Lotusphere 2012 as an exhibitor (part 2 of 5)
Tags :Lotusphere exhibitor
I started this years viewpoints of Lotusphere 2012 as a partner, so moving it downstairs to the exhibitor floor made sense. Each paragraph seemed to take a new angle in my thought.
Lotusphere 2012 as an exhibitor
Some noticed that we did not exhibit at the last couple Lotusphere events. We debated internally and made the business decision to network more in person that stand hoping someone would come along. It has proven beneficial since we started working that way the past couple years.
The sponsor/exhibitor floor is nothing like it used to be. Gone are the sheer numbers of pedestals. This is the second year since IBM redefined the shape of the floor to break up your line of sight making it look larger (see IdoNotes Episode 98). Gone are the days of straight lines of pedestals as far as your eye could see.
The wave of attendees is not as strong as it once was, yet the quality seems to have gone up. This means that the days of just sending people to Lotusphere was trimmed down to those treating it as an investment. As an exhibitor I see less traffic but better leads (I heard this from more than one exhibitor).
We have found that if you have a solution that integrates with the announcements from the OGS, or you won an award, you get much more foot traffic. I mean that if you make an integration with Connections, this was a year for you. If you only make a fax solution for Domino, not so much.
IBM does their best to move attendees into the show floor by providing breaks and snacks down there. The opening night party always draws the largest crowd. Staffing numbers is hard. Should we bring more than enough to make sure we catch everyone and risk having people stand around. Do we send a skeleton crew and risk missing someone too impatient to wait.
Badge scanning is becoming odd as people don't use real phone numbers or email addresses much anymore. It is hard to get in touch once Lotusphere is over. Are we really making an impact by having them simply follow or like us on the social networks? Do we have reach?
Many vendors reach out to use at the end of the floor time asking to share lead lists. Yes, this happens annually. Give us yours and we give ours. Helps everyone build bigger lead pools. However, people that found us on the floor wanted to talk to us. Passing them off to someone else and potentially losing money they spend with you that we could have made makes no sense. We decline and watch many exhibitors do it anyway.
At the end we tally up all the badges we scanned, business cards with notes collected and hope Lotusphere pays for itself in sales this year again.
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See my 2011 posting on Lotusphere as an exhibitor to compare (or see the whole series in the links at the bottom of that posting)
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On Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 by Chris Miller
