Jay Menashe talks about using virtual and hybrid events todrive your global sales growth

Welcome to the Global Sales Mentor Podcast for conversations that drive growth. When you are ready to grow your international sales, join the conversation with your host, Zach Selch.

Welcome to another episode of Conversations That Drive Global Sales Growth. I have a special guest this month talking about trade shows. As we are spending this month talking about trade shows and preparation for trade shows, Jay Manash is a specialist in trade shows and exhibitions and specialty events for corporations. Jay, you wanna introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Yeah, thanks for having me, Zach. I'm Jay Manash. I work for EDE. We create personalized experiences for trade shows, branded environments, and museums. And really what that means, we design and build exhibits, we handle and manage all the services. So basically our clients can just show up and focus on the revenue-driving activities, not get locked in all the paperwork and all the The—

not be there at 6 AM with a pair— with a screwdriver on your knees and a suit, right?

Yes. Hey, feel free to come along, but then they'll send someone like me to distract you, to keep you away from that so that everybody else can get the work done.

Right, right. Yeah, that's— and, and that's, that's really fantastic because I'll tell you what, you think about how many times you— well, I, I've been to a trade show again, like, you know, in my suit with a, with a screwdriver fixing something right before opening. And it is distracting. When I go to a trade show, and I always say this to my clients and people on my teams, I want to know exactly how much it costs me per minute to be there. And then every time somebody wastes a minute, I'm thinking, that just cost me $62, right?

Oh yeah.

And, you know, that's, that's the way to look at it, because it's some of the most expensive time in your year. but it can be the most valuable, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot of money that is easily wasted for silly reasons at trade shows.

Right. So talk us through a little bit about how this would work. You know, so you're basically, you're gonna design the booth, but also set it up and make sure that you get the experience you want out of it.

Yeah, absolutely. So it all starts with the design of the booth and the attendee experience and the flow of the space. You know, it's not just about throwing up architecture and hoping people coming. We wanna work through the pre-show effort of how you're driving people there and making sure that they know like this is where they're gonna access the show. You have a couple main aisles usually around your booth and making sure signage is pointed in the right direction and there's something dynamic, you know, whether it's lighting or AV or something to pull them in.

Right. I think that's a big thing that people overlook is, and it's sort of funny, sometimes you look at a map of a trade show and if you don't know what you're doing, you don't realize where the flow is and you put the trade show at the wrong angle or the wrong way. And you gotta think about where people are coming and how it appears as they approach so that they know what you're doing, you know?

Yeah. Well, and then I'd say one of the hardest parts of our industry is like you can look at a map and think you understand the flow, but if you don't know that convention center or even that specific show, it, it tells a whole different story of, of what to do. Like, we're—

Exactly.

We're preparing for an event in November and, you know, there is a massive show. It's RSNA. It's a radiology show in North America.

I love RSNA. Yeah.

So there are 2 main aisles, but everybody knows when you enter that floor, you're usually walking down that first main aisle, and then to go across, like, there's a secondary main aisle. So it's like addressing that secondary aisle is almost just as important.

Right, right. And, and there's— for people like me, there's a lot of debate about the cost-benefit. I mean, it's cool to be on the main aisle with a 3-story, uh, booth with, uh, with, you know, making steaks and espresso and all of that. But if you can't afford that, what's your best bang? You know, if you have $20K to spend, what's your best bang for your buck? And I was talking to somebody yesterday about the benefits of the outer periphery of the hall or the main aisles. And if you can't afford a lot, there's also an argument for being at the very periphery, because people do walk around the periphery. I think the little aisles that are in between, from the very outside to the middle, those are the ones that sometimes are the worst. It's, it's hard to tell, right? What's your opinion on that, Jake?

I think the pre-show marketing does— is underemphasized in a lot of cases, because if you have an exciting story to tell or, or a good reason for people to come to you, your pre-show marketing will get them there. Because like you're saying, it's like if you're on that periphery and it's hard to find your booth. It's like, for me personally, I don't walk around those outer edges. But, you know, maybe you feel like wandering, you want to see some of the new technologies, you're going to get there. But, you know, there's got to be a compelling reason to walk into the booth.

I'm going to say something that sort of goes against your tradecraft in that I don't want— typically, I don't want strangers walking into my booth, right? If I, if I don't know you and I haven't set a meeting with you, I probably don't have time for you at a, at a trade show. Because I want to have those meetings always set up for them. Now, a lot of people look at it from a very different perspective. Typically, what I'm doing at a trade show is I'm meeting people I want to meet in a centralized location, right? And I, I feel like, depending on what you sell, and depending on your, you know, how, how long you've been in business and all that, very often people just— they're trying— they're, they're treating this like a Like a mall. They want random people to walk into their booth and do business. But for me, I want people I've already set meetings with to come in and have a comfortable meeting experience as opposed to random strangers seeing my booth and going, oh, I understand exactly what Zach sells. This is exactly what I need. I'm gonna walk in and give Zach money. That never happens to me, right?

