Exhibition Stand Staff Training
Communication with exhibition visitors starts 20 feet from your exhibition stand. You have 3 – 5 seconds to grab attention. Your exhibition stand staff are crucial to your exhibition success.
Having invested time and money in planning and promoting your exhibition participation, you need your stand staff to deliver on their objectives and maximise your performance. Choose your people carefully and train them. Tell them why you are exhibiting, your exhibiting objectives, what you expect of them and how you expect them to do it. Get them to play as a team and to understand how to work the stand space, no matter how experienced they may be.
To do that, you might want to consider a specific exhibition stand staff development session.
A major reason visitors attend an exhibition is to source new ideas, products, and suppliers. Narrowing down the search for a preferred supplier is also another major reason. A third of visitors use exhibitions to ultimately make their purchase decision.
Has your team got the right mindset approach to be successful?
The exhibition environment is a highly visible one where eyes and ears are everywhere. Your stand staff need to understand that their behaviour and conduct is as much on show as your products or services. They need to buy-in to the process and own it; you’ll then start to see a real tangible difference to your overall event performance.
Exhibitor Stand Staff Training
We have over two decades of experience in working with exhibitor teams to improve performance before, during, and after an exhibition. We've worked with several organisations across many industry sectors including oil and gas, manufacturing, service, public sector, pharmaceutical, engineering, automotive, hospitality, and more. We have also worked with exhibition organisers.
Our programmes and workshops are tailored specifically to the needs and objectives of the individual client company. And, we deliver them as interactive and participative sessions, in the following formats:
- One-day interactive workshops - for stand staffers
- Ambassador programmes - a series of sessions covering pre-show, at-show and post-show
- Webinars - delivered over several weeks in the run-up to an exhibition or series of exhibitions
- Consultancy services - for the stakeholders responsible for their organisation's exhibiting programme with particular emphasis on the pre-show planning and promotion, at-show team development and on-stand strategy, and the post-event follow up process
For an informal chat about how we can help you perform better at exhibitions, get in touch!
Following your amazing training we got excellent feedback on our attendance of the Red Tiger stand during ICE. Among other things we remembered: - Not to cluster or stare at our phones - To be dynamic and use the space around the stand in attracting visitors - To prompt for important information and get commitments We achieved our target of contacts, and it was all thanks to your professional workshop. On behalf of the whole team, I wish you good health and success in preparing other teams for delivering great visitor experience and adding value in generating new business.
I wanted to say thank you for the work that you put into not only preparing for but also delivering the event stand session last week. The time that you took to understand our business, industry and specific needs ensured that you interacted with the team on a level that ultimately made the day hugely beneficial for all. The team is continually evolving and as such I’m sure that we will be able to discuss the potential for future projects when appropriate.
“Emma Swales is a knowledgeable and respected speaker at De Montfort University who consistently gets great feedback from our stakeholders when delivering marketing workshops and seminars. She's a valuable member of the Enterprise Inc business mentor programme, supporting graduate business start-ups, and her wealth of experience in business and marketing is hugely important in encouraging and educating the business mentees. She has real passion for her craft and she knows it very well indeed, which is why we chose her to deliver a series of marketing surgeries for tenants of the Innovation Centre. She inspires. We would highly recommend Emma's skills and expertise for any business looking to kick-start and re-energise their marketing. If you're attending an exhibition, you should talk to her first.”
We hire Emma over and over again to deliver our stand staff training. She is able to adapt to all training situations and always delivers the program at a very high standard. She has excellent event and exhibition knowledge which means she can draw on her experience to answer all questions the stand staff may have. She is also extremely professional and well organised. Our stand staffers have always commented on how informative the training is and they now feel more confident to work on our exhibitions.
A pre-show briefing is a prerequisite to exhibiting success
Conducting a pre-show briefing enables you to communicate your exhibiting strategy to your stand staff.
Your briefing session should include:
- Reasons for exhibiting
- Your target audience
- A review of exhibition visitor profiles
- The personal responsibilities and targets
- A review the products/services to be exhibited
- A run through of demonstrations and presentations to be given
- An explanation of the design of the stand including the graphics
- An explanation of the enquiry handling procedures
- A presentation of the sales literature to be used
- An explanation of any competitions, giveaways or incentives to be used
- An explanation of the stand dress code
- A list of all the stand staff including a staff rota and scheduled breaks
- Show dates, times and venue
- Catering arrangements
- Accommodation and transport arrangements
- Details of off-stand activities
Your exhibition stand staff need to listen more than talk
Choose your stand staff carefully – it is not always the case that sales people make the best exhibition stand staff. It is a completely different environment to the selling experience they are used to. Good sales people often talk too much and in an exhibition environment, it is the visitor that needs to do the talking.
Develop your exhibition stand staff to ask powerful questions that enable them to engage, qualify, present and close within a pre-determined time span. This process is important so that your stand staff don’t waste time with visitors that are not serious prospects for your product or service.
Exhibition marketing and exhibitor training are specialist areas for Marketingesp
We can help you with all aspects of successful exhibiting – planning, promotion, stand staff development and training and measurement.
For a free, no-obligation meeting please get in touch.