How to manage promoters at fairs?

Exhibitions are a difficult exercise, even for experienced business owners. Regardless the amount of preparation you put into it, things never go as expected. If the traffic at the trade show is important, you will need to hire promoters to help you dealing with the surge of visitors. But how can you trust outsiders to handle your business efficiently? How to manage promoters on fairs?

Provide early training to promoters

. Organize yourself to meet them in advance, during an interview for example, to give them product training. Even if you expect your extra manpower to only filter your booth’ traffic to redirect promising leads to your sales people, having a deeper understanding of what you do remains an essential piece of your success.

Take an hour to explain your product, your market and buyer personas and give demonstrations. Organize role-plays to test their ability to present your services to potential visitors.

and you must make sure they are up to the task!

Provide on-site follow up

You might have explained everything in details two weeks before the event . Take some time before the first visitors start flowing through the convention center to try another role-play and provide your new team with tips and suggestions.

If you have ever attended a trade show before, you know that you will go from busy times to idle times. Make use of the latter to give your promoters and hostesses feedback on their performance and suggest ways to improve their service.

Prospect data collection

It might not be the first role of a promoter, but !

Remember that regardless the amount of training you provided your outside team with, they are not “in” your business and have no knowledge of what really matters to your business. There will be times when they will have to collect business cards and prospects information: even if that isn’t their prime objective, you should make sure they know what to record if you don’t want to miss important leads!

myfairtool offers a very simple exhibition CRM that can be used by your team to record visitors’ information. Among basic details (name, company, email, phone, etc.), the tool can be customized with tags (importance of the lead, customer’s country, product interest, etc.) to make your promoter’s recording much easier and accurate.

Only the best will survive

If you have decided to use myfairtool, you will be able to analyze and compare your staff performance at the trade show. You should quickly find out which promoter is efficient and which one isn’t.

Finding good promoters isn’t an easy task: once you have trained a promising one, keep his contact to re-hire him for your next event! Should you use costumes for your booth hostesses and promoters?