Stephan Murtagh, The Trade Show Guy, Joins to Talk About How To Use Trade Shows to Grow Global Sales

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.

Hi, welcome back to Conversations That Drive International Sales. And I have here my friend, the exhibition guy, Stefan, who is, uh, really, um, the guy to go to to talk about international exhibitions. And so we've talked about a lot of other people, we've talked to a lot of other people who deal with various tools that you're going to use to grow your export, but we all know that trade shows and exhibitions are one of the best tools you have, and this is the guy to talk to about it. So welcome, thank you very much. We've known each other for a while, not necessarily as real in-life But we've been talking and chatting about this field for a while. So it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks a lot.

It's a pleasure, Zach. And it's funny, it's a new type of friendship, I think, these days. It starts on Zoom. Every great relationship starts on Zoom.

Exactly. But I'll tell you what, it used to be that people I met on LinkedIn, I'd probably meet— within 6 months or a year, I'd probably end up having a beer or a meal with them at some point. And now I know more and more people who I, I've been dealing with them on a regular basis for 2 years, and I have yet to have a beer with them. So yeah, I miss that part. So let's talk a little bit about what it is exactly you do, and then we'll talk a little bit about what's changed, because I think we're both in a situation where what we do has changed a lot in the past year, but it'll change back. I'm not, I'm not, you know, saying that anything is, is going away. So tell us a little bit about about what you do and especially how that helps people grow their international sales.

Yeah, well, of course, it's great to be here. But I suppose the Exhibition Guy, where it comes from really is I spent the past 27, 28 years in exhibitions, both managing shows in Ireland, UK, and internationally, managing exhibitions for somebody else. And I also have my own business running actual shows. But the biggest, the biggest thing I came across a lot of the time with— and this is not an Irish or a European thing, this is a worldwide thing— is people would arrive at exhibitions and they wouldn't have a plan. They'd just rock up to the venue and assume it would all happen.

I hate that, I hate that, yeah.

And it's just, it used to frustrate me because, you know, as a salesperson in exhibitions, we'd invest all this time in our exhibitors, we'd want them to do well, we'd give them the tools to do well, but they just arrived to do nothing. And then what they do is they take the easy way out and blame the exhibition organisers, say the show was rubbish. I got no business from it. And a case in point, I suppose, was I was— one of my clients, or one of my very first clients, I remember he was doing exhibitions. And I said to him, I said, how many— sorry, he sold high-end kitchens, so a fairly decent product range and price he was making. I said, how many inquiries did you get from that exhibition? He said, I think at the time he told me 127 inquiries. Now that's a lot of kitchens, by the way. But I said to him, and how many of them did you chase up? Ah, listen, I got too busy when I came back after the event and I didn't chase them up. And I said— and then he proceeded to tell me how bad the event was. I kind of go, well, it obviously wasn't that bad if you got the inquiries. He said, well, I got no business from it. I said, well, what did you do actively to chase those people after the event? He's, well, nothing really. Like, therein lies the problem. So I suppose what happened for me is being in the exhibition industry for so long It used to frustrate me seeing people waste their money on booking stands or booths at exhibitions and not actually following through and getting the thing that they really want, and that's the business from the show.

Right.

So it's really commonplace, Zach. There's about 70— in fact, it's 68% of people will go to an event without a plan at all. And to be honest with you, you're just not going to get anywhere with that. So—

Oh yeah.

In another example, the last show I worked on as a salesperson I put a lot of time in one particular company, and ironically they were selling high-end kitchens as well, just purely as a— by the way. And what happened was he'd spent about $20K with me, $20,000 on the space, right? That's a lot of money. And he spent a further $50,000 on the stand, so he was in for $70K.

And the travel— how many guys did he have on the booth?

In this particular case, it was based in Dublin. He was from Dublin, but he had, I think, 4 people on the stand with him, or the booth with him.

So that's— they could have been doing something else, right? So he's paying for them.

Yeah, it's—

anyway, sorry I interrupted you. Go on.

Yeah, no, no, no, it's a good question. He incorporated all these costs, and it was one of the shows that I worked on that was incredibly successful, and everyone wanted to rebook. It was a launch show we did, and this guy was just— he was irate on the last day of the show. The show was really bad rubbish, got no business from it. So I sat down with him, and like most good salespeople, I'm a listener, so I'm going to talk to him. I'm going to ask him some questions. I want to hear his opinion because my opinion doesn't matter right now because there's no point to me— and you know this, Zach, in sales— there's no point me telling him he's wrong.

Right.

It's his situation. Anyway, long story short, I said to him, what kind of planning did you do? And he did— he looked at me blankly. He said, no, how do you mean? What kind of plan? I said, well, did you plan for what you wanted to achieve from this? He said, no. I said, did you set any objectives or anything specific? He said, no, no. So, okay, what marketing did you do? We had a chat and he said, I thought you might be doing that. And I said, well, it's our job to bring people to a show, but it's your job to bring them to the stand. So the last question I asked him was, I said, who is working on the stand with you? He said, I've got 4 guys from the warehouse. I go, they're not salespeople, they're warehouse people. That's their different skill set. He's like, the sales guys are away on holidays or something like this. So it really frustrated me to see him absolutely waste his money.

