Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How Did B2B Companies Deal With The Loss of Trade Shows?
72 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, Stacy and Alanna talk to Alex Eckhart, Director of Marketing at SalesRoads, about how companies have dealt with the loss of tradeshows due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
SalesRoads surveyed 103 sales & marketing professionals to learn how the loss of tradeshows, starting in 2020 due to COVID-19, has impacted lead flow and revenue. Alex joins us to discuss the resulting published in the SalesRoads white paper, The State of Trade Show Lead Generation (http://bit.ly/37Vd9Ez)
Alex touches on:
- The importance of event marketing to business leaders
- How companies reallocated trade show budgets
- When survey respondents say they'll feel comfortable with trade show events again
- Live events versus virtual events
- and more
Want to get in touch with Alex?
Email him at aeckhart[at]salesroads.com or connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/alex-eckhart.
___
About The B2B Mix Show
The B2B Mix Show with Alanna Jackson and Stacy Jackson is brought to you by Jackson Marketing. Need help with your B2B online presence? Let's talk!
Connect with us on social media:
The B2B Mix Show — Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. In each episode, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your sales and marketing strategy. We'll share what we know along with advice from industry experts who will join us on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Stacey Jackson, long time, no talk. And I'm Elena Jackson, and we are the co-founders of Jackson Marketing. And in case you still haven't heard, we are also sisters. Is that what I was supposed to say? Yeah. We just haven't done this in a while, Elena. I was like, am I supposed to say, were the hosts of B2B mix show? Okay. So I had it right then.
00:00:41
Speaker
Yeah, let's keep going.
Impact of COVID-19 on Trade Shows
00:00:43
Speaker
We gotta admit, we haven't talked in a long time. I'm gonna blame 2020 and COVID crazy. What about you, Lane? Sounds good to me. I'll go with it. And you know what? Today's topic kinda is caused by COVID crazy, or at least was the reason for the white paper that our guest and his company wrote. Why don't you talk a little bit about what that topic is?
00:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, so trade shows, most everybody has been to one and we love them. They're fun and all kinds of stuff. And most B2B companies attend trade shows every year. But as we know, 2020 hit and everything kind of changed for all businesses everywhere. And trade shows were hit really badly.
00:01:33
Speaker
And that is what the paper is about. It's the state of trade shows. And we're going to go through what people are doing, where they're reallocating their budget, what the state of the trade show is. Is it going to be back soon? Is it not going to be back soon? Just kind of walking through all those different things that you would expect when you're doing a white paper and learning about
00:02:00
Speaker
Did people have a negative impact to their bottom line because they didn't attend trade shows? Did they have a positive impact to their bottom line because they moved things elsewhere? They moved those monies to focus on other channels. So it's a really interesting study. And if you have the chance to download it and take a look at it, I think you'll really find some interesting facts that are in there and some stats.
00:02:26
Speaker
I don't want to cause a spoiler, but Alaina, was there one thing before people listened to the interview that you found most surprising from the study or from our guest?
00:02:37
Speaker
Well, what shocked me was just like, I knew the trade show industry was huge, but the amount of dollars that they lost. And when you look at the white paper and you look at the visual of the chart, it's like crazy that it really puts it into perspective on how much people spend on trade shows and what's going on and how it might impact your business.
00:03:08
Speaker
One thing that surprised me, but it probably shouldn't is that people saw so much success with the virtual trade shows as an entity. Most of the ones I've been to, I thought were terrible.
00:03:19
Speaker
Well, yeah, yeah. And it feels like it's just a lot of webinars put together, you know, and a lot of people know how to do a webinar good. Right. Exactly. But, you know, it makes sense. It's easy for somebody to fill out a form and most of these virtual conferences are free. So a lot more people are going to be there. So I guess that makes a lot of sense. Cheaper to a 10. They just got to up their game if they want to keep the virtual conference train going, in my opinion. Exactly.
00:03:48
Speaker
We're not here to hear my opinion. Alina, why don't you introduce today's guest and let's get the show on the road. Gladly.
