Made in the Shade

Given today's economy, most companies are eyeballing every dime spent on exhibit marketing. So now more than ever before, it's important to make sure your exhibiting plans go off without a hitch - and that you return to the office with fistfuls of hot leads that can help justify your company's trade show investment.

So when I planned my company's exhibit at a recent nursing trade show, my main goal (not surprisingly) was to collect and qualify leads on the show floor. Thus, I'd rented a lead scanner from the show-approved vendor, thinking that it would certainly make our lead-collecting job easier. But when I arrived at the show, I was shocked to find antiquated lead-retrieval equipment that put my goal for the show - and maybe even my program - in jeopardy.

While helping set up our exhibit the morning of the show's opening, I made a quick trip to the show-services desk to pick up the badge scanners we rented for our booth. Since capturing leads is the first step toward a sale, and those sales are how we measure return on investment, having good badge-scanning equipment is crucial for all exhibitors, including us.

As I stood there collecting my equipment, I was less than impressed. I'd been told we'd get state-of-the-art scanners that had the ability for us to add in questions for qualifying leads as we scanned. But these scanners looked like they were a couple of technological generations old. The devices' design aesthetic resembled something from 10 years ago.

When I picked one up and looked over its features, it seemed to me that the scanners were not intuitive to use. The keys for inputting the qualifier information were difficult to access, and on top of that, the units appeared as though they had been downright abused during their extended lifetimes on the show floor.

But with the show starting later that morning, I didn't have time to worry right then. After all, the scanners may not have looked like much, but as long as they worked, we'd be fine.

When I brought the scanners back to the booth, I set them up at our stations to test them. The dials for entering the qualifying information seemed touchy, so I wanted my staffers to practice using the equipment. After all, collecting more data than what came from attendees' badges was the reason we'd rented the scanners. With everything ready, I lined up a few of my co-workers and decided to test the equipment to see how well it worked.

But one error-beep message after another told me we had a problem. When I pointed the scanners at the bar codes on the badges, the encoded contact information did not come up on the scanner screens. I tried it with the badges taken out of the laminated sleeves, but even that seemed to work on a hit-or-miss basis. Furthermore, I didn't want to have to ask each attendee to take his or her badge out of its sleeve. That would just make more work for the people who were guests in our booth, and it would take more time, each minute of which I felt would slow down my staff in the exhibit.

Frustrated, I gathered up the badge scanners and took them back to the show-services desk. When I told the woman at the desk about my problem, she sympathized but said there was nothing she could do. The scanners I had were the only ones available for what I needed to do in my booth. Worse, she then told me that she was aware of the problems. It seemed the overhead lights in the show hall created a glare that interfered with the reader on the scanners. And if you took the badge out of the sleeve, any creases on the bar code made them practically unreadable for the scanners as well.

Hearing this, I had gone from frustrated to furious. These scanners were a vital part of our plan for tracking ROI, but if the equipment didn't work, that plan seemed DOA - and what's worse, my leads could be MIA.

I took the balky scanners back to the exhibit and tried to think of a solution to my lead-gathering problem. If the scanners didn't work at all, I could have my staff collect business cards and hand-write information about attendees on the back of them or on additional sheets of paper. But if I'd been worried about the time it took to take badges out of sleeves, this option was an even bigger time waster.

The best plan, it seemed, was to somehow make the scanners work better. Again, taking the badges out of the sleeves helped some, but that meant inconveniencing our guests at the booth. Plus, every time someone removed a badge, it tended to bend the cardstock on which it was printed. Besides, the bent badges tended to scan better when inside a sleeve.

The real problem, I realized, was the overhead lights. The glare from those big bulbs somehow messed with the part of the scanner that read the light bouncing off the bar code. Looking around my booth, I tried to see if there was a place where the lighting was minimal or at least indirect. But no such spot existed. And that was when I noticed our literature packets. We'd brought some marketing packets that were collected into thick folders. Since we had more of these available than I thought we'd ever need, I decided to grab a few of these folders and conduct an experiment.

Taking a couple of folders, I created a small tent on a countertop. The tent worked as a darkroom, blocking the light from anything inside it. When I stuck the scanner inside the tent and scanned a badge, it worked. In fact, as I tried badge after badge it, well, wasn't perfect, but I did notice a definite improvement over any other scanning test we'd made that morning. And once the badges were scanned, we could simply remove the hand-held devices from the tent and input data from the qualifying questions.

When the show opened, my staff and I kept our tents close by, often explaining to attendees how we had come up with a solution to make using technology easier - just like our mobile work stations did for nurses.

While I was angry about the poor quality of the scanners, I realized it wasn't necessarily show management's fault. After all, it was the company it selected as the scanner provider that was renting us those old machines. Still, I hope the two entities work together next year to provide some quality scanners rather than squeeze another year of return out of that old investment. In the meantime, I'll be asking some specifics about the scanners before I attend next year's show. The last thing I want is to find myself with another device disaster.

- Cheryl Lappas, marketing analyst, Stinger Medical LLC,
    Murfreesboro, TN