February marks the start of the new year for retailers, and they’re out in full force at trade shows, finding the right mix of products that will delight their customers. You’ve made a significant investment to exhibit at your industry’s key events and completed all the important prep work to book appointments with buyers. Now, it’s time to ensure you maximize the value of those meetings.
Here are four ways a B2B platform can help you drive the greatest value from trade shows:
1. Give Buyers a Digitalized Browsing Experience
Upgrade your buyers’ browsing experience from paper to digital by trading in your printed catalogs for digital catalogs. Help them find and engage with your most relevant items on your iPad or iPhone and instantly convert their favorite items into customized line sheets for easy ordering, eliminating the time and pain of handwritten orders.
Not only does this provide your buyers with a better experience, it also enables you to increase your average order value through better merchandising and cross-selling.
2. Use Barcode Scanning to Enable Easy Ordering
While digital catalogs are great, it’s still important to get buyers to engage your products live at the show. Bridge the the physical and digital for your buyers with a barcode scanner. Buyers can quickly scan product barcodes as they browse your samples, and the products’ information is automatically captured in a linesheet that can be converted into an order or emailed to the customer for further review. Brands that utilize barcode scanning at trade shows have seen a 20% or more increase in the average number of items per order.
3. Spend Less Time Building Linesheets, and More Time Building Relationships
With the introduction of digital catalogues, custom linesheets, and integrated inventory, the time spent on filling out forms, taking notes, and flipping pages during meetings is virtually eliminated. This leads to decreased meeting time and more personal, quality interactions. Now that you are taking shorter meetings, you can fit more in a day!
4. Convert Meetings into Orders
Use each meeting as an opportunity to confirm an order on the spot. Work with retailers to build orders together while looking through your digital catalog, and submit them with a click of a button. If retailers want to review the order post-trade show before submitting, send them a link to goes directly to their shopping cart so they can go look at their order on their own terms.
We will be at many trade shows during the next few months, meet us there or request a demo today.