Interview with Alex Zachark, Director of Marketing at SalesRoads
00:03:56
Speaker
Alex Zachark is the Director of Marketing at SalesRoads. In addition to sitting on the Executive Council, he contributes as a brand catalyst and inventive problem solver. He is a remote work truther and likes to spend time working abroad, most recently in Mexico and the Caribbean. Now in the past, we've had David Krieger from SalesRoads on, join us a couple of times. So we're really excited to have someone else from SalesRoads join us and talk to us today. So Alex, welcome to the B2B Mix Show.
00:04:26
Speaker
Thank you, it's great to be here. I'm going to have to get on board with that remote work from an exotic location, that sounds good. I'm just sitting here in Dunning, Florida. That's nice, but it's not exotic. Yeah, it's not too bad. You just got to make sure you vet the Wi-Fi before you go. You don't want to get in a situation where you're going to have to take an emergency flight back home. Oh yeah, sure. Oh no, does that happen?
00:04:53
Speaker
It's not, thankfully, because I've got the Wi-Fi. Make them send me a screenshot of a speed test. Oh, well, that's a good idea. So Alex, I know that SalesRoads has just released a white paper titled The State of Trade Show Lead Generation. And obviously, 2020 has kind of sucked for everybody. It took a toll on the trade show industry.
00:05:17
Speaker
And your white paper has mentioned that the market value dropped from 10 billion, I believe, is that right? From 2019 to 2020. Can you give us a background on what prompted you to do the study and why you feel it's important for B2B companies to really look into this?
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, of course. So we are an SDR outsourcing company, and we primarily service the manufacturing and SaaS sectors. And obviously, ratios are huge for both of those industries. And in light of COVID, we wanted to know
00:05:52
Speaker
how are these industries responding? You know, it's a huge lead generation channel. I know you referenced 52% of business leaders say that marketing drives tomorrow ROI, excuse me, then the other lead gen channel. And PricewaterhouseCoopers says it's the second largest source of B2B revenue in the US. And it's kind of crazy, right up overnight, it's really one of those bizarre things. And hopefully we never seen a team like that, but that was the genesis of the study.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, and it's when you're looking at the study, it's like fairly close into the beginning, but you see the chart and how it just is all is close to like a 90 degree just drop. And it's just crazy to see that and just thinking about how 2020 has kind of changed things is just like blows your mind when you see like something like that.
00:06:43
Speaker
So for these businesses where they were relying on event marketing for the ROI and they had to pivot, what were some of the things that they pivoted to? Are they reallocating those trade show budgets to like mainly virtual events or what's happening there?
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, so in total, almost 90% of businesses who did reallocate some of their funds invested in virtual events. So most people did try to recreate that channel virtually, but we also saw a lot of respondents were trying other things as well and having success. We looked at a couple of channels specifically and also considered
00:07:25
Speaker
how businesses might be reinvesting in their own processes already. So we asked our respondents if they were investing in in-house marketing or in-house SDR type initiatives, if they outsource either of those or if they invested in virtual trade shows.
00:07:41
Speaker
And as I mentioned, virtual trade shows are really huge. Investing in in-house marketing initiatives was really large as well. And then after that was lead generation, SDR types of outsourcing initiatives. On average, our respondents reallocated 55%.
00:07:58
Speaker
of their original trade show budget. So that was the money that they had already set aside for trade shows. Obviously they couldn't do it at that point. So on average, they were moving 55% of that money elsewhere to those various channels. As far as the virtual trade shows go, I mean, I guess I get why people would move it there, but as an attendee, I don't really enjoy it.
00:08:23
Speaker
I was thinking the same thing. I get from a sales perspective why you might want to do that because then you still are getting names and contacts. But from an attendee, it feels like just another webinar a lot of times. Yeah, absolutely. I talked with a lot of people who work in the event industry and they had a lot of really interesting things to say to me. One contact from a Fortune 500 company who had attended a virtual event
00:08:53
Speaker
said or wondered out loud if people were just attending these virtual trade shows as a exercise in participation. They couldn't just let their competitors have this virtual space of themselves, so they had to show up. But they had a lot of the same feedback that you did that, oh my gosh, you know, how many virtual booths can you go to? You can't recreate some of the networking too. There's no virtual elevator for you to bump into someone.
