When we assist clients in developing or assessing their sponsorship/advertising/PR/Marketing programs we always apply our ’5P’ approach.  We also use this very same approach when assisting potential sponsors in determining the sponsorship/advertising/marketing opportunities they best suit them.  I will delve into each one a bit more in each upcoming newsletter but briefly our overall philosophy can be summarized here:

1-Aim for Permanence

2- Make it a part of a Plan

3-Advance the/your Purpose

4-Give it a Personality!

5-Always benefit the Partnership

Contact us for more information about what this means and how it can work for you. And watch for our next newsletter where we explore ‘Aiming for Permanence’.

Implementing a sponsorship program into your events, conferences and tradeshows can enhance both the attendee experience and the organizer’s bottom line. Over the next few newsletters we’ll discuss many aspects of sponsorship program development, sales and fulfillment. But the first step in developing a sponsorship program is setting the organization’s sponsorship policy. Every organization should have a written and widely accepted sponsorship policy and it should be reviewed at the onset of each sponsorship campaign or throughout the year if your sponsorships are yearly. Your policy should define your sponsorship objectives and list practical fulfillment issues but most importantly it should include the ‘rules’ that everyone is aware of and follows. This document can alleviate confusion in the prospecting, sales and fulfillment stages as well as protect you should any allegations of special consideration be made by one group or another.  Click here to view and print. This guideline will help you formulate the policy that is right for your organization and should serve as a great outline for you to follow. Please feel free to email us at sponsorship@lodestar-group.com or call 919-573-6108 with any questions.

Download  points to review when creating a Sponsorship Guidelines Document here

These few activities can greatly increase your opportunities at your next tradeshow/event!

I like to teach classes and seminars but speaking at industry functions is a struggle for me. Sometimes you get a tough crowd. Other self-proclaimed experts make me nervous as do those who seem to be too eagerly lapping up what I’m saying. It has made me a much better listener and attendee to other people’s presentations though. So in the hopes that my efforts to be good to my fellow presenters will bring me good listeners in October, I am sharing  a few ways I think attendees can help a speaker during a presentation and I’m praying my audience is full of these types in October.

Smile at the Presenter and Look Interested
If I’m feeling a bit unsure of my audience when I’m presenting I always choose a friendly face in the crowd to talk to until I’m back in the groove. I now try to be that friendly face while attending seminars and conferences. I try not to spend too much time staring at the list I may be making or the doodles I’m drawing even if I have no interest in the speaker at all. Surveying  your audience and finding everyone looking down, writing (when you know you haven’t just said something brilliant), and talking to the person beside them is just demoralizing for a speaker. Try to appear attentive and not unhappy.

Ask Questions or Give Examples if Asked
Most presenters will ask questions at various points during a presentation. This helps them engage the audience and make sure that they’re talking about what the attendees want to hear. As a speaker it is especially difficult to ask for anyone to share an example of what you’re describing or to ask a question and to have absolutely no audience feedback.  Try to step up and help your presenter out if no one else is interacting with them, it really makes a difference. Usually once the first audience member has participated, others will follow.

Attend The Right Sessions
Sounds simple but sometimes attendees see the title of a presentation but don’t read the description or the objectives. Then they’re bored or give the speaker a bad grade on the surveys. I believe in helping speakers by being honest about their presentations but don’t blame them if you went to an entry level presentation and were bored. Which leads me to…

Fill Out the Survey Form
Each event I have participated in as a presenter has provided survey forms to the attendees following my presentation. They are always less than 10 questions and can be completed in a few minutes.  Please fill them out and be constructive if you need to criticize. Honing the speaker craft is a tricky undertaking and having useful feedback is extremely valuable.

If You’re Bored to Death
If you’re in a session and you think that it’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard at least try to get one good nugget from it. As my grandmother said,  “Even a broken clock is right twice a day”.  You can learn something from everyone. If a speaker seems to be drifting from the topic, politely ask a question to get them back on. Make it a point to try to learn if you’re there already right?

It takes a special person to stand, smile, and greet everyone that walks by at a tradeshow. I personally have met these people and I have met others who were the worst possible choice to work out of a booth. As an exhibits director, I have seen firsthand the impact of sending the right and wrong person to a specific tradeshow.  Why would a company wishing to promote their products waste money and effort by failing to select someone who was the right fit for a particular show? Choosing the right person means several things.

1-Choose a person whose knowledge of the product/service is compatible with the company’s objective for the show.

Some exhibitors attend tradeshows as a living advertisement for the organization. They aren’t there to necessarily sell a particular product or service, but rather to be seen and to not be conspicuously absent.  Others are there to show support to the audience of attendees. Still others are trying to sell or gather feedback on a particular product/service from the attendees. There are many other valid and valuable reasons for attending a tradeshow and most companies have more than one. But it is vitally important to send someone capable of fulfilling your company’s objectives at each show. General marketing, support and presence booths can be staffed by most anyone in the organization. The mission here isn’t to drag people in and count conversations or contacts. Most anyone employed by a company should be able to stand in a booth, smile, and answer simply general questions.

