Salespeople Cannot Ignore the TradeShow

Offline or Online...Sellers Must Be Content Creators and Distributors

The toilet paper was stacked to the ceiling.

It was the summer of 2002 and I was setting up the booth for the tradeShow in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. 

I was a summer intern with Procter and Gamble. One of our distribution partners in Pennsylvania was hosting a tradeshow to help educate their customers on the various products and services that they sold. Our booth contained all the core household items that Procter and Gamble manufactured. Dawn dish soap, Bounty paper towels, Charmin toilet paper and of course, Tide laundry detergent. 

I arrived the day before and took a few hours to organize our booth so all of our products and brochures could be displayed for customers to view and sample everything that we had to offer.

The tradeshow was a chance to educate, inform and inspire our customers to buy our products and services. We would have the opportunity to interact with these customers throughout the day as they visited our booth. 

It was an in-person experience from 9 am to 5 pm. 

We were the source of information and our buyers were eager to learn, sample our products and see what we had to offer.

The tradeshow was the forum for our sales team to communicate with these customers.

Now, fast-forward to 2021. Our buyers have moved online and they no longer need the tradeshow to learn about our products and services. The internet has changed the way buyers buy.

The internet has also changed the way sellers sell. 

Our personal brand and the brand of our company are always on display online. A simple Google search gives information to the buyer. 

Salespeople need to realize that the tradeshow has moved online. 

Sellers still have a forum to educate, inform and inspire their buyers. A consistent routine of creating content for online distribution is part of the solution. 

The online distribution of content by salespeople is the modern day trade show. 

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