Confex Here We Come

Good morning my blog loving friends - I trust that the day finds you well.

This week we've been putting the finishing touches on our stand for the International Confex Show, which takes place at Earls Court from the 23rd to the 25th of February. It's a show where anyone and everyone who is involved in the world of conferences and exhibitions comes to peddle their wares to the business buying public.

There'll be venues such as conference centres and hotels, right up to the tourist boards of countries eager to drive more commerce into their fair nation. There'll be stand builders, furniture providers, audio visual companies and of course, a category lovingly called 'Exhibition Support', which is where we come in.

I'm proud to say that this year our stand is going to be better than ever.

But what are the keys to a successful show stand, especially when you're a company that has a lot of products and services to offer? Well if there's one word which can help sum it all up then it's this one - PLAN.

Plan everything single detail, and be as anally retentive as possible. I'll use my stand as an example.

We have a total of 22 shelves on which to place merchandise. Now the way we used to do things was to take our best and shiniest merchandise, pack it neatly in bubble wrap and then put it out on the shelves at the other end. The problem was that we invariably ended up taking about 2 boxes' of merchandise back to the office as we ran out of space.

Well no more. Now we get the sizes of the shelves from the stand builders, create a mock up in the office, lay out the merchandise just as we want to see it at the show, and then pack only what we need. Now sure, it does take a little longer at this end, but the result is that when my team are putting everything together on the stand, they'll know exactly what goes where and we won't have anything wasted.

Which leads on to point number 2 - what goes where? Your stand needs to hold a combination of your best selling merchandise along with the newest and most exciting items. If you've been pitching what you consider to be an exciting item for the past 6 months and haven't sold any yet, don't bother bringing it. You need to make the most of every square inch of space that you have and so you have to be ruthless. You may love the item in question, but you can always pitch it to your visitors in a follow up meeting.

Point 3 - less is more. It's easy to create an Alladin's cave of products and services, but it only means that your visitors will leave you with a headache. Think about who is going to be coming along and what services will interest them. Take my stand for example - 22 shelves means I have 22 'themes' I can work with right? WRONG!

22 different themes is far too many. You're better off creating sections on your stand. Now we have 3 shelves dedicated to our environmentally friendly range. If someone comes onto the stand expressing an interest in eco friendly stuff, we know exactly where to lead them. Now they may well want to look at everything else too but that's an afterthought.

Remember, the most important thing that your stand should do is attract people onto it - and don't be tempted to use sweets and drinks to get people on - those people are just after the sweets and have no buying agenda. You don't need them and they don't need you, so don't go wasting your money.

So I hope that a lot of you will be at Earls Court next week. We're on stand G110 and I can assure you that our stand is awesome. There will be lots of special offers darted around the stand - anything from 10% discounts to the chance to claim your free Flip Digital Video Camera, so please pay us a visit and feel free to make my day by telling me you read this blog.

See you there.