiles was so
innovative.
That lesson was carried through
to subsequent exhibitions, but probably had its most important effect at the
Yapi Exhibition in Istanbul in 2000. We had recognised some months previously
that the installers used by our excellent Turkish distributors were competent
fitters of roll carpets but had limited skills when fitting carpet tiles. I had
once been called to a complaint at a new Turkcell building on the outskirts of
Istanbul where a 2,000m2 floor area had been fitted with beige carpet tiles. On
the back of every single tile is a direction arrow to show which way the tile
should be fitted. There was also a full set of instructions on how to fit the
tiles, translated into Turkish, in every single box of 20 tiles. So when I
walked into the area the problem stuck out like a sore thumb: a single tile had
been fitted in the wrong direction. Not my problem!
A few months later we had the
chance to train the Turkish fitters by getting them to install a complex floor
pattern on our distributor’s stand at the Yapi exhibition. We flew over the
best UK carpet tile fitter to train them on how to create complex shapes with
carpet tiles, and actually cut the distributor’s logo into the floor. So not
only did we have the best looking floor in the exhibition, we had also trained
installers to fit to the highest standard. Sadly, I had to have my evening meal
each night with said carpet fitter, who lived, breathed, and yes probably ate
carpets! For each of those four long evenings, I longed for a conversation
about football.
In both of these cases, I was
there to sell the product. In both cases the product ended up selling itself.
It taught me that at exhibitions, sales people are order closers, and that the
whole of your exhibition stand, how it is operated throughout the period of the
exhibition, and all of your preparation in attracting customers to visit, act
as lead generators. And finally the power of demonstrating a skill, at
exhibitions where your customers may largely not speak your language, is simply
the best sales aid of all.
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