Yeah. Well, but to that point, so our clients typically, 60 to 70% of their meetings are pre-booked, and then they may end up filling the rest. Even if it's— they hit their goal in preset meetings, they're still going to add on easily 30% more at the show, right?

Exactly. And there are always people who don't set a meeting with you, and they, they do, you know, even if they know you, they, they just don't like to manage their time like that, and they'll come by. But I like to have— so for me, typically what I like is a booth set up I do something that's a little, little funny. I like to have a meeting room. I like to have what I call like a hangout room for my distributors, which is seemingly a lot of wasted space. But what I find is I have distributors who come to the show, they're going to see 10 or 15 different manufacturers. But if they're most comfortable at my booth, they're going to spend most of their time at my booth. So if I, if I have a second meeting room, and I make that into a lounge for my distributors to hang out, I'm going to get a lot of time with my distributors. And then the other thing that I waste space on is I like to have a coat room for my distributors. And I say to them, you can come by in the morning. Because I'll tell you what, like you go to Düsseldorf or Frankfurt, or I'm not sure about— nobody ever wears a coat in Vegas. But you go to check a coat in Frankfurt at the trade show, you're gonna wait half an hour in line to check the coat and half an hour Right? So if I say to them, hey, come by, leave your coat and your bag in my booth, I know everybody's gonna come by my booth twice a day, right? Which gives me opportunity to, you know, capture mindshare with my distributors, spend some time talking to them, that kind of thing, and it drives engagement. And then if I have a nice lounge with 2 couches in it and a coffee machine and maybe some beer, they're gonna spend hours every day hanging out in my booth. And it's worth the real estate for that, right? If I spend, you know, 30% of the real estate on my booth of distributor lounge and coat, you know, coatroom, then it's still a pretty good investment for me, right? You know, a lot of people aren't going to do that. But it works out pretty well for me.

I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, think about it this way. It's like you can have the best product in the world, best features. But if people don't like you or trust you, They're not gonna, it doesn't matter. So building, that's just adding to that relationship building, that comfort. You know, you want people to come hang out, but that's honestly more and more clients are going that route. Maybe they don't have like a coat check at their booth, but they're building spaces that are more comfortable to spend time in because they're built to be, you know, drive sales and have meetings and build relationships.

Right.

So I'm not a huge fan of the demo-heavy booths. I mean, especially these demos that are all, it's like, ooh, another PowerPoint.

That's wonderful.

Right. You know, you could do that online. We could do that like this. Why am I traveling halfway around? around the world or halfway around the country just to see a PowerPoint demo that we could do on a computer.

That's exactly right. I'll tell you, 8 or 10 years ago, I found that the cost of having a working demo at our booth for one of the products I was selling was huge because we needed a dedicated— it was a very complex product. We needed a dedicated engineer to run the demo and we always had problems. Right? Every year, you know, we, we had a cable break, so we'd have to run out to a hardware store in the middle of the night, all these different things. And one year I just said, well, what if we had 2 big video screens set up to our solution center back at headquarters, and we had somebody doing demos video to the screen Wouldn't that work? And it worked. It worked really well, and it solved that problem. So then what we did was every year we just set up two big screens, and that was our demos. And we had somebody doing demos remotely on video. This was eight or ten years ago.

That's smart. I was gonna. It reminds me. So we have a client at a show called Modex, and it's a huge machine show warehouse automation. So everybody bringing these big giant sorters.

Right.

Well, they they stop bringing machines. They they usually bring like one smaller machine and empty the booth of it and create. experiences too. It's like, right, help you understand how the product works with a hands-on demo. Like they did a, uh, a digital shell game one year, and when you won, because everybody won, um, one of their robots would bring a prize to you and show you the most efficient path that it brought the prize to. So yeah, it's just, you know, and sometimes it's a little more expensive to do something like that, you know, to create a custom app or whatever, but there are so many simple, even analog ways to create experiences that are much more memorable than, you know, Oh, let me walk you through this PowerPoint.

That's a great word, Jay. Memorable, right? Sometimes we forget how many booths people hit at a trade show, right?

Yeah.

So you have a guy who's just walked around, he's hit, you know, 70, 80 meetings, you know, 70, 80 discussions over a 4-day period. And how does he remember you, right? So that type of a memorable experience That, that's really powerful and very valuable for a sales tool, right?

Yeah, no, I think people underestimate how many demos that their attendees are looking at in a day and how many of them are 99% the same, right? Just slap a different name on it.