Technical support and customer service personnel make great booth staffers at a show focusing on a particular product or service or where customer interaction about the products themselves is key.  These folks are able to answer specific product related questions, offer tips and advice to those who stop by the booth (a definite way to build customer loyalty) and support any sales questions with helpful user stats and examples.

Salespeople are a good fit at a show where the objective is simply to talk to as many current customers and find suspects to work on in the future. Your salespeople should be the most outgoing, the most personable and the most eager to talk to anyone possible for your booth.

2-Choose Someone Who Understands the Marketing Power of a Booth

If my first week on the job as an exhibits director didn’t consist of being an actual exhibitor at a tradeshow I never would have known the view from inside of the booth: tired feet, exhausted brain, jet lag, missing booth literature, missing parts for booth set-up, issues at home, no luggage,  and more inconveniences.  Nevertheless then, and at any event I have exhibited at since I choose never to arrive at my booth with an attitude that reflected my issues because I knew that I was not just representing myself, I was representing my entire company.  A booth is a portable storefront. The image your booth creates in the mind of an attendee at very first glance is the impression they will have of your whole operation. Is the equipment and collateral displayed in an attractive and accessible way that furthers the brand? Do your booth personnel know what the standard ‘company line’ is for anyone who approaches? These are important things to make standard for anyone attending a tradeshow as a booth staffer.

Send Someone Who Wants to Be There

The one individual that has the ability to make a show successful is always the one standing inside of the booth. Having a grumpy or unknowledgeable person standing in your booth representing your entire company is not a great idea. Make sure that the person who arranged your company’s participation passed all of the necessary information to the people working at the show.  Review the upcoming event with the personnel prior to the show to make sure expectations are reasonable and a plan for measuring success is in place. And make sure that the person/people you send want to represent your company!

More Proof That Johnny Carson Was Brilliant

I’m a member of an industry message board/listserve that is fairly active.  I rarely comment and don’t even check the messages daily but  several weeks ago I did and someone had posted this great quote attributed to Johnny Carson, “My success just evolved from working hard at the business at hand each day.” Wow.  How simple is that?

Three things in that one quote are just genius :  He worked hard, he worked hard every single day, and he worked at the business at hand each day.There is a manual for success wrapped up in that one sentence. This is what I learned from that quote that I’m trying to apply to my own business life in my success quest.

The first and most obvious thing that jumps out at me is that he worked hard.  He didn’t say he worked hard until he got famous or that he worked hard and took long vacations. He worked hard. Working hard isn’t working until you sweat or until you’re in a frenzy. Working hard is working smart. It’s persevering when you face challenges, working to fix problems that are standing in the way of productivity, and always keeping your goals clearly defined so that all of your actions are movements toward them. I now evaluate my work situation weekly. What challenges have I let take the wind out of my sails, what processes could I streamline and what have I accomplished that is tangible and quantifiable?  This is how I make sure I’m working hard and smart.

The second thing that struck me was what Carson said he worked on. He didn’t say he pursued a crazy idea every day. He didn’t say he relished his job as boss and delegated and passively managed things all day long. He very pointedly said that he worked hard at the business at hand. Sometimes this can be a real struggle for an entrepreneur. Many (personally I’d say most) entrepreneurs are risk takers and challenge seekers.  Read that as people who have the attention span of a gnat and spend a great deal of their lives having great ideas about the next big thing. For me it is probably the single biggest challenge I face. Often the business at hand isn’t fun. Often it is boring and sometimes downright unpleasant. I own a business with a small group of people. We don’t all have personal assistants and more often than not I’m doing my own filing and typing. But that is the business at hand. And I have seen that nothing big can happen if you aren’t taking care of every little detail. So I make a list every day and I’ve learned how to sync my tasks on my blackberry and my desktop. I make sure every single day that I am taking care of the business at hand so the future takes care of itself (to some degree).

Lastly he said that he took care of the business at hand each day. He didn’t say on the days he felt like it or on the days that he wasn’t on vacation. He said he worked hard each day. I’ve always been a hard worker and as a professional who has a commute-free office, I work harder and more than I ever did at an office for someone else.  But I realized I wasn’t always working the same each day.  Between my short attention span and my lack of a time clock I was always working some days much harder/longer/productively than others. Consistency is key to success and I didn’t always understand that. In the few weeks as I’ve been working on changing my habits I’ve found that working at a steady pace each day, on a consistent list of evenly distributed priorities is far more productive for me personally than working several 15 hour days like a fiend and then just being bored of it for the day after.

I’ve made a schedule, I keep a goal for each day and I make sure that I keep myself from daydreaming too much about the next big project instead of really consistently relishing the details of the business at hand.

What do you think of the success manual masquerading as a simple quote? How have you recognized or incorporated these principles in your own professional life?