Trade show ROI expert and friend of Trade Show Feed, Richard Erschik is gearing up a for a series of seminars and workshops at events around the country. It starts with the Exhibitor Show later in March and continues at Texas Library, IMTS, Fire Show, and ConExpo among others through June. Richard prepared this video as a preview.
Thanks Richard!
February 17, 2010 (Mentor, OH) – The Rogers Company (www.therogersco.com) has expanded its presence in the Northeast by opening a sales office in Rochester, New York. Brenda Newman will be heading the East Avenue office. Newman brings over 17 years of experience to her new role having worked with a range of national and global clients from Fortune 500 companies to small startups and everything in between.
“We are very excited about this expansion,” said Jeffrey Blackwell, president of The Rogers Company. “Newman brings the expertise and dedication to customer service that we need to capitalize on opportunities as the economy begins to recover.”
Newman is enjoying the culture of The Rogers Company, which emphasizes building partnerships with its clients, employees and suppliers while fostering its goal of helping clients achieve the highest return on investment possible from trade shows. This philosophy is highlighted by the company’s recent launch of Return on Exhibiting, an approach that guarantees 100% lead follow-up post show.
“We ultimately want our clients to succeed in the short and long term,” said Newman. “Rogers’ partnership approach fits perfectly with my mantra of putting client service first.”
Newman is looking forward to working with clients in a wide range of markets, but sees opportunity in green technology such as wind and solar power.
“I have experience working with manufacturers and suppliers to the wind energy sector and I see growth opportunity in industries that supply green technologies,” said Newman. “I can also work with any company on making their exhibit displays more green. The design and build teams at Rogers are a terrific resource for finding green materials that fit budget and design requirements.”
About Rogers
For over 65 years, The Rogers Company has been an award winning designer and manufacturer of branded environments for trade show exhibits, corporate events, lobbies, show rooms and retail environments – essentially any place where communicating a brand is vital. In addition to its 3D marketing services, The Rogers Company is also a full service trade show and event implementation partner providing turnkey services and support for its corporate clients throughout the country.
With its complete design staff, skilled craftsman and construction facilities, Rogers can custom build a wide range of branded environments to suit any need. Through its strategic partner network, the company also provides a wide range of portable and modular display solutions, support and logistics for international trade shows and an extensive rental inventory of both custom and portable display products.
Additionally through its partner network, Rogers provide Eventelligence TM, a technology, infrastructure service for event registration, event mapping and way-finding systems, lead retrieval, lead tracking, fulfillment services and various RFID solutions for focused trade shows and events.
For more information on the Rogers Company, please visit www.therogersco.com or contact Brenda directly at brendanewman@rochester.rr.com, (585) 698-5229.
The Rogers Company has announced a new service that begins to answer many of the Trade Show ROI questions that companies have. Are we seeing value from this show? The answer, it seems, may be in what you’re doing with the leads you are getting from the show. From the press release:
The Rogers Company, a designer and builder of trade show exhibits and other branded environments, announces Return On Exhibiting, a new approach to lead management to substantially increase sales resulting from trade shows. This new offering comes from a partnership between Rogers and Richard Erschik, founder and CEO of Leads to Sales, Inc. (www.leadstosales.com) and RICHARDERSCHIK.com (www.richarderschik.com). Erschik and the Rogers team are working closely together to unite booth exhibit design and fabrication with lead management and post-show follow-up. The result is a one-stop shop for better trade show ROI.
You can read the rest of the press release here: Link
Sukki Jahnke from The Rogers Company interviews Chris Hopkins about exhibiting at AHIMA. He gives some quick strategies on their approach to face-to-face marketing. So is tradeshow exhibiting really just about brand positioning and ’showing your face.” Not so, according to Hopkins, AHIMA provides some very real relationship building opportunities and some on-floor sales.
Look for more From the Show Floor interviews from Sukki coming soon.
Often, marketing and sales people tear out their hair trying to figure out what customers and prospects are thinking.
So here’s a radical idea: Ask them.
