In October 2022 one of our clients took a stand at Gitex Global, in the Sheikh Maktoum hall, for the five days of the show. Two of their founders flew in. One of our reps worked the stand with them.

The stand itself cost what stands cost. The meetings held on it cost almost nothing, because we booked them before anybody got on a plane.

The arithmetic nobody does

A company that takes a stand at a large regional show is buying floor space and the hope of traffic. Traffic is real. It is also mostly students, competitors, recruiters and people collecting pens.

Meanwhile the same company is paying an outbound team, all year, to persuade senior people to give up half an hour of a working day for a video call. During show week several thousand of those same senior people are voluntarily standing in one building, in a mood to look at things, with gaps in their diaries.

Booking a meeting into a gap at a show a prospect has already decided to attend is the lowest-friction ask in this business. He is not giving you an hour. He is giving you twenty minutes between two things he was doing anyway, and he does not have to explain the meeting to anyone.

What we actually did

A fortnight out, we wrote a short invitation and sent it through our own database into the client's target segments: consumer brands, their regional distributors, the retailers who sell them. Not a promotional blast. A specific note that said which hall, which stand, which days, and one sentence about what they would be shown.

Then two follow-ups, spaced across the week before, because a prospect who is travelling to a show is precisely the person whose inbox is worst in the days before it.

The result was a stand with a schedule attached rather than a stand with a crowd around it, which are different products even when they look similar in the photographs.

Four things we would tell anyone doing this

Send it early enough to be diarised, late enough to be real. Fourteen days works. Thirty days is forgotten, five days is too late for someone whose show schedule is already full.

Name the hall and the stand number in the first two lines. Show emails are read on phones, standing up, at speed.

Ask for a time, not a visit. "Come and see us" produces goodwill. "Wednesday at eleven, ten minutes, we will show you X" produces a calendar entry.

Have somebody own the diary. The failure mode of show meetings is not booking them. It is three people from the client's side and one of ours all promising slots on the same stand at the same time. One person holds the schedule.

The part that generalises

We have run some version of this for events every year since, and the underlying idea is not about trade shows at all.

It is that the cost of a meeting is set by how much the buyer has to rearrange to attend it. Most outbound is expensive because it asks a stranger to rearrange his day. Anything that lets you ask for a slot inside a day he has already cleared, a conference, a show, a visit he is already making to a city, is worth more than the same effort spent cold.

Find the week your buyers have already agreed to be somewhere. Then be there with a schedule.

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