Exactly. And that's, that's part of the frustration that people don't get how important it is to make it memorable, make it a little different, that kind of thing.

And people get nervous about it because they don't want to take a risk and they think it's like, well, if I do just the standard PowerPoint demo, it's like, well, that's not risky at all. But it's like, yeah, but what are you really doing?

What's the value in that, right? So yeah, it might not be risky, but what's the value in that? Are you going to achieve your goals? You know, and that's the thing, like you have a short amount of time where they're— you get their attention at your booth. What do you want to achieve with that time? You know?

Yeah, absolutely.

So what are some of the interesting things aside from, you know, remote demos and robots and stuff like that? Some of the interesting things that people are seeing, you know, in the past couple of years at trade shows that you think are really cool?

Well, the past couple years have been kind of boring because, uh, most of them didn't even happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I think people are really tapping into experiences more and moving away, you know, more and more companies are moving away from that standard demo, which is great to see, focusing on meeting areas and building relationships. You know, there's typically 3 reasons you're at a show. You want to build awareness for your company or your product, you want to strengthen a relationship that's already kind of in pipeline, or you're closing a deal. So really honing in on that specific objective, not having 20 objectives coming into the show. I think marketers in general are just getting smarter about that. I think that is, thankfully, a good trend that we're seeing.

Yeah, yeah. I think focusing down— one of the things I like to talk about is message boards at trade shows, because you very often— a lot of my experience is you're pulling in field salespeople from different places that don't spend a lot of time together, and you really want to have clarity of your messaging at the show, what people talk about, and clarity of your focus, what you're trying to achieve that show. And, you know, it's sort of like salespeople, it can be like herding cats, right? You wanna— everybody's trying to do something else. They have their own ideas. Once I was at a company, it was a funny company because it was one of these very old companies. And it had been— there were a bunch of companies that had merged and changed their names and so on. So it wasn't ever clear what year the company was founded in, right? And I walked around the booth and I heard people talking and they said, yeah, the company was founded in 1919. Somebody else said, yeah, you know, our company has been around since 1925. Somebody said, our company's been around since 1938. And it struck me that if I were a client customer and I heard 3 different dates for the foundation of a company, I would think, okay, can I believe anything these people are telling me? And, you know, and that's the same type of thing. People will say, oh yeah, our warehouse is 10,000 square meters, our warehouse is 18,000 square meters, whatever. When you hear these inconsistencies, it always strikes me that the customer is going— it's going to raise a red flag with the customer.

Sure.

So trying to drive these consistent messages on the booth to me is really key for the experience of interfacing With the customers. Yeah.

Yeah. One thing we work— we talk a lot about is analytical design, and it's using— rather than, you know, you look at every booth and every marketing campaign, it's all about these big buzzwords and, you know, messaging and, you know, lifestyle pictures. And we focus it more on stats. You know, as marketers and salespeople, we're all focused on ROI, but we're not putting the ROI in big bold print on a graphic rather than focus on buzzwords. And that's a big shift we've been making with our clients, whether it's It's a, you know, candy expo where our company, our client is selling into specific regions in the US. It's like, hey, our marketing efforts has lifted their ROI of this product by 17% or 34%. And it's like putting that number out there versus the messaging. And that, that's also been a nice transition. It's like, yeah, we all talk about ROI, but for some reason they're scared to put it on like a graphic.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, and I hate to raise the sales marketing divide here, But very often when you're dealing with trade shows, you're dealing with marketing people who don't necessarily look at these things in terms of the numbers, right? They, you know, I hate to say it this way, but very often the marketing people are sort of like, well, I want to have the prettiest booth. I'd love to get a red ribbon or a blue ribbon for the quality of my booth, or for, you know, for this, a prize for this design or whatever. And the sales guy's thinking, I need to get ROI. I need to get the most sales for the dollars I'm spending. And I like to think about it in terms of that too, right? And, and those are the type of messages very often that are very powerful with your customers. A guy who worked for me once who wanted to put just lists of reference sites on the walls of our booth. And on the one hand, I was thinking, you know what, this is a lot of text. And then when I saw it, I thought, holy crap, There are like 300 reference sites of high-quality hospitals on the— named on the wall of the booth. This is a really powerful message to people who come in here, right? And it was a great idea, but it wasn't my idea, you know? But once I saw it, I thought, you did the right thing. So yeah.

Well, and honestly, if you get a good graphic designer, they will work that into making it look like a cool pattern that you don't even realize is these powerful data points that you're trying to sell.