Oh.

And it struck me at that very moment, Zach, that for somebody who's been in sales for so long, both through exhibitions and Yellow Pages, that I have a background in selling, obviously, but I'm also very passionate about people doing business. I'm passionate about this whole doing well from events. So I set up a company called The Exhibition Guy to specifically work on a really simple principle called the 7 Steps to Exhibition Success. So some key things you need to do when you're exhibiting at trade shows. Now, I've delivered this all over the world from the point of view is none of these things are unique to Europe, to the States, to India. It doesn't matter where you are, the principles of exhibiting and doing international business remain the same. There may be some slight differences of cultures, but essentially the principles are the same. So I set up the business and I work with exhibition organizers training their clients, which is the exhibitors, on how to exhibit properly. Now, the reason we do that is in our industry, we probably lose about 40 to 50% of our clients every year for various different reasons. And that's, that's a crazy amount. No business should be losing that much clients per year.

Right.

So what we do is we educate them on how to exhibit better so the retention is better for the organizer, the exhibitor does better, and then the visitor obviously is happy because he's done better at it. So that's essentially what we do, and we do that globally.

Okay. I, I'll tell you what, what, what you are saying there is so correct. And, and I always say, and, and I say this to people all the time, I'm like, most of the people I know who do the type of work I do do it wrong. And, and it sounds really arrogant, but, but that's exactly it. You go to a show, I basically say to people on my team at a show, I say, This is costing us $11 a minute. This is costing us $13 a minute. This is costing us $9. And it's always in that range. It's never less than about $7 a minute. It can go up to $20 a minute, right? For the time on the show. So if you have a problem and that problem takes you 25 minutes or half an hour to solve that problem, I mean, even something stupid like your water cooler tips over and you have to clean it up, something stupid like that, that could be $300 right there of wasted time on the booth. Not to mention the flip side of that is you say, well, it's our intention to do $6 million worth of business this week, right? So every minute you should be selling $50K, right?

Yeah.

I mean, you're losing money and people don't get that. And the whole idea of bringing the wrong people The other thing that I do, and I started with a company about— I joined a company as the head of sales 10, 15 years ago. And the first show we went to, I put out a 25-page briefing document for our main trade show. And somebody at the company, the head of marketing said, you know, I've never seen anything like this before. And I said, well, I said, I'm going to be spending about $13 a minute on this show. My anticipation is I'm going to bring in all this revenue from the show. I want everybody going to the show to know what they're supposed to be doing. And before I get on a plane, I've told everybody what hours they're working on the booth. Because I don't want to do all the talking, but I'm like— No, of course. You take a group of Americans to Berlin for a week, You can bet your ass somebody's going to want to go sightseeing, right? So if you give them a 2-hour time slot to go sightseeing, you know they're not going to run away from their duties, right? If you say to them, okay, these are your hours you're on, but I'm giving you a 2-hour time slot every day to go jogging, to get some exercise, to see the city, right?

Yeah.

So I plan all of that out, all of that stuff. The other thing that I do is I always— my personal time is set up so that I have virtually no free time at any given day. I have meetings set up. If I'm going to a 4-day show, I probably have 32 meetings set up right now. I'll also leave a couple of time slots open for something that might happen. Some of those meetings will change, people will be late, whatever. But I'm not getting on a plane and flying halfway around the world and spending all that money without a plan. I mean, who does that, right?

But this thing, would you be surprised? Because a lot of people do do that. And this is why, this is why exhibitions— people will look at exhibitions. I mean, if you take in the harsh reality of it, is exhibitions are probably the most expensive form of advertising you want to do if you get them wrong, right?

But they could also be the best return on investment.

They absolutely are. I was just going to say, they are absolutely the best return on investment if you get them right. Because no matter what way we want to talk about it, face-to-face, understanding somebody, seeing them face-to-face and understanding body language, things that are incredibly important in sales in general, but specifically in exhibitions, right? Where is he? And you don't know, for example, who's going to walk on your stand, because it could be somebody who's really interested, or it could be somebody, right, who's what they call a tire kicker. In other words, they're not really interested in buying at all. You need to be able to manage that audience.

You know what I love are the guys who come into your booth, they look around and they go, What do you sell? I want to be your distributor. You know, and you're like, okay, you are totally worthless. Get out of my booth.

No, no, absolutely. But you see, you're so right for saying, because if you go back to your plan, as I say to people, when it comes to planning for an exhibition, you don't have to make it complicated. It needs to be at sales, marketing, and operations. Those are the 3 key features of your, of your, of your plan. And what I'm saying to companies is, when you have a plan and you say to yourself, this is what we want to achieve by exhibiting at XYZ show, then you're focused on achieving it. Now I talk with clients and say, well, how many objectives do you have? So we want to sell lots of products. Now that's not an objective because it's not measurable because you don't know whether you're going to hit it or not. So what I'm saying to people is the critical point to— sorry, the first point of the 7 steps is having that written plan.

Right.

1 to 2 page written plan. You can have a 25 page written plan.

