As a small company the prospect of exhibiting abroad can be pretty daunting, both organisationally and financially. We’re currently financially bootstrapped, but we knew that the expo could be a great opportunity for us to network with potential clients and to give us great exposure. I am hoping this post will help those that want to exhibit abroad to save valuable time and money, whilst helping to maximise the efficacy of their efforts.

1 – International exhibitions are expensive!

First things first, exhibiting is an expensive task. In addition to upfront exhibition costs, you need to account for plane tickets, hotel rooms, living expenses, printing banners, cards and brochures, not to mention the man hours that are required to ensure a successful show. Then there are the extras that they sting you with when you turn up at the exhibition– internet access, equipment rental, storage fees, and so the list goes on.

Having a limited budget, we knew that the only way we could afford to exhibit would be with financial support. Thankfully for us, there is help available. We contacted the good folks at UKTI (the UK government department for trade and investment) to see if they could provide us with any support. Every year, the UKTI help companies of all sizes exhibit abroad. The help they offered us was fantastic. We received a Solo Tap support grant, worth £1,000 to put towards exhibiting costs. We also benefited from one free flight (business class ) via a UKTI – British Airways scheme. These helped to drastically offset our costs.

In addition, we used friends and family to wangle free / cheap accommodation. My cousin’s couch turned out to be very comfortable, and treating him and his housemates to lunch was far cheaper than staying in a hotel.

Don’t be afraid to negotiate on the cost of the exhibition. We put forth the case that our services would be of great interest to attendees but that the listed cost of the expo was too high. After some negotiation, we managed to get our booth for $2,000, down from the original price of $3,000. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, so it’s always worth asking!

Our overall expo costs (minus food and drink) came to approx. £2,000, as opposed to the £5,000 that it would have cost us had we not sought help. Thank you to everyone who helped us out!

2 – The Seven Ps: Prior planning and preparation prevents piss poor performance!

(Thanks to Phil Crosby from iExercise for the Seven Ps reference.)

When running a start-up, you soon realise that everything takes longer than you think. Planning for an expo is no different! Our tasks only came together a couple of days before we left for NY and for a while it was touch and go as to whether or not we would pull it off. We were reliant on four separate companies to print new business cards, t-shirts, our banner, and Comufy brochures. Whilst we could have finalised our designs and copy earlier, various delays and glitches by our suppliers meant that deliveries scheduled to arrive with a week to spare only came through the day before we left. This cost us financially too, as urgent printing and shipping is significantly more expensive. The worst potential outcome would have seen us turn up without key components of our stand, and this would have seriously weakened our appearance and our company pitch.

3 – Cultural differences

In addition to helping out financially, the UKTI also provided us with advice on how to exhibit in the US. Culturally, lots of people think that the UK and the US are very close, given that we have a common language. However, the cultural similarities are only superficial and when you start talking to prospects you soon realise this. The UKTI representatives in the UK and in NY gave us the following key points to bear in mind:

•    When talking with American companies, bear in mind that many of them are not as established as they say they are. Whilst this is also the case for many European companies, particularly young companies, American firms tend to be more aggressive and elaborate in their storytelling.
•    Many American firms will want you to have an office in America or an American partner, before they agree to deal with you.
•    All pricing is expected to be in $USD.
•    Make sure that you have an American telephone number on your literature or business card, as this will give the impression that you have an American presence. Once you have given this out, be prepared to answer calls from the West coast late into the evening.
•    Brits tend to be quite conservative in our marketing and promotional material. Make sure that you ‘Americanise’ your literature and your speech. Use an American rather than UK spellchecker. Make bold statements using strong words and superlatives.

Please note that this list leans towards the stereotypes and that not all American firms conform to the above, but do be prepared for cultural surprises. The lesson to take away here is that cultural differences and nuances are critical, so do your homework and speak with someone from that country before you go. For example, we made sure that our American friends proofread our brochures before we printed them.

The UKTI also offer paid services such as the Export Communications Review and the Export Marketing Research Scheme to help when trading abroad, but time constraints meant that we did not have the opportunity to use these services.

