Trade shows can be your Superbowl at every stage of your business — by Alex Baydin

By Alex Baydin

Treat Trade Shows Like Your Super Bowl It doesn't matter whether you have a $500 marketing budget or a $50,000 marketing budget. If you're going to invest in trade shows, prepare for them like they're your Super Bowl.

I can't overstate how important trade shows were to our business at every stage of its growth — from pre-revenue all the way through our eventual exit, when we had reached $20 million in ARR.

And the value went way beyond the traditional reasons companies attend trade shows: meeting prospects, connecting with clients, and building relationships with industry experts.

Of course, we did all of that. We strengthened relationships with clients and analysts in the expo halls, over dinners, and in restaurants in Las Vegas.

But trade shows also played a much bigger role in our company. They helped shape our culture, assess talent, build our brand, and even achieve some pretty significant business milestones.

Let me give you a few examples. 1. Building Your First Marketing List — Even on $500 In the early days, we were scrappy. We didn't have much of a marketing budget, but we were creative about finding ways to build our prospect list.

At the premier industry conference for our space in Las Vegas, I came up with an idea.

I contacted the UNLV career office and offered two students one-day marketing internships. I put them in PerformLine T-shirts, took them to the conference, and gave the barista my credit card with a very strict spending limit: $500.

The assignment was simple. Anyone walking around with a conference lanyard and a company logo we wanted to get in front of was a potential prospect.

We bought them a coffee in exchange for their contact information.

By the end of the day, we had 100 leads and the beginning of our marketing list.

That's how you make a small budget work. You don't need a big booth or an elaborate sponsorship. You need a little creativity and a willingness to hustle. 2. Trade Shows as a Talent Assessment Tool Trade shows were also one of my favorite ways to evaluate our people.

If I hired someone in sales or client success and they turned into a wallflower at a conference, that was a red flag.

These events weren't vacations, and they weren't opportunities to hang out exclusively with people from our own company.

You were there to make connections, represent our brand, engage with prospects and clients, and create opportunities for the business.

If someone wasn't comfortable doing that, we needed to figure out why. Maybe they needed coaching. Maybe they were better suited for another role. And sometimes, it was a sign that they weren't the right fit for the business.

You learn a lot about someone when you take them out of their normal environment and put them in front of customers, prospects, and industry leaders. 3. Demos, Deals, and Even Contract Redlines Trade shows are also an incredible opportunity to accelerate revenue.

Think about it. You have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of relevant people in one place over just a few days.

Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?

We made a point of turning as many conversations as possible into live demos of our software. We wanted real-time feedback from as many people as we could get in front of.

And we weren't afraid to get transactional.

If we were meeting with a prospect who was already somewhere in the middle or late stages of the sales cycle, our team was prepared to move the deal forward right there, face to face.

One of my favorite revenue stories came from a meeting at a conference with a representative from the world's largest bank.

We had been waiting for weeks on the final redlines to our master services agreement. Meanwhile, the bank's head of procurement was actually on stage presenting at one of the conference sessions.

Our CRO spotted him as he walked off stage.

Rather than waiting for another email or scheduling another meeting weeks down the road, he approached him and got him to come up to our suite.

Ten minutes later, we had the contract projected on the big-screen TV, and the two of them were working through the final redlines together.

That's what I mean by treating a trade show like your Super Bowl. You show up prepared, you recognize opportunities, and you take advantage of them when they present themselves. 4. Building Culture Along the Way And finally, trade shows were a huge part of building our company culture.

We had fun at conferences. But I also asked a lot of our team.

In many cases, people needed to have more than ten meetings a day prearranged just to qualify for the opportunity to attend.

Once they got there, it was full-on. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, meetings with clients, meetings with prospects, demos, networking — it was exhausting.

But we also made sure to blow off some steam as a team. We found fun and creative ways to spend time together outside the conference schedule.

Those experiences mattered.

They built relationships across the company, created shared memories, and gave people a sense of what it meant to be part of PerformLine.

And some of those relationships lasted well beyond the conference itself. The Takeaway So here's my advice: Don't look at a trade show as just another line item in your marketing budget.

Whether you're spending $500 or $50,000, think strategically about what you want to get out of it.

Prepare your team. Schedule the meetings. Have a plan for generating leads. Get your product in front of people. Push deals forward. And make sure your people understand that they're there to represent your brand.

Because the real value of a trade show isn't just what happens on the expo floor.

It's what happens to your business as a result of showing up prepared and making the most of every opportunity.