And it should be— usually it's something like, well, my first thing is I have set meetings, right? I'm meeting all my distributors. My second thing is I am interested in finding a distributor from these 3 countries. All these other countries are full. So if somebody comes in from India, give them a cup of coffee, thank them for coming by, get rid of them. But if somebody comes from Nigeria, make sure I meet with them. Right? And that's in my plan.

Right. Because the second step in the 7 steps is this idea of setting 3 clear objectives. So it's not about setting one objective. I want to sell X amount of product or service.

Right.

Or so you set your 3-tier objectives. Now obviously revenue can be one of them, but it could be I need to get a new distributor in Nigeria. It could be I want to find a new team member for my team. But the key is that we have those 3 objectives, because when we, when we set 3 objectives, we're very focused on achieving them. Now what happens is in the world of sales, in the world of exhibitions, we talk about this thing called ROI, return on investment. That's great, but— and it is a big but— If we hang our hat on an exhibition on a number saying we're going to sell 500,000 or 222,000 or whatever the figure is, if we don't hit that number, we come back from the show and say it wasn't a success. Now that's not the reality. So we talk about in exhibition terms is what we call return on objectives. So it's ROO as opposed to ROI. And ROO is where you set those 3 clear objectives. Yes, I want to do 500 grand, but I also want to get one new staff member, or if that's your thing.

Right.

I want to appoint one new distributor in Nigeria. Now when you come back from the show and you haven't hit your revenue number, but you're very close to it, you've achieved the other thing.

Well, but I'd also say that your show isn't about 2-week revenue, it's about year revenue, right? If you're doing— in my opinion, so I typically do 3 shows, 3 big shows a year, right? And but those are every year. I've been doing the same 3 shows For almost 30 years, and I look at them as driving revenue over the course of the year. I'm not going to come back from a show with a million bucks worth of purchase orders.

Nobody does. It doesn't work that way.

Yeah.

That's why I say, and people always say to me, say, well, how many sales am I going to get? I say, well, you can't, like, tie it on as a piece of string. You're not going to walk away from trade show floor with a big bag of orders unless you're in something—

Unless you sell like, you know, car mats or something like that, right? Yeah.

Then you're assessing it based on the number of consumers who bought off your booth. But in reality, in trade shows, we've got to set those 3 clear objectives. The next one we look at is really important, is— and it's a really critical piece— is how we market ourselves before we exhibit. Because like, I come back to the example I gave earlier on.

I, I like what you said about you bring people to the show, but the exhibitor brings people to their booth. I think that's 100% true.

It's so true, you see. And that's what I was going to say, because If you look at it at the moment, exhibition organizers take me on board to talk to their exhibitors on exhibitor days face to face, and they want me to say this because the reality is that they find it difficult to say that to their clients. Rightly or wrongly, they find it difficult to say it.

Right.

I will get up and I would say to somebody, it's your marketing budget, it's your money you're spending, so how you spend it is up to you. Now obviously you want to get the best return. Yes, of course, as organizers we bring people to the event. That's what we do. But when it comes to bringing people to your stand or one of the 500 other stands in the hall, that's your responsibility. And that comes down to the marketing, the way you market yourself beforehand.

Right.

And I did some work for UBM, a very big exhibition company, on 12 things you need to do when you're marketing yourselves. And I won't go into them all because they'll bore you, but what I will say to you is it should be, in this day and age, a 70/30 split between 70% of your marketing should be online and 30% of your marketing should be offline. Most companies these days say, oh, everything's online. That's fine, but don't alienate the piece of the other people, whether that's through networking meetings, through posting invitations in the mail, or whatever it might be, because they're an important backup for it.

And I'll tell you what, that— so walk-ins are almost related to the design of your booth and the location of your booth within the hall.

Yep.

Now, if you are a first-timer, the first 5-year exhibitor in a good show, you have almost no say of where you're gonna be in the hall, right? Because they're gonna put you not necessarily in the best place until you get a little bit more seniority.

Yep.

Now, the difference between a pretty good booth and a rockstar booth could be $50,000, right? If you say, I'm going to go to the show, I'm going to sit there, and people are going to come by, and they're going to love my booth and come in, the only way you're going to achieve that is through a lot of money.

Yeah.

But 2 or 3 weeks of reaching out to people, like you send out a mass mailing to all your clients, and you say, by the way, I'm going to be at this booth on such and such a day. We have a new product we'd love to show you. Can we set an appointment with you? What does that cost you? A couple of hours of an admin's time? It's nothing. Again, so you're basically saying, okay, I throw $50,000 on having a clown on my booth and making it 3 stories and giving out beer and popcorn, or I send out an email beforehand. What's the better use of my money?

Because it is so true, because people often say to me when I used to sell exhibitions, they say, well, I want to stand at the front of the show. And I go, okay, just tell me why you want to stand at the front. So we want to be the first people— first company that people see when they walk in the door. Now I go, okay, well, let me just give you my experience here. That's not a good idea. And I'll tell you why. Because what tends to happen at trade shows, people walk in the door and they keep walking. So they're going to walk straight past you. So we want to be in the center of the hall. But my fourth, I suppose, tip of the 7 steps is exactly about what we're talking about here, is how do we get our booth, our stand, as we call it in Europe. How do we get people to our stand and engage them? Well, if you take a statistic, when a visitor walks into an exhibition and walks down the aisle of a trade show, they decide within 4 seconds if they're going to stop in your stand.

