How to Choose Event Staff
- Get a diverse mix of people
- Research your staff
- Ask them!
Let’s face facts – if your team has had a poor conversation with someone at the booth, no matter how good your stand, product, or follow-up, you’re unlikely to convert that prospect into a customer. All of the great work pre-event can all be undermined by poor staff at a trade show.
Now let’s touch upon event training – who can honestly say they’ve ever had event training?
Yet salespeople and sometimes marketing staff are expected to perform to a high standard without any guidance or training and sometimes without the motivation as well.
Ideally, you’re using an event lead capture solution that gives you metrics on staff, how many leads they collected at a particular event etc. This will give you a good indication of the numbers that person can bring you during an event.
If you don’t yet have a solution to manage your trade show leads and the follow-up process, and even if you do, the following is a good place to start.
The simplest way to start is to get a mix of salespeople, personalities, genders, ethnicities, and ages. Depending on how you want to come across on the booth depends on your choices here, young, fresh, diverse, experienced, etc.
The old adage of people buy from people can be extended. People buy from people like them or that they like. Having a diverse group on your booth increases the chances of synergy.
It’s a common misconception that outgoing people make the best event staff and it’s easy to understand why, but not everyone is comfortable in a trade show environment. Finding out how many events, public speaking, large scale presentations each of the staff has done, will help you narrow down who is best suited.
The final and most simple step is when you have narrowed your selection using the above, simply ask if the person wants to go! Unless they actually want to be there, they won’t give 100% and it will show to the delegates and in the number of leads they collect.