4 – When at your booth

Lots of companies rely heavily on props and gimmicks to attract the attention of passersby. Companies spend money on plasma televisions and Nintendo Wiis, whilst others give out free food, pens and gadgets. Being on a tight budget meant that we were unable to follow suit and we consequently found out that all of this is not necessary. In fact, it can be largely detrimental as your staff focus on these extras rather than your core offering, and many of the people who approach you have no genuine interest in your product.

We opted for a clear, simple and catchy slogan that would pique the interest of conference attendees. In fact, we spent days debating what slogan to use, and our choice of “Kids don’t use email, why do you?!” proved very successful. We had numerous people approach us who wanted to find out what kids do use, after spotting our banner from the other side of the room. Once they engaged us, we were then well placed to weave our pitch into the conversation.

When manning your booth, it is important that your body language, appearance and position attract people to come over.  We found that when we were sat down, less people came to talk to us as we appeared uninterested and unwelcoming. Furthermore, try not to stand next to your colleague as you will inevitably end up talking to each other, and this can prevent people from approaching you as the don’t want to interrupt. But DO NOT blurt out your pitch to every single individual who so much as glances at your stand. Many of the stalls would try and sell to you the instant you looked in their direction, and this has nothing but a detrimental impact. Firstly, you scare people off before they get the chance to process and decide whether or not your services are useful to them. Secondly, you waste your breath and energy on pitching to unqualified leads. Wait for them to look at your banner. Take a look at their badge to see if you can determine what sort of company they work for. If they approach let them pick up your literature and if they make eye contact then introduce yourself. Don’t jump in with a sales pitch! Instead, wait to see if they ask what you do. If they do, don’t jump in with a sales pitch! Sound them out first. Give them a high level overview of what you do. Do they seem interested? Do their eyes glaze over? Then try and find out what they do. This will help you place them and make a decision as to whether or not you can help them, or if they have a problem to which you can provide a solution. Listen to them! Let them do the talking before you give your response. If you just roll out a set reply, you will instantly come across as fake. Instead make your reply relevant to their situation.

Practise your pitch. As difficult as it is, try to get it down to 30 seconds. Have different versions of your pitch so that you are prepared to speak to different groups of people. Learn to differentiate between those who are genuinely interested and those who are not.

If they take literature, or seem interested ask for their card! Don’t assume they’ll call you just because they take your card. Nine times out of ten, if you ask someone for their card once they have picked up your literature, they will respond positively.

Make sure you annotate any business cards that you receive. Once they have left, write down who they are, what they said, and what they look like. When you collect a couple of hundred cards in the space of a few days, I can guarantee that you won’t remember who everyone is unless you make notes.

5 – Not everyone will come to you, so hunt people down.

Whilst many of our contacts came from people approaching our booth, we also made lots of contacts through being proactive. There were lots of seminars and panel discussions that took place at the expo. We made sure that prior to the expo we had researched every individual speaker and marked the ones that we wanted to target. We then approached each individual after their session. Generally speaking, there are numerous people waiting to talk to speakers and you only have a handful of seconds to achieve your goals. If you take too long, both the speaker and the waiting crowd will soon get frustrated. The goal is not to sell to them there and then, but to gauge their interest in your product and hopefully pique their interest enough for them to give you a card or arrange a follow up meeting. Again, ask questions, don’t just tell. See if they have a pain that you can solve and try to highlight this pain. For example, we would ask questions about their current communication strategy when it came to contacting kids and teenagers. Do they still use email? Are they getting good results with email? Are they interested in increasing their open and click through rates? You may have to guide them to the answer that you want, so carefully select your questions. Again, practice makes perfect. One of the best things about a large expo, is that you get plenty of opportunities to practice your pitch and the end result is significantly better than your initial pitch.