Right.

That's across the board. Now, what you've got to think about is, how do I engage that client in the first 4 seconds? Yes, of course we can use our people, and we'll come back to that in a moment. But we also have to think about the stand design, and there's a couple of key metrics here. The first one is your graphics that you use with your text or whatever pictures or whatever it might be, they need to be readable and visible from 15 to 20 feet away. Really important.

Right, right, right.

Strong use of color. The second part of that is you need to have about 60% of your floor space that you have on the ground free for visitor access, so in other words, they can walk in and out of the stand. The third one is, and really important, is your people. Your people need to engage. They don't sit down reading the newspaper or texting.

I used to say, like, you know what they say at McDonald's is if you have time to lean, you have time to clean. I always used to say you can't, and nowadays, it shows how long I've been doing this. I used to say you can't smoke, eat, drink, or sit on my booth. If you want to do one of those things, Take a break as scheduled and get off the booth somewhere else, right? Yep.

Yeah.

Because if you walk by and you see somebody sitting there checking email, you think, well, they obviously have a lot of time.

They're not engaged.

And you keep walking.

Engaged, Zach. And yeah, you keep walking. The other thing is, and a really simple example I would give to people, is when I had my daughter and my kids, but when I had my daughter specifically, and she's about 3 or 4 years of age. Someone said to me, said, if you want to have a conversation with your daughter and you want to take her seriously, you want her to take you seriously, or you've got something to talk about, you kneel. So in other words, you're eye to eye. That's right. Now, when you're at a trade show, very similar example. When you're at a trade show and you're a visitor and you walk up to a booth and the person is sitting down and you're looking down at them and they're looking up at you, that's not an equal relationship. It's also, from a visitor's point of view, quite off-putting because they think, am I putting Zach off, or am I disturbing him from reading his newspaper? Oh, right, right.

It's not meant to be that way.

You should You should be standing and engaging, open body language.

I have a friend who's pretty crazy, and at trade shows, he does little magic tricks. He stands in the aisle, and he's pulling a quarter out of your ear as you walk by and stuff like that. Now, in the end of the day, I don't know how much business it gets, that thing, But he's engaging people all day long. He's standing there talking to people, engaging people.

Yeah.

I was saying a while back, I hate to pull this off to a different direction, but I was in a market in Accra in Ghana. And I'm walking down the hallway and everybody, you know, everybody is trying to get your attention. And this one guy said to me something, total— like, asked me a question totally unrelated to his goods, and it stopped me, right? And I thought, well, this is the guy I might— you know, everybody has the same stuff, maybe I'll buy from him because he had a good engaging— he wasn't just saying, you know, I have cheap stuff, I have cheap stuff, I have cheap stuff. He asked me a question about, about my, about my experience, and then we started talking, and in the end I bought from him, right?

You see, you've got to be different, Zach, because you see, it's like I say to people, you go to exhibitions and everyone is doing the same thing, or everyone's selling the same thing, they're saying the same line and stuff. I mean, that's not engaging because that's just repeating lines that everyone else is saying. It's what we've got to be in life is different. I mean, I wear odd socks. People— it's one of my trademarks. And people say, oh, you wonder what socks he's wearing today. Now, slightly different example, but my point is, when we're different and when we can come out with something that's actually engaging, like your meditation or the that you can stop somebody. Now the next step is, can you take that to the next level of engagement? But that's the key to sales, and you and I both know that, right? Is you get somebody's attention, you build rapport with them, a relationship with them, before you talk about anything to do with what you're selling, right? Talk about— we understand them. Now if your magic trick idea works and stops me, and I go, geez, that's a great trick, it was amazing, and then I turn around to Zach and say, what do you do, by the way, Zach? And Zach says, well, I do this amazing training. And I go, tell me about your training. And then Or into a conversation. That's what's—

That's exactly it, right?

It is absolutely 100%. People come to exhibitions to buy, not to be sold at.

Right.

When I go to— when I talk to people about tip number 5, I say to them, interesting, what is the worst question you can ask— an exhibitor can ask a visitor at a trade show? And the answer is, can I help you? Why is that a bad question? Because you know what the answer is. So, right, really simple what we say to people is put the word how in front of that sentence and you're totally changing the dynamic and you're getting into a conversation, which is what we're trying to do. We're trying to get into conversation with people because that's where the engagement, rapport, relationship begins. Then we talk about our sales products or whatever.

And going back to what you said about, uh, preparation, right? I used to add to, like, when I do a trade show prep document, right, a briefing document, I say these are the 3 questions you should be asking people when they come in, right? Because I don't want to leave that to chance. Because again, if you're, you know, everybody has different skill levels. Great.

It's important that we understand that as well, because it's, it's when it comes to selling at trade shows, it's, it's different, yes, because you've got to be reactive because you don't know who's going to walk onto the booth. You could, if you're in a lucky position where you've a queue of people who want to talk to you, that's even better. But even with that, the challenge there is how do you manage that audience? Because very often a lot of these people won't be interested and never buy off you anyway. They just want a free brochure or free campaign or whatever it is. Whereas we need to manage the audience. And that's what it— there's a certain amount of churn that's necessary off your stand, as you mentioned earlier on, because—

Right.