No, that's a very good point, is it comes down to the designers and the people who do those things. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

A few years ago, I was walking around the day before a trade show opened, and there were about 3,000 booths, and I picked out a couple of them that I really liked, and it turned out they had both been designed by the same woman, and I really like her work, and what You know, they were designed around— one of them had 7 meeting areas in a very small space. They were almost like telephone booths. But she said they, you know, what she had been asked for was to get a lot of space for salespeople to meet one-on-one with people in a semi-private environment. And she made it work in this little space. It was really good. And the other one was similar to that. It was also a lot of—

Yeah.

of good meeting area within a small space. So, you know, a good designer can get really good results from, from this. You know, it's worth the money to spend on a good designer and a good experience.

Absolutely. It takes so much of the headache away of planning. It's like you need experts for these things. You're investing tens of hundreds of and hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. You know, go, go with an expert that can handle that for you.

Yep, I, I agree. If you can afford it, always go with an So you had a funny story about, about showing up one day at a booth. What, what, tell us that story, Jay.

Uh, thankfully this is a long time ago. Uh, that's the best part about it.

It's always great when you make these mistakes a long time ago, right? Yeah.

Yes, I would say even a few days after it happened, I was able to laugh at it because it all worked out fine. But yes, I was showing up to a show and we had been working with this client for 3 years now. So, you know, we had done this booth a bunch of times. We were ready, and I was, I was showing up later than normal because I had a good same crew year after year. And I'm like, you know, I'm gonna show up a day and a half before the show versus like 5 days before, spend some more time at home, whatever. So I'm walking into the booth, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna mess with our lead supervisor. I'm gonna tell him the booth is set up backwards. And I step foot into the booth and I look around. And the booth was actually backwards and it was like 70 to 80% completed. So they were basically, all the structure was up, they were just gonna be putting up the graphics and, you know, you have to be adaptable in the trade show world. And, you know, I gave it the good try of convincing the clients like, you know, maybe this is really facing the right aisle. And, you know, I had a really good relationship with this client. She's like, listen, Jay, I get it. I know what you're doing, fix the booth.

Right, yep, yep.

So, yeah, it was a fun next, you know, 36 hours or so where I was like, I got to Vegas, I'm like, I'm gonna go to the sportsbook. You know, Clemson was playing FSU that night, big rivalry match. I'm like excited to go watch the game. Yeah, there was no way I was watching that game that night. I don't think I left the hall until at least midnight, and then there was another long day the next day.

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I, I think if you've been to enough shows, you've seen just about every possible screw-up or whatever that can happen. Even before COVID I used to put a lot of hand sanitizer around the booth, and I would yell out every, like, hour or so. I would yell, everybody sanitize your hands! And because twice I've been on a booth where everybody got sick. One year— this goes the first time about 25 years ago— everybody got the flu on a booth. Literally everybody got the flu.

Geez.

And then one year, about 10, 12 years ago, everybody got pink eye. And somebody else, somebody picked up pink eye right before getting on a flight, and by the time they got to the, you know, to the, to the country, it had been fully blown. And then the next day they passed it to 3 other people, and, you know, within a couple of days the whole booth had it. So that kind of thing happens, or you, you know, the one time I was going to this trade show, and the engineer who was supposed to set up the demo system had a brilliant idea. What— I'm not being sarcastic. She decided she would carry all the cabling with her in her carry-on to make sure it didn't get lost, and security confiscated it because she had— they, they said you can't, you know, she had like 200 meters of Cat5 cable. Which theoretically, like, they were like, why do you want this on the plane? Right? It was, you know, 20 kilos of high-quality electrical cable. So they confiscated it. And so we had to run around the next day and try and find exactly the right cable at a hardware store. You never know what's going to screw up. You got to be prepared for any kind of mistakes, right?

Oh, yeah. You should have a list of distributors and local resources before you head anywhere. For any kind of reason, you know, whether it's a Home Depot or Target or a hardware— yeah, it doesn't matter. Be prepared. That stuff's gonna happen.

Exactly. And it's sort of funny, I'm, I'm not a terribly handy guy. Like, it would never dawn on me to like plaster up the wall in my house. But I'll tell you what, I know hardware stores in every city that I go to a trade show. I've been to a hardware store and I've been to the, you know, the equivalent of Best Buy buying stuff and buying hardware. You know, fixing things at the last minute because these things happen, right?

Oh, if you don't expect it to happen, it's 100% gonna happen.

Definitely will. Great. Well, so thanks a lot for your time, Jay. Do you want to, um, tell people how they can find you if they want to engage with you and want to work with you?

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, first way is easiest is always LinkedIn. You could always go there and easily find me. I'm pretty active daily, on a daily basis.

Great. Great. All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. Thanks, listeners, everybody, for listening in. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Conversations That Drive Global Sales Growth. Thanks, Jay, and everybody. I hope you have a wonderful day and rest of the month. If you are doing trade shows this season, I'm hoping that you will prepare well for them and get very good results. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Jay.

Thank you, Zach.