I love being positive. I love helping people. And I hope this doesn’t sound like too much of a rant but I have to share this.

I travel to about 15 conferences every year, it’s not a lot but since I have been going to trade shows since the 90’s, they do add up.

These events have companies that have booths. I walk up to a company to find out what they do as I want to learn more. And 98% of the time, the people at the booth make the most horrible mistake that they can make.

They don’t ask me any questions to tailor the conversation at all to my current business needs.

They automatically go into their sales pitch and have no idea if anything they are saying is even important to me.

[Tweet “Don’t talk AT your booth visitor. Talk TO them.”]

For instance, I was looking at a productivity tool. I joke you not, the sales person spoke at me for 10 minutes without taking a breath. I told him that I just needed to know if the product integrated with SalesForce. It didn’t, and I was looking for a product that did.

Soooooo if he would have asked me in advance he could have saved us both some time. He then did the same thing to the gentleman next to me holding him hostage. The hostage was glazing over with the barrage of information. He had no idea what they even did, and the rep was going into major detail.

Another vendor I stopped by hosts desktop products in the cloud. The attendee I was with uses all products that are already in the cloud but the company stood there and talked about their history and everything that they have done to build top security and the amount of servers they have. She was interested in knowing more but not from when the company was founded 20 years ago.

I hear companies complain often that attendees walk by without making eye contact.

You now know why.

Instead of talking at them, I challenge every person who stands in a booth at a trade show to ask the person approaching you about what they do. Ask what they are looking for. Then you’ll know how you can help them, if you can help them and what they may want to know.

[Tweet “Booth Challenge: Find out 1 unique fact about each person who visits you.”]

Don’t just go into your pitch, please and thank you.