If you see salespeople sitting in chairs and talking to each other at trade shows and events, the five errors we discuss in this article are being made. Take a look at 5 ways you can increase sales dramatically without spending a penny more at shows and events.

As shows approach, many sales staff members suddenly remember appointments and presentations that have to be made during the show. This leaves that show understaffed. Many times a company is forced to use non-professional sales staff to man the show and that can lead to failure. If you must use non-professional sales staff, show training becomes even more critical to success. Never man a show with untrained staff.

Before you book a show, you should decide the goal to be achieved from your investment. Are you there for “exposure”? Did you book the show to get actual appointments with clients or customers? If so how many should each staff member achieve? Are you there to sell? If so, what and how much? Just having goals and checking results will increase your show success.

Each staff member should have a set activity quota for the show. Not having one is what causes sales staff to sit in chairs and talk to one another. Checking results and holding staff to agreed levels of activities keeps staff working and digging. For example, if your goal is to set appointments for future follow up, you might set a goal of one appointment every 10 minutes or 6 per hour. Having a quota for activities like sales or new clients or actual appointments tells your staff what you expect. Best of all, these goals are measurable in numbers. You won’t need to rely on feelings like “It’s going well, Boss”.

Shows are different that regular sales situations. Each area of show selling is not what your team is used to in non-show situations. They need to qualify faster, They need to present better, they need special show reasons to act and more. It is extremely important to your success that your staff be well trained on tactics and scripts. Without this training only natural born show salespeople will succeed.

If you have assigned special activity quotas and scripts, managers need to work the show if you are serious about success. If managers cannot work the entire show, they should stop by unannounced to see what is happening and to measure results at random times. When they arrive, they should ask each member of the staff if they can see the results…customers and contact data, number of meetings actually scheduled and orders signed. If these actual results meet or exceed the designated quota, the manager should praise the staff member. IF they have fallen short of quota, the manager should coach them on what they need to do to succeed. If the actual activities are checked several times a day during the show, each staff member can be coached to success and the entire show will succeed as well.

Take an inventory of these errors and see which ones you may be committing. We know from experience with hundreds of clients that a few changes in theses areas will make a huge difference to your show results without costing you any additional investment.

Television makes everything look so easy and that may be one of the problems with it. Home renovations are not easy to do right and the home renovations television shows can make you think that home renovations are so simple to do but what they neglect to remind you is that there are experts doing those home renovations or at least supervising them. There is a lot involved in home renovations but I will admit that those television shows certainly do offer a lot of great ideas and they offer ideas that I have used in my own home but I do have to remind myself that experts are doing the work. Unfortunately the work I do can remind me that there are experts doing that work on television.

Television shows can make replacing walls look so easy that it is almost dangerous. In a half hour show the walls in a home are taken down and then rebuilt with what looks like no problem at all. I often wonder how many times a wife has come home from work to see that her husband had watched a home renovation show that made replacing walls look so easy and now they are the proud owners of a huge mess. One thing those television shows neglect to cover is the concept of load bearing walls and how removing a load bearing wall can cause parts of your house to collapse. I bet that is a fun lesson to learn. So just be careful when you watch some of these television shows and remember that the ones that make it look easy are professionals. Unless you are a professional you are not going to experience the same sense of ease that the professionals on television experienced.