When prospects are in your booth, how do you entice them to buy and what is the best way to upsell and cross-sell your products? Upselling your products is offering a prospect an enhanced, upgraded or “premium” product or service at an increased cost. If anyone has ever offered to “super-size” your order for a few cents more, you’ve experienced upselling.
Cross-selling products involves offering a prospect an additional, different product or service to compliment or supplement whatever they may already be purchasing from you. “Do you want fries with that?” is a perfect example of cross-selling. Executing up-selling and cross-selling can prove difficult, especially when your products or services are expensive or complex.
Here are four tips to increase your opportunities within your tradeshow booth:
1. Be able to demonstrate all products at a moment’s notice. The ability to show prospects every product that fits their needs is the best way to open the door to an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity. Unfortunately, many event marketers can’t afford to bring their entire product suite to tradeshows due to the exorbitant shipping and drayage costs and booth space requirements. Exhibitors are turning to technologies, such as virtual 3D products, that look and behave just like the physical products to demonstrate entire product portfolios on interactive touch screens. This type of tradeshow technology capitalizes on cross-sell opportunities by giving booth staff a quick way to showcase complementary products while the iron is hot.
2. Don’t just tell your product story – SHOW it. Even when physical products can be brought to events, it is often difficult to explain exactly how they function or interact with other products. Wise exhibit marketers know telling someone why your products are a great fit for them is no longer enough. Instead, customers want to see how your products work together to solve their business challenges. Stunning graphics will not only drive prospects out of the aisle into your tradeshow booth but also will quickly demonstrate and communicate how your products operate together – visually. If you can differentiate your solution set from your competitors’ within 2 minutes (the average time a prospect spends in a tradeshow booth), you have a better chance of that individual purchasing products solely from your enterprise and a greater opportunity to upsell relevant offerings.
3. When cross-selling, use analytics in your booth to track patterns of customer behavior and reference them with future buyers. “Well, most of our customers who bought product X also purchased product Y.” Interactive experiences on touch screens provide you with analytics to deliver relevant insights into customer buying behavior, like which products are viewed most often in the booth and how long a prospect engages with a particular offering. Mentioning these trends to customers will make you appear more knowledgeable about their industry needs and will allow your booth staff and sales teams to suggest a relevant purchase or up-sell option they may not have considered.
4. Figure out what your prospect’s pain points are. If you have a marketer, an engineer and an IT professional in your booth, they’re all going to be looking at your products from different levels, from 100 feet to down to the details. To address each individual’s needs, arm your booth with interactive marketing tools that allow you to really hone in on a prospect’s business challenges, regardless of the audience. This enables you to speak directly to the interests of your prospects, personalizing and tailoring the demonstration to their needs, which will keep them interested and engaged. Having a good grasp on exactly what problems a particular individual or company is facing should enable you to cross-sell a variety of offerings as long as each one addresses a real business need.
Gavin Finn is the CEO of Kaon Interactive, a company that specializes in creating interactive, 3D solutions to help marketers and sales teams communicate and differentiate their features and benefits.