Survey tools today are cheap, simple to implement, and sophisticated enough to gather some incredibly helpful information. There’s a really helpful article at idealware.org that outlines some of tools available to you that are free or cheap. The article also outlines a few features to look for: Read the full story
Life Science Leader recently ran an article on Franklin & Seidelmann’s work with The Rogers Company to design an effective booth for its tradeshows — the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) show in particular. The article focuses on the F&S need to create a space to build relationships. Since the company’s main business is teleradiology, it doesn’t have the chance for face to face branding or even to build relationships with its own physicians. The article outlines how the need to build relationships was built into the design.
As more and more companies, once traditional, move to online services, it’s possible that the need for face-to-face relationship building will become more important. In the past, meeting the people you already know at a tradeshow was a secondary goal. It may become or may already be a primary goal if it’s the only chance to connect a human being to your brand.
You can read the article here: Link
“Partnership” has become a throw-away word these days. Years ago, before working in the exhibit industry, I worked for a consumer products company. In my position I worked with a lot of plastic injection molders since our products were largely made of various types of molded plastics. A number of our vendors were also big suppliers to the automotive industry, in particular the US automotive manufacturers. The owners of those companies would talk to me about their “partnerships” with the “Big Three”. How they were invited to participate in “Vendor Days” and quality symposiums. Some of them were considered “tier-one” suppliers; others won vendor-of-the-year awards or were given plaques for superior quality. They were called “partners”, so in theory these business owners really thought they were partners with these huge corporations.
What most of them unfortunately learned later-on, was that this partnership was really a one-way street. Yes they got the business and yes they got their plaques and certificates, but in the end what they really got was dictated to. Many of them told me that they would be given a three year contract and that each year after the initial year they were REQUIRED to lower their price, regardless of material increases, regardless of labor increases, regardless of energy cost increases. They were basically told that in order to remain a “partner” they had to improve efficiencies each year and pass those savings (real or not) on to the customer. So the partnership was really not a partnership at all but rather a typical old-fashioned vendor-customer relationship where no matter how much circumstances had changed for the vendor the customer was really calling all the shots.
Eventually the pricing pressure and the lack of a real partnership drove a lot of these injection molders literally out of business. Others simply decided to stop selling to the car-makers because they were basically shipping dollars out the door with every truckload of parts. This isn’t a partnership. This is a dictatorship. True partnerships are win-win, and this was “win” (for the customer) and “lose” (for the vendor).
A true partnership starts with the understanding that both sides have needs. A true partnership allows one party to share those needs with the other and to have those needs understood and incorporated into an agreement that very simply allows both parties to make money. There is this misguided sentiment that even if a company loses money on every order, they can “make it up in volume”. All this philosophy does is allow a company to go out of business faster – but with a nice résumé – to serve as its epitaph.
I still believe in partnerships, but in this world I wonder how many other people actually embrace this concept? True partnerships require a level of transparency and an even deeper level of trust.
A great vendor partner looks for ways to save their clients money. They provide free stuff – advice, ideas, samples, and prototypes. They don’t take advantage of last minute orders by tacking on rush charges when they themselves aren’t incurring any extra cost.
Meanwhile, a great client partner recognizes the value a great vendor adds to their business. They have a sense of loyalty, share sensitive information and demonstrate their trust by living up to their end of the bargain. I wish we lived in a world where the term “fair profit” was more clearly defined and agreed upon. But since we don’t, we have to rely on partnerships that live up to the real meaning of the word. In the end, in a true partnership, both parties share the risk and both parties share the reward.
And as Henry Ford once said, “The reward for a job well done is the opportunity… for more work.”
That’s JB’s space for now. Thanks for visiting.
You decide. The website twitterhandbook.com thinks that it is, but they would, wouldn’t they? Twitter is, indeed, a fast, cheap way to communicate and it may just be email 2.0, but you also have to consider your audience. Some industries are slow to adapt technologies and others are on the cutting edge. joycemckee writes about how she uses Twitter to research an upcoming event and also to promote her presence at a tradeshow through give aways: Read the full story
This lengthy video posted on FORA.TV is from the The Argyle Executive Forum. It features four marketing folks from different backgrounds discussing the recession and its impact on marketing. It’s interesting that there is so much talk of software and social media. This trend seems to have coincided with the worst economic environment in decades. Does social media and online marketing shield us from an ugly reality that people are buying less? It seems that marketing could use at least some kind of historical lesson on how companies succeeded in past economic hard times without Twitter and Facebook? Some of the world’s most enduring brands, after all, survived and thrived during the Great Depression.