When approaching other exhibitors and attendees, find out who the key person is that you want to talk to. If you do this at the outset, you will save yourself plenty of time and effort. For example, we quickly learnt that if you want to speak to marketing, trying to pitch to a sales guy won’t help. Be direct and ask who is in charge of marketing and if they are there. If so, approach them directly. If they are not there, ask for the sales person’s card and write the marketing person’s name on it. Then follow up with sales guy to get the marketing person’s email address. This way you also have a name that you can refer to when you send your initial email, and this will increase the likelihood of the message being opened.

Ken Morse of the MIT Entrepreneurship centre explains this very well. He says that all decisions have a jury of people who are involved in making that decision. Your job is to identify who sits on this jury and to then get the key members to buy in to your idea. The most effective way to do this is to convince them that your product solves a problem that they have. If you can then get a member of the jury to sponsor your idea internally, you are much more likely to see results.

Many of the ideas in this post are not new and apply to more situations than just exhibiting. However, I hope that this article gives you some tips and pointers, refreshing your memory. Exhibiting at international trade shows is a great way to get your brand recognised and to find prospective leads, and thus the above skills will prove useful to most companies.

In terms of talks the highlight of the show for me was to see a bit more about the upcoming Lego universe game, it looks pretty amazing and phenomenal and fantastic and wonderful and outstanding, have I mentioned yet that it is also unbelievable? The Lego guys didn’t use these words, even though their product would deserve them. However, some other companies did, which is quite funny for an European. We are just not used to over emphasising things and a pretty good normally suffices. Some other small clashes when it came to sarcasm – I love stereotypes Oh and some (that reads David) know London better than us.

We will write a specific blog post about our “lessons learned” soon. Still processing some of the things…

Having spoken with a lot of people and listened to a few talk snippets, it seems some kids companies are slowly realising how important it is to engage properly with kids.

After the expo I also attended the Ultra Light Startup legal meetup. Some interesting discussions about IP and good networking. I mainly went to meet a few of the startups here in NY.

Then a quick foot long sub and now at the Ace hotel….

We also had some fun outside the expo. I found my neighbourhood and we ate at a great mexican restaurant of death with a rather kitsch interior.

Our big day is tomorrow with the start of the EngageExpo… Stay tuned…

My hotdog required a coffee for digestion and then back to work. On the way back we passed through China town, which was buzzing in preparation for Chinese new year.

Now we are off to a party at the Ace Hotel….

We then arranged a few more meetings and had a huge burrito – we were told we need to gain a bit of weight.

This afternoon we met Karl Schmieder from Messaginglab, nice guy with a good sense of humor. We will try to meet up with him again next week and might even have the chance to work out of his office. For the rest of the afternoon we camped out at the Ace Hotel on 29th Street, which seems to be the cool tech meet up place.

Tomorrow we will try to meet up with David from The Hatchery.

So far the Big Apple is very welcoming and everyone has been extremely helpful. But I am not sure if I ever will get used to their black water and tea. OK enough for today, my inner clock is telling me I should start getting tired – off to meet some friends.

(Update) We ended up listening to an opera in a church and had some healthy vegan food – really not what you normally would associate with the US.

We are on our way to New York for the EngageExpo, a trade show for kids products, ranging from internet based games, social worlds and real physical toys – yes they still exist and we hopefully have some time to play. In addition to realising a childhood dream of attending the biggest kids trade show in the world, we are presenting our direct marketing and ingame alert solutions – allowing business to engage with their demanding kids customers on THEIR channels. Kids just don’t use email anymore and businesses are slowly starting realise that. Comufy helps these business to message kids and teens easily on social networks and instant messengers. Twitter is also an options, but kids don’t seem to use it much yet.

During our stay we are also looking forward to meeting a few NY startups, i.e. Ray Bernaz from Socialibrium who was very helpful already putting us in touch with the NY tech scene and Graham Lawlor who has invited us to attend a ultralight startups event next Tuesday.

Enough about Comufy and why we are going to New York… More about the actual travel experience so far.

Thanks to UKTI, who have been great help all round so far, and British Airways, who have sponsored this flight as part of a program helping UK entrepreneurs go beyond the island. Virgin is no longer THE airline for entrepreneurs.

