Making the Most of Trade Shows

You’ve just returned from a travel industry conference with a suitcase full of business cards, supplier information and brochures. Now what do you do with it all?

Most travel industry shows now include an appointment session where you “speed date,” so to speak, with suppliers. You spend three to five minutes gathering information from each supplier – which in some cases could total upward of 30 to 40.

The Collateral Conundrum

Travel shows invariably also include trade shows, where you have the opportunity to connect with more than 100 suppliers whom you may not have met with in the brief one-on-one sessions. Let’s face it: That’s a lot of collateral to collect.

Organizational Strategies

Here are a few tips to help you easily cull through the materials you’ve collected during travel shows. On my flight home from travel shows, I always add all the business cards I collected to my CRM, along with any notes I had taken during one-on-one meetings. Then I toss the business cards. Some suppliers will provide you with thumb drives with all of their information on it. I download all of the information and save it in my cloud and toss the thumb drives.

Assessing What to Save

Once home, I sort through the suitcase full of brochures, separating them by continent and discarding those that I know I will never use. If I already have suppliers’ brochures and they haven’t changed, I toss the duplicates. If the supplier has a new brochure, I keep the new one and toss the old. I add the brochures that I’ve chosen to keep to binders by continent for future research.

That full suitcase of brochures is now consolidated into a few binders, your CRM and your cloud.

These strategies will work toward ensuring that you are able to make the most of the conferences you attend.

So be sure to give them a try at the travel show you attend!