Social media is a powerful tool and it’s changing marketing — but so did radio, television, highways, and jet travel. Aren’t there lessons to be learned from past companies that have succeeded in tougher times without Twittering? Read the full story
Journalist Jeff Jarvis talks about how car companies can become more ‘Googley’, which is short hand for listening to your customers’ needs leads to success in the 21st century. The important question that he brings up is: “What business are we really in?” For car companies, for years, it was making cars that Americans wanted to buy at a cheap price. Car companies may actually be a bad example of this because a bad economy means that people are simply buying fewer cars. The question may actually be better for those of us in the tradeshow business. What business are we really in?
If we’re in the business of setting up booths in a physical space at a set time, then our days are numbered. There are simply more ways of connecting in business than there used to be and business-as-usual means that those other ways will slowly but surely eat away at tradeshows and their share of marketing dollars.
So what can tradeshows learn from Google? Building on Jarvis’s points here are a few:
1.) More Beta
Google tries new things all the time and lets their users try things as well. What works is kept and what doesn’t is thrown away. Tradeshow organizers need to try news things pure and simple. Attendees and exhibitors are eager to see new things that will help them grow their business and or provide feedback to help make a good idea great.
2.) More Transparency
Its pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get at Google. They turned advertising on its head by linking it to searches. They moved the cost model to paying for clicks and placing a higher value on search terms that are more desirable. There are more ways to spend money with Google today than ever. But here’s the thing: it’s all transparent. Advertisers know exactly what they are paying for and exactly what they are getting for their money. Google even helps open up more transparency with handy tools that let you see keyword search trends and traffic on your site.
3.) More Tools to Succeed
Google recognized that people search in order to find things. While the competition thought they were in the search engine business, Google realized that they were in the “finding things” business. Now you have Google Maps, Google Books, even Google Health. Putting tools in people’s hands to succeed helps Google succeed. Tradeshows could do the same by offering free services that leverage (exploit) the need for information flow. For example, in addition to tradeshow guides or show dailies, why not have search kiosks with sponsored searches and pay-per visit options? Why not an iPhone app that would do the same thing? Heck, while we’re at it, why not a pay-per-lead model? It may sound dangerous but so is not considering these ideas.
4.) Flexibility
Tradeshows offer the ability to essentially rent a set space for a set period of time. The bigger the space, the more flexibility you have. Some companies have the budget to build an entire environment in a huge space while some are stuck with 10×10s. Why not break up that model? Could companies be more creative with their space choices? Could they team up with other companies to create environments that ‘cross the aisle’? What about multiple spaces each devoted to different challenges in the marketplace? Granted, these are all ideas that may need to come from exhibitors themselves, but tradeshows should push innovation along and not hinder it.
5.) Get In the Information Business
For decades, tradeshows provided the space, exhibitors brought the products, and journalists covered the show. If tradeshows are in the information business, they need to team with journalists and companies to communicate with attendees. This may be in the form of podcasts, blogs, or social media — but the point is that information needs to flow more freely and on a more timely basis so exhibitors are able to make better, more informed choices while attendees receive relevant information that will enhance their experience at the show. And, by the way, attendees need to have a voice as well. Information is no longer a one way street. And, guess what? That’s a good thing.
Let’s face it, Google isn’t perfect. And it’s not the perfect model for the Tradeshow Industry. But it does reveal some of the changing trends in information exchange that have already impacted our business. People gathering in one place to do business has strong roots dating back to ancient marketplaces. There has always been value in being able to freely roam through a maze of merchants combining savvy information gathering with random encounters. But Google has taught us that calculated searching combined with chance encounters now has expanded possibilities. Not taking advantage of those possibilities is, at best, a missed opportunity, and, at worst, a death knell to the industry.
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