Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Diane Conklin with CompleteMarketingSystems.com. Do you ever have an opportunity to go to a trade show or be a sponsor at a live event? And have you ever wondered how do I profit with that? How do I make this a profitable situation? There are a lot of ways. The first thing to remember is that having a booth or a table or in some instances you might be doing a poster display. It's not about, it's not typically about what you think, right? So as a business owner, the thing that you want to do is you want to set yourself apart. You want to do something different. And so there are a lot of different goals that you might have and that you might set yourself up for with a sponsorship at a live event or at a trade show or having a booth somewhere. It could be about setting appointments. It could be about making sales. It could be that what you're really after is to get as many names as possible. If that's the case, if you're looking to get names and you're looking to start to build a relationship and connection with people who are your ideal clients, for example, what you really want to look at is how do you attract people to your booth? How do you attract people in to make a difference, to start to meet them, to start to have a conversation with them? And so, you know, idealistically we want people to come to our booth because, well, we have a great product or service or because they're genuinely interested in our new gadget, whatever it is, right? And so I had somebody the other day who said to me, I'm not putting candy out of my booth because I don't want that to be the reason that they come. Well, my philosophy is a little different. I don't care what reason it is that they come into the booth. What I care about is capturing their name, their email address, their address and phone number so that I can follow up with them. So if the candy bar is what gets them there, that's okay with me, right? And so when typically what I do is I would have some sort of drawing for something. And again, it doesn't always have to be related to what you do. It could be. It could be the latest electronic thing, right? It could be there was a time when that was a digital camera. There's a time when that might have been a Kindle Fire or some sort of, you know, maybe it's an iPad or some sort of digital device like that or a particular phone that's hot at the time, whatever, right? A video camera, depending upon where you're speaking and who the trade show is for, different things will work. Maybe it's a vacation, register to win a free vacation, right? Could be a lot of different things. Here's the point. I will sometimes encourage people to go outside of the booth and start to talk to people and bring them in because think about it. People are just walking down the aisles. There's got to be something that catches their attention. And once you get their attention, now you can begin to build the relationship and talk to them about what you do and how you might be able to help them or their business or their life or whatever it is. So don't let the idealistic piece of you who says, I only want my ideal targeted market, you're right, you do, but sometimes even with your ideal targeted market, you have to get their attention to draw them in before anything's going to happen. So I really want to think about that and here's the thing I want to leave you with. The most important thing in all of this is having that follow-up system set up and in place so that you know what's going to happen and it starts to happen as soon as you get back to your office and start to plug names in, emails start to go or phone calls start to get made or whatever that follow-up sequence is starts to happen. Don't think you're going to think about the follow-up after the fact because then it'll be too late and all those cards and all those contacts that you made are going to sit on your desk and six months later you're going to think, wow, I did all that work, I invested that money and I didn't get any leads and you'll say that didn't work or that was a waste of time when in fact you didn't work it properly. It's not the trade show boost and live event sponsorship doesn't work, it's that you have to, like most things in our businesses, have that plan, the follow-up marketing set up before you even go. If you'd like more information on this or any of the great things we do here at Complete Marketing Systems, check us out, go to completemarketingsystems.com. I'm Diane Conklin, see you next time.