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Trade Show Survival Tips for the Introvert

by on June 24, 2011 in Marketing

I just returned from managing my first trade show booth in nearly five years. Turns out there were some simple things I remembered:

  1. Comfortable shoes are a life saver (turns out my Lucchese boots fit the bill nicely).
  2. Make incremental adjustments to booth setup depending on the attendee behavior (we moved our tchotchkes closer to the front to encourage more takeaways).
  3. Smile and call folks by their name (it’s no accident why events have those big name tags featuring attendee first names).

But I also realized there are some fairly important tips I’ve developed that help me – as an introvert – to successfully cope with the demands of working a trade booth. The biggest misconception of introverts is that we’re shy which is only somewhat true. Some of us introverts (like me) have extrovert tendencies so we enjoy interacting with strangers and carrying on interesting conversations. Where we do tend to differ from our extrovert counterparts is that being in and around large groups of people drains our betteries. So for that reason, we introverts need to carefully manage our energy in order to start and finish a trade show strong. Here are a few tips that I’ve used that have helped me…and hopefully they’ll help you:

Take care of ourselves. We need to eat a healthy breakfast, get plenty of sleep, drink lots of water, and breathe. Trade shows are incredibly demanding of our focused energy so it’s crucial that we tend to our physical, mental, and emotional needs.

Make time for some alone time. Our batteries get drained by being on the show floor so it’s only logical that they need to be recharged. That usually requires some alone or quiet time. If we’re going to make it through that two or three day show, we can’t do it on depleted energy reserves.

Take breaks when they come. It’s natural to have some lulls in show traffic. We need to take advantage of them to recollect ourselves and be ready for when the next wave of traffic hits.

Have fun…but within limits. Trade shows can be a lot of fun. We get the opportunity to meet a diverse crowd of folks, learn about their work, and find ways we might be able to help them. We also get out of the office and visit some interesting places. But it’s important to remember we’re there for work first and foremost. Going out drinking and clubbing every night is fine if you’re one of the rare individuals who can function on little sleep and hungover. I’ve yet to meet an introvert who can do that.

Don’t apologize for who we are. Seriously. Accept that most folks who staff trade booths are extroverted by nature and gather energy by being around other people. We can’t try to keep up with them like its some kind of test of strength. If we do, we’re probably going to lose. So if you’re feeling a little run down, graciously head back to your room for the evening, order room service, and just relax with a book or television.

If you’re an introvert, what other advice would you offer? I’d love to hear about your own experience so leave a comment below.

Additional Resources:
The Surprising Value of Introverted Trade Show Booth Staffers from Mike Thimmesch at Skyline Trade Show Tips
You’re Just Not That Into Me (the introvert’s guide to attending a conference) from Lisa Petrilli at C-Level Strategies

Ideas on Customer Success Stories

by on June 9, 2011 in Customer Experience, Marketing

Great customer testimonials and success stories are like gold for marketers. Nothing sells a product, solution, and experience quite like hearing about it from the viewpoint of a peer. But don’t mistake referenceability for actually having a customer with a compelling story. The former simply means they’re happy to tell a prospect about their own positive customer experience. Our job is to uncover those customers who have seen extraordinary results that couldn’t have been accomplished without us.

Along similar lines, Joshua Horwitz at Reference Success encourages us to Look Forward by Looking Back to Your Most Loyal. I like Joshua’s third point:

Find New Faces Don’t be afraid to ask who else might have stories to tell.  We always recommend trying to find multiple contacts within each customer reference site, but that request gets easier as the relationship matures.  Asking your loyal customer to vouch for how easy it is to be a reference for your company can make all the difference in recruiting others that may have new perspectives and new stories to share.

What’s worked for you in collecting those compelling success stories from your customers?

Customer Experience Has To Be Captured In The Wild

by on June 6, 2011 in Customer Experience, Research

If you’re thinking you can develop a customer experience program from behind your desk or behind the glass of a focus group room, think again.

“The ideas underlying customer experience are not new, and historically many successful entrepreneurs have used essentially qualitative research techniques to develop distinctive customer experiences…Developing a new customer experience involves risk, and research techniques – especially quantitative techniques – may be incapable of eliciting a response from potential customers where the proposed experience is hypothetical, and devoid of the emotional and situational context in which it will be encountered.”
Adrian Palmer, Customer Experience Management: a Critical Review of an Emerging Idea

Customer experience has to be captured in the wild and in the moment. Focus groups are for wimps. Now, go get it.

X-Men And Our Own Struggles With Alienation

by on June 5, 2011 in Life

There’s a rather fascinating op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘X-Men: First Class’ reminds us we are all mutants now. It argues that “the superhero movie series reflects an America that has increasingly come to accept individuals with unique identities, desires and talents.”

It’s a good article that raises some interesting ideas. However, where I’ll disagree with the LA Times writers (and perhaps Grant McCracken, though I haven’t fully reviewed his work titled Plentitude (pdf download)) is where they argue this “quickening speciation of social types” is a recent phenomenon. If you need any evidence, just think back to when you were in high school and how many different social types existed. The fact is we’ve always typed individuals. And we’ve always set out to form our own tribes as a way to confirm (or deny) self-identification as well as develop the security of numbers.

Now, it’s a lesser-known fact that I’m a huge comic book collector. I first started reading in 1984 and one of my favorite titles was X-Men. I don’t think I was completely aware of it at the time, but what I undoubtedly found within the stories were themes I could easily relate to: feeling outcast, alone, angry, and different from those around me. I surely felt a kinship between my teenage self and the various mutants within X-Men who sought acceptance from society.

But another way to look at why the X-Men remain popular since their beginnings in the 1960s is to see their relationship to our own cultural outlook. Not only do they fulfill a hero archetype, they connect us to an inner sense of alienation. Each of us is alienated from something in one way or another. It could family if we’ve chosen to do something outside of their wishes. It could be work if we are disconnected from the leadership structure. It could be online in social networks if our attempts at communication are ignored by others.

The moral story of X-Men – not just First Class but throughout the canon – is there are two paths we can take. One is with Magneto who believes alienation should be met with anger and vengeance. The other is with Professor Xavier who argues that alienation can be met with a hope for societal acceptance.

At the end of X-Men: First Class, characters are asked to make a choice: join Magneto or Xavier. It’s the same in our own daily existence. If we’re feeling alienated and apart from the group in which we seek acceptance, do we take the path of brooding anger…or do we take the path of hopeful determination?

The Beauty Of Small Marketing Budgets

by on June 4, 2011 in Marketing

April Dunford published a great post this week on the “beauty of constraints” in small marketing budgets:

Taking the money away often takes away all of the really obvious options. And that’s exactly where the magic happens. So we can’t just spend more to acquire new customers. Now what? Well, we could figure out ways to engage them to send more business our way, we could figure out ways to sell more to the customers we have, we could figure out ways to improve our customer retention. There are always a thousand things you can do with a small budget.

As someone who has spent his marketing career working for nonprofits and small, scrappy startups, I can definitely say I love the challenge of having to do a lot with a little. Necessity truly becomes the mother of invention.

Do yourself a favor and read April’s whole post.