Since yesterday was our day of prep for our first real trade show, I thought I’d talk about some of the hard work that goes into getting ready for your first one. First off, I really need to thank my parnter, Mike Golden. He took care of so much of this, so I could keep rolling on our never ending development list.
So first lets talk about the obvious stuff, the table… if you’ve ever been to a trade show, you know that they normally have a fancy table covering with their logo, or slogan or something like that. Now it sounds easy, but it still requires the design and getting the logo into the correct format and getting it all ordered a few weeks in advance.
Next, to up the level of our professionalism, we wanted a couple of banners to advertise for our “heavy hitting” products. Renovation for all our service management stuff, and proximity for all our production execution stuff. Now, this needed all the same stuff and then some marketing content. Let me tell you, coming up with marketing content is no walk in the park for a couple of engineers 🙂 Now, not only did I need to come up with some good descriptive stuff, but it needs to fit in a confined space. Up till now, I’ve been working with a web page that has limitless space. On the up side the marketing blueprint class I did helped a lot, but it still takes time.
And all this work was just to get the table and a couple of banners to sit on the table… Next up we needed some takeaways for people who visit the conference. The first, and probably easiest was the pens. Mike got some pens with the JaveLLin Solutions logo made up, so we can give those away at the table. But a pen alone is unlikely to have anyone remember us… This leads me to the biggest chunk of work, the brochure.
Again, my hat is off to Mike. He took the lead on this, learned MS publisher and put together a great layout. Then came the hard part again. Content. Only this time we needed written text, AND a demo. So that meant for all our products we needed to put together a decent demo highlighting enough features of our products to get people attention without overwhelming or boring them with details. Not as easy as it sounds for me. Simply because I designed all this stuff, and I want to show off all the bells and whistles. For me, it came down to writing a script and giving myself a deadline. So I aimed for a 5 minute demo, and recorded over and over again until it finally worked =) Check them out if you get a chance. Each of the product pages now has a full demo for it. Mike then took the video and even gave it a QR code and slapped it on our brochure.
Last but not least, I’ve been working to have systems up and running so that we can give live demo’s to anyone “really” interested after watching the 5 min demo’s we put together.
Amazing how much work this first tradeshow has been, but I trust all this up front work will pay off and get us multiple leads, and make life MUCH easier the next show we present at. Wish us luck, or if you happen to be in Vegas, come find us at the Mirage. =)
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike