What a trade show in Singapore actually costs you

Floor space is sold by the square metre, so that is the unit everybody argues about. It is the wrong one.

What you are buying is two seconds of attention from each person who walks past your front edge, a few thousand times over. A stand can be large, expensive and completely empty.

What a visitor really gives you

Almost nothing, at first. Someone walking an aisle at a normal pace crosses a three metre frontage in about two seconds, and takes in one thing: a logo, a shape, or a person doing something worth slowing down for.

If they stop, the useful part of that conversation usually runs four to eight minutes. Past that you are holding one person while the aisle keeps moving behind them.

Which is why stands with something happening on them beat stands with more square metres. A demo on a clock, a signing, a queue waiting to meet somebody: a queue is the most persuasive thing you can put on a show floor. People join it before they know what it is for.

Plan against conversations, not cost per square metre

Cost per square metre is easy to work out and tells you nothing about whether the show worked. Conversations per day is harder and tells you almost everything.

It has three ceilings and only one binds at a time. The aisle delivers so many people past your frontage. Your people hold so many conversations properly. And the hall is alive for fewer hours than it is open. Find the lowest of the three: it is the only one worth spending on. The stand itself is another subject, covered in the guide to exhibition stand design.

Staffing is a shift pattern, not a headcount

Two hours on the front edge is about the limit. After that a person stops greeting and starts leaning on the counter, and a stand with four people leaning on it reads as closed. Rotate in pairs, so whoever comes off can hand over the conversation they were in the middle of.

Keep somebody uncommitted at all times. A stand goes dark the moment every person on it is already talking to someone, which is how three people have a worse day than two. Put a name against every hour, the way a run of show puts a name against every cue, or the rota becomes whoever happens to be standing there.

The hours are not equal either. The first half hour of any day belongs to registration. The last hour of the last day is dead: exhibitors start breaking down, the organisers open the doors for teardown, and the aisles empty. Rostering full strength into it pays people to watch a hall being dismantled. Put your strongest pair on the first two hours of day two, when serious visitors come back to the stands they short-listed.

A stand goes dark the moment everyone on it is already in a conversation. Three people can have a worse day than two.

A badge scan is a name, not a lead

The scanner is the most misleading object in the hall. It produces a number that looks like a result, and three weeks later nobody can say which of those two hundred names asked the question worth calling back about.

What makes a scan worth having is three lines typed next to it while the visitor is still in front of you: what they came for, what they are trying to solve, what happens next. Twenty seconds, and it is the first habit to collapse when a stand gets busy.

Agree the follow-up deadline before the show rather than after it. What you collect decays fast, and by the second week the visitor cannot remember which stand you were.

Decide what the show is for before you book the floor

Three questions settle most of it. How many real conversations would make this worth doing? Who is having them? What happens to a name the day after the hall closes? The graphics and the giveaway are ways of serving those answers, or ways of avoiding them.

If the answer to the first is twenty, you do not need a bigger stand. You need two people who are free at the right hours and somebody writing things down. The floor itself is the part we run: briefing, the shift pattern, and making sure nothing leaves the stand as a bare name.