Time is money, right? Yes, of course we want the relationship, but ultimately your success by and large is going to come down to what objectives you achieve by exhibiting, right? And you don't do that by just having to yarn with somebody for, for 4 or 5 hours and thinking it's great.

I'm going to tell you something that, um, that you might not have heard somebody say about what they do at trade shows, but typically Building a community of distributors is extremely important to me, right, in terms of my, my business model, right? I want, I want to be the number one, uh, supplier for each of my distributors, right? So what I do at a trade show is I take a quarter of the booth and I make it into a distributor lounge.

Oh yeah.

And what I do is So, so a lot of these trade shows are in cold weather, and you know what happens? The cloakroom has an hour waiting time.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I make sure I have a closet, and I say to people, hey, you can drop your coats off at my booth. And then I know they're going to come by my booth twice a day. And then I put— and then I put 2 couches and a coffee machine and a water machine in a booth Or in a, in a section of the booth.

Booth, yeah.

Which holds about 6 to 8 people, which means that at any given time, I'm gonna get anywhere from 5 to 10 distributors resting in my booth, right?

Oh, I see.

And so I'm not selling them anything. I'm not— like, all I'm— the objective is that by the end of that show, they are going to become that much more bonded to me. Right, definitely. So it's, that's, it's another objective, right? But it's not necessarily that they're going to give me a purchase order, it's just another objective.

No, but it's like you said earlier on, Zach, you're right. I mean, if you're talking about getting a PO, getting their purchase order, we don't, we don't get a lot of those at shows. You get an idea, I might give you a purchase order, but the reality is, as with all sales, I mean, it's about building relationships, it's about getting that connection. and building that connection over time. I mean, and for me, because if you look at it, if you take another statistic from the exhibition industry, which was my last point, was, was that 81% of leads from trade shows are never followed up. That's fact, by the way. Now, I understand why it happens. People come back, they've been at a show for a week between the build-up and strip-out of the show, and they go back to the office, they've been busy, right, travel a lot probably, and they get caught up with what happened when they were away. And the reality is that happens all the time.

People say, oh, it does, it does, but it's, it's a real shame.

Yeah, but the problem there is that, and they do what they do is, and I could see it in slow motion happening, they say, okay, I'm going to chase those leads tomorrow. I'm back on Monday, I'll chase leads from Tuesday. Tuesday comes and then suddenly there's another meeting or they've got to go out to do something, and then they say, I'll chase them on Wednesday. Now, it's like the movie says, tomorrow never comes. It literally never comes. Well, the biggest issue there is that in 3 weeks' time or 4 weeks' time, when they go, I never chased those leads up, and they go back and the leads don't seem as hot anymore. And even when they do chase up the leads, the guy says, oh, I thought you'd forgotten about me, I went and bought off a competitor, or whatever it might be. Now you're saying—

Because he also talked to 2 of your competitors at the same show, probably, right? He didn't just come to your booth.

Absolutely. And it's really important that we— so what I say to people is You need to set yourself a back at office show day. And this is, you know, where you come back to the office and all you're focused on is chasing up the leads or queries from the show, whatever it is, get them done or delegated or whatever way it works and get them in motion to be followed because they need to be followed up within 6 days as a maximum. Now that's not to say you're going to get an order in 6 days, but you're maintaining that contact in 6 days. If you're in a really lucky position where you get loads and loads of leads and you can physically chase them within 6 days, You need to email them within a maximum of 48 hours saying, great to meet you, I'm going to be in touch with you at the end of next week or whatever it might be. But what you're doing is you're continuing that contact all the time.

And I'll tell you what, we're— I'm old. I'm not going to say anything about you, but I'm old, right? And things have changed that make this easier, right? So it's not like you don't have to be taking a business card and stapling it to a piece of paper and writing some details and putting it in a box and hoping some admin— you can take your phone, take a picture of the card, populates an app, and generates an email, right? You can do that. It's so cool. And you can do it on the booth. And then at the end of the day, you can basically say, okay, send out that email that says, thank you so much for talking to me. I will get back to you within, you know, 5 business days, and then gives you a reminder. And then the next week, you, you can You can do that. It's, you know, $3 on the App Store, right? And it really drives me nuts when people don't do something that somebody has gone out and built a tool to make it so simple to do, and then you don't use it, right?

But you see, the problem there, Zach, is— and unfortunately, common sense isn't very common. And what frustrates me in a lot of ways is that, you know, we explain these concepts to executives, yet they still don't do it.

Right.

But what they will do then is they'll say, oh, it was the exhibition organizer's fault, the show was rubbish. And it's just— it's no. And I say it sometimes, I'm very straight up with people, I say, no, actually it was your fault, not theirs, because you didn't chase the leads. And, you know, I think you can bring a horse to water but you can't make them drink, as the expression says. And it's absolutely critical because what we've got to understand is that— and in really simplistic terms, I say to a client, I say, When you get an order at a trade show for X amount of product, whatever it might be, let's call it $10,000 worth of product, right? So that's not an order for $10,000. That's actually an order for about $60,000 or $70,000 or $80,000.

