What’s the Value of Trade Show Exhibiting?
A crowd of potential clients can visit you at your trade show booth, a lot more than your sales people can visit in a day.
I often hear this question: “Help, please! My trade shows are under attack from management! What is the value of meeting a customer or prospect on the trade show floor versus in their office?”
Trade Shows Work
An estimated 110 million people attend more than 4,000 shows in the United States and Canada every year (courtesy: tradeshowsandevents.com). How many clients or prospects can your sales reps see per day? Maybe 3-4 or 6-7?
Consider a 20 total hour show with 10,000 attendees. You have the potential to visit with up to 500 people per hour. Even if you only meet with 5% of those attendees, you’ll end up with the opportunity to connect, face-to-face, with 25 people per hour. To achieve the same level of success, one sales rep would need 20 weeks!
The Numbers
Trade show exhibiting, it’s a great value. Consider the following numbers, provided by CEIR.org:
- For the past 10 years, an average of 81%-83% of visitors have some kind of buying power.
- The average visitor spends 9.2 hours at a 2-3 day trade show.
- 86% of your visitors will be new contacts.
- 77% of visitors will remember your company for up to 10 weeks.
- Cost per lead from show averages $212.00.
- Cost per lead from field averages $308.00.
- Cost per sale from a show averages $705.00.
- Cost per sale from the field averages $1140.00.
- That’s 38% less for a sale from a trade show lead!
How to Use This Info
I suggest you share these numbers with your management and accounting teams. Then couple the information with your own statistics & measurement results, so that you can help everyone understand the importance of your trade show marketing program.
Filed Under: Budgeting • value of trade shows
About the Author: Michael Flavin is a trade show strategist & exhibit consultant at Skyline Exhibits & Graphics Mid-America in St. Louis, MO. He works with companies & organizations to eliminate headaches from their trade show, event marketing & recruiting programs. Overall, he offers total, turn-key solutions, focused on creating memorable experiences, lowering operating expenses and increasing ROI. In addition, Michael consults & trains booth staffers and helps companies measure results from their trade show programs. He also helps exhibit marketers design 
Thank you for confirming the value of trade shows. I have one question, are your comments based on expositions (trade and consumer shows) or just trade shows?
Hi Jai,
Thank you for your comment. While some of the information, we discuss in our Trade Show Tips, has been researched based on B2B shows, many of the principles relate to B2C shows as well. For example, you can meet more people at a show, quicker and more efficiently than a field sales call.
This is exactly the kind of information we need to have accessible to everyone. Thank you for sharing it!
Dear Michael,
Thanks for the statistics and tips for the Expo industry. Can you provide list of top fifty show in the world and name of the country. Please keep on mailing the updates.
Hello Vijay,
You ask a very good question, and I have not seen the answer anywhere. Tradeshow Week compiles their own statistics for the top 200 shows in the United States, and a separate list for the top 50 shows for Canada. AUMA does a great job listing the top European venues, and they have a good German and Worldwide database of shows, but it is not searchable by size. If you or any of our readers sees a unified, ranked list of worldwide shows, please let me know because I’d like to see it, too!
I would just like to ask in this time of economic crisis, are trade fairs still workable? Or maybe we are just spending our money in trade fairs?
Hello Eddy,
Even during this time of economic crisis many exhibitors have found it’s a great time to exhibit. There are less competitors there, and the attendees who are still coming are highly qualified, with greater buying authority. That said, it can be harder for an exhibitor whose industry has been harmed more than average, such as housing, construction, and mortgage finance. Thanks for the comment.