Part 2: Strategies for Traveling Sales Events
There’s always something new and exciting happening with our clients, and the exhibit world in general. While we’re certainly dealing with a lot of unforeseen events these days, this is really just another opportunity to try new things; maybe go out on a limb a lot further than you would have, even two months ago. The ideas here will provide you with some action items to work on now, so you can hit the ground running when the time is right.
Solution 2: The Traveling Sales Event
This is about creating small group, regionalized traveling sales events of any kind. As travel will likely be reduced by both company and government policies, this is an opportunity for your sales reps who might be centralized or perhaps scattered all over the country to be able to focus on their own local and regional opportunities.
Your own research will help you locate a geographical area of interest, and then you can pick a suitable location. Hotels can work as well as dedicated event spaces. We’ve seen co-working and event spaces popping up in many cities, both large and small. Maybe this would be a one-day deal or maybe it’s several days, depending on your audience needs. The traveling event strategy will help you leverage your time as your having prospects come to you, at your chosen location, versus going to them. And you’re controlling the environment, the branded message, and the experience.
In addition to rented event spaces, some engagements might happen at a client’s own location. With one of our clients, Virgin Pulse, they needed to engage their clients they had just signed on and expose those new employee clients to the Virgin Pulse platform. They basically created what we would call a ‘booth in a box,’ which is a kind of kit with exhibit materials that was sent around from location to location.
(Note: The visuals presented here are all things that BlueHive as a company have produced.)
The idea of the booth in a box concept is to have an inventory of these simple standalone pieces that can be organized anywhere based on the actual location. A setup like the one above works in a cafeteria, a lobby, a conference room; you can really lay it out however the space dictates. In this particular configuration, an indoor scenario where the lighting can be controlled, the greenscreen camera worked well, and it was a typical photo-op activity. We filled out the space by flanking the greenscreen area with typical pop-ups; some pulled from their old exhibit and those used in smaller linear exhibits that were especially fitting to be repurposed for this interior event.
Filling out the space could be achieved with additional pop-up screens, portables, and even small furnishings, but really, these booths in a box can be compressed for ease of travel. The reality is, you can ship whatever you want these days, so some of those portable backdrops could be shipped in UPS or FedEx mailers. And you typically don’t have to worry about setup crews for such an event, since these are things you can ship and move easily. What’s more, some of these smaller crate and booth in a box packages can fit in your own car, so you can just bring them in your vehicle and transport them that way.
As always, the big key here is scalability. We wanted to take these same ideas and highlight some visuals of how these could be (later) translated into ‘standard events’:
(Note: The visuals presented here are all things that BlueHive as a company have produced.)
You’ve got these large or very small ballrooms, and you’ve got these simple reusable assets, so having those open spaces to work with are ideal when you’re creating low-contact traffic flows (something we’re all wary about right now).
In a trade show environment, a lot of times you can move into a booth from all angles, so it’s harder to control how people interact with that space, especially in keeping people six feet apart as they progress from one demo to another in an orderly fashion. Conversely, with your own event at such a larger scale, you can control that a lot more. You’ve got wide travel lanes to control that movement; you can incorporate floor graphics to help move people in the right direction with the right spacing. We see a lot of those in supermarkets and retail stores already.
When you start to scale these up, you can bring in things like video walls, light boxes, backdrops, and accent lighting. You control this environment more so than you would control your environment at the trade show. And then you can scale it up even further and start bringing in additional kiosks or demo stations or slide in shield guards between demo stations if you can’t space them out.
Conclusion
We’re all tired of feeling like we’re stuck in this hurry-up-and-wait game. This concept offers several ways to get busy now with the leg work to implement a strategy as soon as you are allowed, helping you further increase exposure and drive sales through these events. In the exhibit world, after all, you don’t need to know your final booth space or hanging sign regulations before you begin the design process. So, the idea here is to get the ball rolling now and work towards whatever challenges as they come up. When the information is available, you tailor the design to that need.
Again, expect to see smaller, regional trade shows and events to be the first ones back. So, why not start smaller with your own traveling sales event and grow from there? No investment is wasted; nothing that you do now is wasted. Everything you do now can be used on any scale, later.
So, let’s get out there and start brainstorming!
Check out Solution 3 from the BlueHive Engagement Playbook, here.