Right. That's, that's, that's a sample order. That is your first taste.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you treat your clients well, they come back and will buy more and more. So don't look at exhibitions as a way of getting a sale in isolation. Because what I do is I have a second company, as I call the Sales Training Guy, which is specifically on sales training. And what I always say to people, we've got to look at the lifetime value. We've got to look at the value we're providing our customers. But my point is that we need to look at the value of clients over time. Yeah, I know what it was actually. I say to people, we're not going out chasing sales. Sales are great. We're chasing clients. What we're doing is we're going to get a sale on board. We're going to turn that into clients because that's the value of business over a longer term. And that's— Oh yeah.

Do you know Marcus Causie?

Marcus Causie?

No. Never mind. He has a podcast on selling, and he's a pretty serious sales trader, and he and I are pretty good friends. And we talked a while back, and he pulled something out of something I said, and he goes— because I said, I'm doing business with people I've been doing business with for 30 years. Typically, the only way I stop doing business with somebody is when they die. Marcus was like, yep, you're in Zach's network until you leave in a box. That's the way you got to look at it. If you do it right, you are looking at doing business with somebody, not just for 1 PO and not just for 10 POs. You could be doing business with them 25 years from now. Right.

100% agree with you because if you, if you look at the reasons why suppliers move from— sorry, why salespeople or businesses lose clients each year, 86% of the reasons are within our control. It's how we treat the clients, how we value them. Now there's obviously people die, people move away, they're ones we can't necessarily do anything about.

And the market changes, products change.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, with good selling, and good account management, we can control. I think, I think those numbers make perfect sense. I'd say, yeah, you're, you know, that, that 86% in our control makes perfect sense.

You see, we could do that. I mean, it's like I say, I, I train, I train probably on an average month, I'll probably train 50 salespeople for one, in one particular company. Um, it's, it's called the Entrepreneurs Academy. It's, it's young companies just setting up. I train about 50 people, right, every month on average. And I say to them, Sales is not complicated. In fact, if anything, as salespeople, we overcomplicate things. We've got to make— understand the basics of what sales is. Sales is a conversation between 2 people to come up with a solution. And if the solution or the problem isn't obvious, we may have to create a problem. And I don't mean that in an underhand way. We may need to highlight the problem.

I like to say we want— I want to isolate and accent the problem. Because I look at it like your customer has 50 problems he's dealing with, and I can only solve one of them, right? Now, if this morning his wife asked him about a problem or his boss asked him about another problem, those are the 2 problems he's most thinking about. He's not thinking about my problem.

Yeah, of course.

So if I can say to him, if I can bring to his attention the problem I solve, I can isolate it and I can clarify the importance of solving that problem, that's a— that's part of my job, right?

Of course it is. I'll give you a really simple example. I, I, before COVID I went to London and I met an exhibition organizer, and I sat down with him, we had a coffee, and I said, okay, we're going into the general chitchat. And I said to him, say, how many salespeople have you got in your company for selling exhibitions? He said 10. So I'm now asking him— the next question I asked him is, how many of them are working out? Because I know invariably, as Murphy's Law would have it, so at least one of them is not working out, if not more than Right. And he said to me, 3 of them aren't working out. Okay, so, okay, I'm gonna ignore the 7 for a moment, right? 7, they're doing great because that's not a problem for him right this very second. Now maybe there's other problems, but that's not a problem. So tell me about the 3. He said, well, what I'm gonna have to do is I'm either gonna have to let them go or fire them or whatever you want to call it, or else they're gonna have to sell more. It's that simple. So, okay, tell me how come.

Why, right?

Yeah, what's the issues or what issues do you think they're having? He said, one of them is really bad at closing. One of them can't prospect for love nor money and can't find new clients. And the other guy makes a mess of presentations. So I said, okay, these are 3 areas that we can help you with because I can make them present better. And not only can I make them present better, I can help them find better clients to present better to. And when they present better, the closing piece won't be so much of a big deal because they'll want to buy it.

Right.

That sounds really straightforward. And I said, it actually is really straightforward.

And go back to what we were talking about on ROI. What's cheaper, firing 3 people and then hiring 3 people and onboarding them, or fixing them?

I exacerbated the problem, Zach. I did exacerbate his issue by saying that to him. I said, like, my wife works in recruitment, which she does, by the way. And I said to him, I know how expensive recruitment fees are, placement fees are. So if you have to replace them, You're going to have to pay a fee. You're going to have to have a lead time before they get trained up and you're still going to have to employ me, by the way, or somebody like me.

Right.

But you're also going to have this lead time between them learning the business and them selling the product and amount of product you want.

Right.

Let's look at minimizing the risk for right now. And if it doesn't work out still, then we have another issue. But we focused on those 3 salespeople and he's come back to me and said, listen, can you train the other 7 salespeople?

Right.

But my point is, Going to him, yes, he knew he had a problem, right? But he probably didn't understand the gravity of the problem.

And he wasn't thinking about how to solve it, and he wasn't thinking about the costs involved and all of this. And, and you clarified things for him.