The experience on BA 0003 (yes that’s right one of THE Concord flight numbers – but unfortunately arrive before you leave is no more) has so far been very pleasant. Simple checkin, hardly any queues and very friendly cabin crew. Even the meal was tasty and warm Just had a quick chat with Gavin, the captain – nice personal touch I must say.

The only thing that has been missing was the quick cup of tea once things got moving. (Update) I nearly complained about not getting cheese and biscuits plus a desert, but Michelle the friendly flight attendant just brought me some extra cheese (If anyone from BA reads this: I am on BA0003 10.2.10, she deserves a promotion and promised not to strike).

Now a few more emails to confirm some meetings, a quick movie and maybe a power nap.

Update, the OnAir insight mobile phone system doesn’t let me connect to the Internet through T-Mobile – so this will be posted when we touch down. Even if they would let me connect, they probably would charge me an arm and a leg. Why didn’t BA just install inflight Wifi instead of an inflight mobile network that doesn’t let you receive calls and charges 1£ per SMS?

Looking forward to the Expo and to meeting our US startup buddies.

Phil

TweetSwitch is a Comufy powered service that lets you send and receive your tweets on your instant messenger. We started working on TweetSwitch in November 2009 for the following reasons:

1. To showcase our technology
2. To stress test our system (a Twitter app is a great way to quickly attract a large user base)
3. To demonstrate how easy it is to integrate with Comufy

TechCruch and Twitter, a virtuous circle

Via the London start-up grapevine, TweetSwitch reached the ears of the technology blog TechCrunch. Now an article on TechCrunch is a big deal. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they can make or break a start-up, but they are highly influential and widely read in both Europe and North America. Whilst we knew that this article would spread the word far and wide, we were also hopeful that the story would be picked up on the Twittersphere. Thankfully this is exactly what happened, and within a matter of hours the article was re-tweeted over two hundred times.

The article sparked off a chain reaction of tweets, leading to more write-ups, more publicity and even more tweets – a truly virtuous circle. For example, we have seen more website referrals from the Yahoo! Messenger blog who picked up on the story, than through the original TechCrunch article. The impact has been significant, as the graph below illustrates. Our site traffic has increased tenfold and our user numbers have quadrupled.

Following the article, the large increase in TweetSwitch users allowed us to stress test our technology. As expected, this wasn’t without its hiccups and this uncovered several bugs that we have now largely fixed. Whilst we had previously simulated stress testing, there is no substitution for real world stress testing, with real life users. Our users have behaved in ways that we certainly didn’t foresee, and their feedback has been invaluable.

A more technical blog post explaining the easy integration of Comufy and TweetSwitch will follow soon.

User feedback

I want to briefly highlight the importance of monitoring user feedback, both positive and negative. On the plus side, users swiftly alerted us to any problems and issues that occurred. However, whilst most users contacted us directly, largely through DMs, some took it upon themselves to publish their gripes via Twitter. By monitoring and swiftly responding to comments about TweetSwitch, we managed to minimise the spread of any negative comments. Our users appreciated their personal replies and this should increase their loyalty to TweetSwitch. As we have established personal communication, they are also likely to contact us directly with any further issues, rather than publish to the social web.

Whilst the power of Twitter to disseminate information to the masses can promote your company, you must remember that it can just as easily tarnish the reputation that you have spent months creating.

In conclusion…

The TechCrunch article and the subsequent re-tweets have helped advertise both TweetSwitch and Comufy, achieving in days what could have taken traditional marketing months to achieve. TweetSwitch has since been visited by users from over one hundred countries and we have seen articles published in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Japanese, Chinese and even Indonesian.

To all companies out there, big or small, don’t underestimate the power of virality. Fortunately for Comufy the article was largely positive and this will hopefully continue to be the case. However, if you do know instances where bad press has significantly impacted upon a company, with particular reference to the virality of Twitter and the internet, please contact us so we can link the articles below.

All feedback on our blog is welcome!