Are your sales reps prepared for your next trade show? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you and your team be more effective in selling today. The reality is trade show selling is an important component of most companies effectiveness of reaching their customers. We got a problem though. And the problem is in most organizations, the assumption is made that our sales reps, because they're experienced in their territory, are also experienced in how to work trade shows, even though the skills are really significantly different. The reality is a lot of companies will spend more time talking to their sales reps about when they want them to be working the booth than they actually tell them about what they want them to say when they're in the booth. Most sales reps come to trade shows uncoached and unprepared, so they have to make this stuff up as things go along. What can you do to make sure your sales reps understand what is the goal of being at this trade show, which I hope is generating more business leads and making new contacts, and reinforcing relationships with existing customers. But the second thing is, what are the major messages you want communicated for somebody visiting your booth at this show? What are the main talking points you want to make sure every customer that visits your booth hears? The reality is we need to work on this as a leadership team to be able to coach our people on what they're supposed to be saying and doing when they are working the booth. We just can't let them on their own because they're experienced. We've got to help them if we want to really have a tremendous impact, and we want to have a positive return on our investment for being in the trade show. Because if we can do a better job at our trade show selling, we'll tend to sell even more.