You see, that's why— that's where I don't— of course I had a sales piece bolted on at the end, but for me, the initial reason why he bought into me was I'm asking him, tell me about your business, tell me about your salespeople, tell me about whatever it is. And that worked well because I'm now listening to them. As I always explain to salespeople, if you ask a good question to a client and you listen to the answer, when you start talking, they are more likely to listen to you as well. It's really simple stuff. It's not— there's nothing complicated about it. Now, I'm not saying that happens every time, but—

Oh yeah, I'll tell you the other thing I like about good questions is if you ask the right question to a customer or prospective customer, you can show him that you understand his business problems. Just not by answering the question, by asking the question. You know, I, I always like to have one or two questions that I know that if I ask them, the client or the customer is going to understand that I really understand his workflow, possibly better than his boss or his wife, right?

Yeah.

And when I ask those questions, Then, you know, then our discussion gets from a point like, well, this isn't just an idiot salesman, this is an idiot salesman who understands my workflow, right?

And it's not even a salesman anymore because you're now— you're now—

Right, now you're an advisor. Because if you ask the right question, you're now in a position to advise him because he's like, okay, yep, they know, they know what I'm talking about.

It's like my bridge line. I use this bridge line that I call the bridge line in my sales training. And the bridge line is basically when you've established rapport and you're having a great relationship with somebody and you say, and you use the words, based on what you've told me, we can help. And the based on what you've told me is really important because obviously it links back to what you've said before. And it's also something I use. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie called TED. There was a movie called TED a few years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's not about the movie, but specifically, but those 3 letters are really important. I train people about using the 3 letters. T for tell me about. So tell me about your business. Tell me about you. Tell me about what your challenges are. E for explain. So explain to me what you're trying to achieve through sales training or whatever it might be. And the last one is D, which is describe. So describe to me what your ideal solution is. Now, when you use those 3 questions together, you're building a great relationship, but you're also leading the conversation for the— to the D one to be able to say, well, here's how we can help you.

Right.

I find that really, really effective actually.

Yeah, I think you're exactly on line there, right? Yeah, cool.

We're cutting the same cloth, Zach, I think.

I think so. Look, you know what? If you've been selling successfully for 30 years, you learn a few things. And in a lot of ways, you're gonna be leaning in the same direction, right? Because you can pick up some type of a fancy fad and it'll get you through a year or two of being successful. But it comes down to fundamentals. When you do this for 30 years, you're dealing with fundamentals, right?

Yeah, big time. Yeah, absolutely. Big time.

Yeah, great. So what are some of the most fun shows or the most interesting shows you've dealt with or been involved with?

Yeah, I worked on a couple of fun ones actually. I worked on— I don't know whether you have it, well, you probably have in the US, called Top Gear.

Yeah.

Yeah, I worked on the first Top Gear in Ireland where Top Gear and the whole TV production crew were brought to Ireland to create an exhibition around supercars. And it was just a phenomenal, spectacular event to work on. Just seeing the whole supercar thing come together, seeing these absolutely dynamite cars driving into the venue, and then seeing the racing went on with it. That was a fabulous event to work on. And I also worked on an event called The Rugby Show. We're very passionate about rugby as a sport.

Yeah.

I set that up myself. Really passionate about that. And what I suppose what I love about that is it brings together different people's passions and really enjoying what you do. And I've worked on, I've worked on, I think about 300 or 400 shows I've sold on. Um, some of them are boring, if I'm honest with you. Some of them just don't excite me. But listen, yeah, different things excite different people.

So—

Exactly.

And I'll tell you what, like, a lot of it for me, the show, you know, I've been— I go to some boring shows, but the people are, you know, I'm gonna see friends there, right? I'm gonna see people, I'll do business, that kind of thing. Medical shows are interesting because there's always a surrealistic moment in a medical show, right? Like you're walking down the hallway and there's like, you know, they'll have these devices that they use for nursing homes to pick people up from a bath, right?

Yeah.

So suddenly you'll be walking down the hallway and you'll see they're picking up women in bikinis with these claws. Right? And you'll turn the corner and somebody's using a laser to slice steaks, and you turn the corner and it's always interesting stuff at a medical show, right?

Oh, definitely. Yeah, 100%. I've worked on a few medical shows myself, and it's— yeah, it's definitely— they're always very impressive because the medical companies tend to have a lot of money as well. Certainly pharma companies have a lot of money. And when it comes to investing and trade, like, there's nothing more I love than seeing a really well-built fabulous looking stand at a show. Now I do appreciate the cost involved in that, but shows like that get me excited because it's opportunity. I mean, I, I don't tend to work with small companies, and I don't mean that in a negative way, right? They can't tend to catch— can't afford to put it—

No, I, I get that completely. Yeah, there's one show I go to a lot in Germany, in Düsseldorf, called Medica, right? That's like my, my, you know, high school reunion type show. I go to that every year. I see hundreds of friends, and, um, I want to say they have 17 buildings Yeah. And a few years ago, a fair amount of time, 8 or 10 years ago, they opened up some new buildings and they were trying to get some of the big vendors to move to the new buildings.

Yeah.

So they gave them a lot of cheap space to move to a new building. So there was this one company that had a booth, probably like 50 meters by 25 meters.

Yeah.

