If your company exhibited at ten trade shows ten years ago, perhaps you exhibit at five or six now. If you occupied half a city block with your new products and displays at the dawn of the new millennium, you may be getting by with less space. Or maybe your company has continued full steam ahead – with the caveat that results will be monitored very closely. Trade shows today can provide great opportunities. But they are expensive and so each one in which your company participates is no doubt expected to Produce with a capital P, whether the ROI is measured in actual sales generated at or after the show, new prospects gained, new alliances initiated, or great visibility garnered.

For future shows, you may benefit by going well beyond exhibiting and running a couple of ads.

Here are eight ways to make more of your trade show efforts:

1. Plan ahead to talk to a key audience. Up to a year or more before an important show, secure a speaking engagement for one of your key people. Talk about industry trends or innovations. Position your company and your speaker as thought leaders.

2. Get press before the show. Start several months ahead to assure that your company’s name and news are in the publications attendees will read before and at the show.

3. Generate more press while you are at the show. Make boothside appointments with editors and writers from key trade publications and blogs. Be prepared to give them a story worth telling.

4. Introducing a new product or service? Go a step further with the media: hold a press conference.

5. Get off the trade show floor to do some serious business. How often do you have this many distributors, customers and key prospects in one place? Organize an event: whether it’s a roundtable meeting for select advisors and customers to get input or plan next ventures, a breakfast or dinner to generate excitement about the year ahead or a cocktail hour to connect, a trade show is an excellent opportunity to enhance relationships.

6. Use social media intelligently. Twitter, Facebook and your corporate blog are good venues with which to let your constituencies know why they should interact with you at this show. Read Skyline’s good post on this topic for specific tips.

7. Go beyond selling. Show your customers, prospects, distributors, and other audiences that you are a partner and a resource for them. Introduce new training programs, partnering opportunities, Web applications, and more at the show. Showcase new interactive tools on giant screens at your exhibit – seeing is still believing.

8. Don’t file your hard work away. Don’t put your new leads, contacts and intelligence aside in the post-show scramble. It’s all too common to see gains lost when staff gets back to the office and gets busy. Make and adhere to a plan to close sales, engage with prospects, follow up with the press, and act on intelligence gathered.

We’d enjoy hearing what has and hasn’t worked for your company at trade shows – here or on van Schouwen Associates Facebook page.

Synergy and momentum matter.

Just as there is arithmetic to recovering in the investment market, there is a logic and arithmetic involved in business recovery. Specifically, it’s often easier to lose ground than it is to win it back.

In the investment market, if you lose 40% of your $10,000 investment, you have $6,000 left. When that remaining investment adds 40%, you have… $8,400. What a bother.

Similarly, a recession can create business losses that are challenging to recoup… and they aren’t all strictly in the numbers.

For example, a large business customer may pull its business “temporarily” during a recession. Getting that customer buying again can be an uphill battle. Getting the customer back to or above its previous level of purchasing can be even tougher. During the customer’s hiatus, it has probably been courted by your competition, with great deals, low prices and – gulp – perhaps a fresher approach.

Many businesses reduced their marketing and hence shrunk their visibility during the last difficult quarters. Now they need to regain what they’ve lost in terms of being “top of mind” – ramping up marketing will require serious, insightful and ongoing effort now if it’s been shelved or minimal in the last year or two.

Were your engineers busily designing the next great thing during the slowdown? Great – you can come out shining. However, if the malaise meant that R&D was stalled and that even the best minds in your company were dulled by lack of sales and incentive, it’s time to refresh your approach and your offerings, because your competition will or has done so already.

Has the sales team been keeping in touch with all its customers and prospects, or has it, as in the infamous sales saga of Glengarry Glen Ross been waiting for the “good leads” and better times? There is no time NOT to be selling.

Today… while the past certainly affects your firm, days gone by matter now primarily as a lesson. Starting today, you have the need and you’ve absorbed the arithmetic. You know that a concentrated, energetic and smart effort distinguishes the companies that will soon regain their momentum and reach new heights from those that will not. This is true even if your revenues are down, your staff is reduced and you’ve borrowed money. It will take more work and more applied intelligence to gain ground than it took to lose it, just as it does in the investment market.

How is your company addressing the recovery? Please comment or email us privately with your thoughts.