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Lucky circumstances (and an offer we couldn’t refuse) secured us a booth at the SuisseEMEX’15 tradeshow. After 30 seconds of feeling great, the realization set in that we’d have to put in some effort to make the most of it. Naturally none of us had any experience in running a booth, but as always in a startup just doing it tends to be better than weeks of deliberation.

Some initial research with colleagues and small business owners let to a pattern. Most people seem to do two things at a booth a) generate new business and b) maintain existing relationships. The latter is mostly accompanied by some form of invitation; the former is all about attracting people passing by. Since our client base is still very manageable, we focused on generating leads.

Key seems to be to have some form of attraction to grab people’s attention. From special lamps to screens of all sizes, various giveaway, attractive models – all kind of ideas were offered. Luckily for us, a co-worker in our co-working space (Colab @ Impact Hub Zurich) likes to tinker with hardware. Out of an LED screen, a raspberry Pi and an emergency button he built a gadget, which if you press the button displays a random icon (32×32 pixels). Some sweet-talking secured us the right to use it exclusively for the two days.

Trying to engage visitors

Since our CTO had a prior commitment, we hired a professional actor for two days to make sure we were at least two people at the stand. We started rather timidly on the first morning. A friendly nod, a shy smile and a „hi“ was how we tried to get visitors to stop at our booth so that we could engage them in a chat and hand them a flyer.

After an hour or so I figured out this wasn’t working. Our goal was to meet people, capture business cards and generate leads. We were more like the shy kids at the high school dance, which couldn’t muster the courage to ask someone to actually dance. Something had to change, since this is a numbers game, the more people you interact with, the higher the chances are of meeting someone interesting.

Improving our approach

Alas we regrouped and changed our tactics. Our professional actor took right flank of booth, I took the left flank. Anyone that walked by was welcomed with a huge smile, a booming, „Hi – we can measure relationships“ and a firm handshake. Immediately people started stopping and asked what exactly it was what we did.

We lured them to our contraption, told them to press the button at which a pixel art image appeared on the display. I would then make up some funny quip that we had just measured their relationship and interpret the image to say something nice our (alleged) relationship-measuring device had discovered. Like a fortuneteller but with the help of modern technology. Of course after a couple of seconds we’d grin at them and tell them this was all but a blatant ploy to grab their attention, but that we really do measure relationships just on a different level and without a weird device.

This simple idea actually worked! We got people to listen to our story about our technology, how we can measure relationships between enterprises and where it generates value (Complex relationships, B2B Sales, Account Management). Within a minute or two I was able to direct the conversation towards asking the visitor what they did and either politely getting rid of them or continuing the conversation with the goal on securing a business card.

Conclusion

The funniest visitor was the one person who looked at us slightly confused and asked, whether the whole workforce would have to stand in front of our device. After stifling a laugh, we were able to bring home our point that our approach works by measuring the electronic communication of the company (Emails, Phone,…) in their datacenter.

It was tough, it felt like being a politician campaigning but it paid off. We generated interesting contacts & leads, which we’re still engaging with today. Plus we learned how to successfully interact with random people, how to hone our pitch and that grit eventually pays off.

The best decision that night was to leave the big trade show party after a single glass of champagne, eat a pizza and go to bed early. We wouldn’t have survived the second day on a hangover. Booth work requires stamina, energy and determination.