At tech conferences, vendor booths confuse attendees by not explaining what they do. Use problem-focused messaging to tell prospects which part of their stack you solve for. The speaker found Galactic Advisors only through a referral because their value wasn't obvious on the show floor.
Hey guys, it has been one hell of an event season so far. I've been at conference after conference after conference, and I just really quickly wanted to touch on something that's been coming up a lot. When you go to a conference and you go into the vendor hall and you're walking around, do you feel like you understand what they do? Because I know I'm not necessarily a technical resource, but when I go to MSP events, IT services events, and telco events, I'm looking at the marketing that the vendors have put up, and I'd say about 70 to 80% of the time I don't immediately understand what it is that they do. So as I'm walking the show hall, a lot of the conversations I'm hearing are people just coming up to the booth, they want some swag, and they're like, so what do you do? When marketing doesn't set sales up for a deeper conversation, sales has a lot of work to do to try to set a meeting, demo, get some type of conversion going. So as we're like preparing as marketers for events, what we want to do is set the groundwork for sales so that instead of the conversation being, well, what do you do? The conversation is more how do you do this better than someone else? Or how do you solve for XYZ? And some ways we can do this is we can build our marketing material to be more of like a PAS type strategy, which stands for problem, agitation, solution, where we can directly address the issue, the problem at hand, create some type of pain around that, and then present a solution. Or alternatively, like if your product is a direct competitor with someone else's, you can just say like, We rip and replace, you know, XYZ. Don't don't use the words rip and replace, but you can say something like, you know, replace your CRM with this, or replace your endpoint monitoring with this. I think a lot of people, as we're walking show halls and we're looking at vendors. I mean, many of the attendees at these conferences are going with problems to solve. So for example, I went to Build It by IT by Design specifically looking to solve the problem of, um, third-party analysis and audits for my clients. So my clients want to do sales outreach that's good, and one of the things we were talking about is let's just offer some type of audit that's a third-party assessment that we can take action on. And we wanted to be able to like bet our prospects that we could find something, a way that their MSP wasn't protecting them. And I ended up going to Galactic Advisors, but only because I had a reference from someone else at the show who I had been talking to about the problem. They were like, oh, go talk to Galactic Advisors. And I learned that they're one of the only solutions out there, potentially the only solution out there, where you can run that type of audit without installing any software on someone's computer. Neither here nor there the actual solution, but I don't think I would have known that about Galactic just walking the show hall. And I talked to quite a few vendors who were like, oh, we can solve for that problem, but here's how we do it. But that wasn't anywhere in their marketing materials, which I probably have a little bit of a niche problem. But as I, you know, that was just kind of to set the stage that attendees come to conferences with problems to solve. And if you aren't calling out those problems, they don't know to come to your booth and have a conversation with you. And so like as someone's walking around the show hall and they're like, analyzing vendors, usually they kind of have buckets of, you know, what budget would this be under, where would I kind of file this tool. And if they can't answer that basic question through your marketing, they're unlikely to be able to have a deep conversation with sales that's going to lead to conversions. So think of it like if I'm walking the show hall and I look at your booth and I can't immediately say, okay, they are Sales, marketing, development, monitoring. And when it comes to MSPs, it's going to be a little bit deeper than that because the tools are a little bit more complex. You know, monitoring is like a really broad topic. Cybersecurity is a really broad topic. So, so potentially, like if I'm walking the show hall for cybersecurity solutions, at the very least, I want to know if your solutions left a boom or right or right a boom. I might want to know, you know, are you monitoring response detection? Like, where do you fit in my stack? Anyways, so that's been my rant. I'm happy to go deeper into like a specific solution if you guys have questions about your own booths and how your marketing is working. But I think a lot of us get really deep in the how, more so than the what. And like, don't get me wrong, the technical decision makers walking around conference spaces, they care about the how, but first they have to understand what to be able to have the conversation about how.
