by Grant Wakelin
Whew! We survived the Wellington Better Home and Living Show. Three days of standing on concrete floors (sore back and feet), and a hoarse throat from all the talking.
A couple of days afterwards, some post show thoughts.
The Highlights
It was great to connect with a number of our customers from the Wellington region. People coming in to say hello and meet us in person.
Steve popped around on Friday morning. We’ve sold a couple of properties for Steve and it was great to finally meet him in person. What was fantastic is we were taking some folks through how 200 Square works, the benefits etc - doing our sale pitch. Well, Steve took over. We just sat back, blushing to be honest. We were happy with our efforts, doing a good job for Steve (and he was awesome to deal with, making it really easy for us). But we weren’t expecting the pitch he gave! The best, best thing in the world is a customer advocate. Thanks Steve!
We had a great time talking to prospective sellers. Our sales pitch seemed to resonate well. It was useful to see the clarifications and objections raised, to hear the competitive positioning of others coming through in comments and questions from prospects. I think it was successful, we spoke to a number of people looking at selling in the near future (less than 12 months) that are now aware of us and will consider us as their agent. Some, even if not selling themselves wanted our details to pass onto others. It’s a truism I know, but every time you talk to a customer or potential customer you get value out of it yourself. It was awesome to see the customer and prospect feedback energising our team.
What did we learn overall?
Planning
The show reinforced the obvious - it is important to have goals you want to achieve and a specific plan to get there. It’s not rocket science but if you’re just setting up a booth and hoping for the best, it’s luck. Not normally the best management tool (happy to take it when it comes of course).
Our specifics were:
Target Audience - people at the Home Show thinking of selling their home, now or in the next 12 months
The purpose of exhibiting at the show is to make our target audience aware of us (profile)
Desired outcome with each prospect is to be considered as the real estate agent to manage their house sale.
We wanted the Home Show booth signage to:
Grab the attention of people walking by
Make the viewer pause and digest
Convince the viewer to come talk to us and/or take literature (DLE)
Profile can be hard to measure of course, but we are looking at that over the next little while to see if the show made a difference. We have specifics we are tracking, including of course new listings from the catchment area of the show. Was the show a success in terms of our goals? Anecdotally, yes. But we will measure that based on the direct results at the show and what happens.
Location
We were the third of 3 real estate agencies at the show (about 2/3rds of the way round clockwise). So we got most people last - perfect position. It gave us the opportunity to position ourselves against the others. The normal rule of sales applies - you either want to be first and set the agenda or last so you can respond to objections.
That wasn’t planned. We’ll take the good fortune.
By being last we were able to differentiate ourselves as transparent and trustworthy. From quoting commission including GST to being able to confirm there were no ‘listing fees’ or administration charges, or other ‘hidden’ costs. It is the same old argument consumers have about agent fees - there are always surprises. It is part of why the industry is not trusted and frustratingly simple to fix. Just be up front.
Attention
We took advice from the show organisers on signage and booth layout. That worked. They indicated that we had 1-3 seconds to grab the attention of people walking past and we focused on that in our signage design, booth layout and booth management.
If you are a major brand with wide recognition people know what you do. Most small companies don’t have that luxury - and one of the goals for us was to increase our recognition. Thus we had ‘what we do’ bold and up front.
We still had to answer the question ‘what do you do’ a number of times - but at least we grabbed their mind share for sufficient time to address it.
Giving away sweets was also a great tool for that. A non threatening way to attract attention and start a conversation. We ended up handing out over 6kgs of lollies! There were several people that would have gone straight by had we not interrupted them with our sugar offering. It certainly got attention by day 2 and certainly day 3 other exhibitors had started to copy the technique.
Lead Gathering and Management
We took a number of names/addresses/contact details to follow up and will do so. Our business is online (duh), so we have a website specifically targeted at our potential customers - the sellers of residential properties. We handed out a good number of our DLE brochures with bold contact details (website, phone, email) and we will measure traffic results from that. But, by having the website and brochure we probably gave leads the ‘out’ to not give us more detail on themselves - it is up to our website to its job now!
One of the things we will look at is whether we should be more assertive in gathering contact details. Some were using competitions to gather contact details. That can work, but I feel tends to be very general and the cancellation rate after the competition ends can be large. Food for thought. It wasn’t our goal to build a distribution list, but a possibility for next time.
Business Development
We spent some time chatting to other exhibitors and likely have business as a result. We could have done more here I think and we have some ideas for next time.
What about next time?
We have already committed to the September show in Wellington. This is an experiment for us, but like any trial doing it once is not sufficient. With pretty much any marketing tool if you do a great job of it you will get results. Longer term it is how it stacks up against other advertising/marketing options that counts.
We will revisit our goals and likely be more specific next time on what we want to achieve - including better targets and measurements eg how many brochures were given out, how many names and contact details taken. How many new listings within days of the show and so forth.
The overall assessment a few days out is positive. We got value out of the show and real business. A more reasoned assessment will take a little more time.
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