And then they built a 3-story building. They built like a garden and then they built a 3-story building in the middle of it, it was just mind-boggling, right? Because the space was, you know, they probably got that space for a third of the normal cost. And inside the building, they had a restaurant that served steaks and stuff like that. It was pretty impressive.

Yes. The thing about it is, and that's one thing we need to be cautious of with regard to, and I always say this to clients because there's no point in hiding behind the truth. If you're taking what they call a free build stance, in other words, you're just taking space, the floor, nothing else. If you're bringing your own stand, what you spend with the organizer would be a third of what you're going to spend overall on average. And a lot of salespeople will hide behind that. And whereas for me, I'm much more upfront and say to the client, okay, you're going to spend 10 with me, it's going to cost you 30, whatever, but here's what we're going to do for your 30, and here's how it's going to work. Because there's no point pretending to them that it's not going to cost something, because it is.

Right.

And the reality is you've got to set the expectation right in exhibitions. I work with salespeople who will go in and I do face-to-face calls with some in London and I'd go into meetings with them and they tell the client, oh, you're going to get 150 inquiries. So you can't say that for starters.

Right.

And second of all, they'll also sell them a ridiculously big stand that the client doesn't need. Now the issue there is he's not coming back. I prefer somebody to take a smaller stand and grow with the show every year rather than somebody who's just a sacred.

I was just saying to somebody yesterday that I, I am very careful not to sell people stuff they don't need.

Absolutely.

Because in the long run, over the course of time, it always comes back to haunt you, right? And it's much better to say to somebody, you know, this is too much sand for you, this is going to be a waste of money for you. I'll tell you what, I've worked for any number of different-sized companies, and I've shared booths. I've gone to trade shows and set up in a coffee— like, I've gone to the show and set up in a coffee shop and not had a booth because I was with a startup that year, and it was the best way to do business. I've got— but I've also had giant— like, I've had giant booths with 6 rooms, right? So it depends what you can do and what's gonna achieve your objectives, like you said from the very beginning, right?

It is. It's critical because you see, it's like taking a ridiculously big stand year one or forcing somebody to do that. That's not strategy.

Right.

It's just trying to get a sale across the line. And listen, we're all in sales. We all—

Right.

I think if you want to be in sales and have longevity and have 30 years like I have and you have and more, whatever length of years, and to get people to come back to you, you sell them what they need, not what you need. You sell them what they need.

And you got to make sure your salespeople know that. Because if you're compensating them only on today's sale and you're not teaching them about the company's values, then why shouldn't they screw over customers, right? You got to teach them.

I do it the other way around, Zach. I would charge my salespeople when I had my team, I would charge my salespeople how many clients they got, not how many square meters of exhibition space they sell.

Right, exactly. And that's a fair way to do it because you're going to make money from those clients next year and the year after. So you want to make sure that you're fairly compensating your sales staff and you're not giving them an incentive to do something that goes against your business interests, right? And, and they— and if they're 22, they might not understand that they're doing something against their business interests. So you gotta help them, right? I mean, exactly, they're thinking in the short term, possibly, right?

Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, we run businesses. I mean, I run a business and I've got to look at the reality of the business. As in, like, it's not me getting a sales training order or an exhibition order for this month. Yeah, of course that's great, but it's about what happens next month. It's about the client coming back, Zach coming back saying, listen, it was great, really enjoyed it, it worked really well. Now I want to train another part of my team because, because that's what business is about. It's not about a once-off.

Well, and you think about the world, right? So let's say you have a VP of sales who today works for one company and tomorrow works for another company. And he says, okay, now I have 12 new people to train. Who was it that I used before? Because he was really good. Ah, I'll call him. Right? And that's how you make your money.

That happened to me when I set up my business originally. I worked with UBM. It's that big company I was telling you about. And the girl who took me on from UBM went to work in another company. She took me there. She went to work in another company. She took me there. In fact, I only got an email yesterday saying she's moved for a 4th time. And she said, I'll be taking you there as well. So listen, you never know where those conversations are going.

Oh yeah. I work with a guy who his specialty is shipping to exhibitions.

Oh, yeah.

That's what he's good at. I've worked with him, I want to say, for 6 different companies over the years, because he's a specialist, he's good. Every time I change company, and having left those companies, the companies still work with him. He got my business 30 years ago, 25 years ago. And he still has business now from 5 or 6 different companies because he provided good service to me.

That's the base.

So I want to thank you. I want to round things up because I don't want to take up too much of your time. How do people find you? I know you can just look up The Exhibition Guy on LinkedIn. But is there a better way?

Yeah, you can get me through my website, which I've just finalized again, through theexhibitionguy.com, Zach. Or certainly, please do connect to me. Love connecting on LinkedIn and sharing content. So you can get me at theexhibitionguy.com or on LinkedIn at any stage. Great pleasure as always, Zach. You're an absolute gentleman.

Thank you very much. It's a lot of fun. I'll tell you what, this is the best part of my week, is to talk with somebody who, you know, has something interesting to talk about and we can really get into some interesting subjects. Thank you all very much for joining us. The 3 dedicated listeners I have out there at this point, or whoever else is listening, I hope you found this helpful. Trade shows and exhibitions, a huge part of doing a good job with your international sales growth. Join us next time for more conversations that drive international sales.