00:09:20
Speaker
So those are definitely barriers for virtual events. But there were some interesting positive notes that people had as well. So some of the virtual event producers did some really creative things. One example is a virtual kids room. So if your kids are in school, like so many kids aren't, you could send your kid to the kids room so you could focus on the event. There's also some interesting things. It is really nice. There are also some interesting things.
00:09:48
Speaker
that they kind of integrated other types of content. So let's say someone had a virtual trade show booth with a white paper. You could download the white paper and then the exhibitor would get your information and they could follow up with you. So less people were going to the trade show booth, but more people were engaging with content. So it is just a very different touch point.
00:10:14
Speaker
Now, if they want to go full virtual reality and send me an Oculus headset, I will definitely go to one of those virtual trade shows. The trade show industry went down 10 billion. I don't know if they're going to invest in all that though. Well, true.
00:10:32
Speaker
Well, they may have to because we're still dealing with all this COVID craziness and we're hoping it'd be done or at least tapering off in 2021, but it kind of looks like it's still going to be around for at least a little while. Do you find that most B2B professionals you've spoken with are feeling confident about attending events this year or still a little pessimistic? What did you guys find?
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah, so we found really a range of outcomes. We conducted the research in December and at that time, 25% of people told us they were ready to go right then. And we all know that December was not a great month for COVID. So some people, COVID be damned, they're ready to go to a trade show. Some people, 10% of our respondents actually told us that they want to feel comfortable even until 2022.
00:11:21
Speaker
There are some other caveats there as well. So a separate survey by Marketing Land, which is a pretty big digital marketing publication, conducted a survey and they found that 66% of their respondents would only attend with a vaccine.
00:11:37
Speaker
So there's just so much uncertainty, right? Is the vaccine rollout going to lag?
Challenges for Event Producers During COVID-19
00:11:43
Speaker
Is it going to catch up? And then too, I think there are some other considerations for the event producers. So I spoke with, you know, again, a lot of people work in the event industry and
00:11:54
Speaker
One of the things that they kept saying to me was, well, it depends on if Congress passes some type of liability shield. We're interested in putting on an event. That's what we do. But if someone's going to sue us because they get sick, then maybe we're going to have to reconsider that. Which is credit to think that you have to think that way. Of course, it is. Yeah, it's very unfortunate. And two, I think they're thinking,
00:12:20
Speaker
you know, there's that type of liability. But two, what happens if you get three weeks from the event and local restrictions come into place again, because there's a local outbreak. There's just so much liability and different elements that I think these event producers are trying to navigate that even with the demand for trade shows, I think it's going to be a while before we see the marriage of producers and attendees coming together.
00:12:48
Speaker
And did you find that if masks were required, if that would change people's mind or was that part of it or was it mainly just focusing on if the vaccine was available?
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, so the mask is not something that we looked at in our study, but I can tell you that of the event producers I spoke with, they were considering masks and other types of mitigation efforts. So one example of an event producer, she told me that, let's say you have people in a room for a keynote, and there's a left side and a right side.
00:13:27
Speaker
At the end of the keynote, there are going to be doors on the left side and the right side, and people are going to exit in two halves because so much of the spread happens when there are particles in the air, right? And so everyone walking through one door is now a increased risk. And so it just goes to show how complicated and intricate planning a safe event on a large scale like this can be.
00:13:52
Speaker
and making sure that people follow the directions. Cause you know, there's going to be those that are supposed to go out that door, but they're just going to go out the other door. Of course. Yeah. It's like herding cats. Yeah. So you found that 50.5% of the respondents said that it negatively or very negatively affected
00:14:13
Speaker
how their revenue is when the fact that they couldn't go to these trade shows. And then 18.5% said that their revenue has been positively or very positively impacted by canceling events. So can you kind of talk through that and what other types of opportunities did these people try to get the positive different reaction for their revenue?
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, so it was an interesting finding to find that some people were having positive impacts from the canceling of events. What we found or what our hypothesis is, is that
00:14:52
Speaker
This 18.5% of people who had positive revenue outcomes from the canceling of events had that success because they actually pivoted to other regeneration channels. So there were two sub findings that were pretty interesting.
00:15:08
Speaker
firms that reallocated more 50% or more of their original trade show budget were 17 times more likely to report positive revenue outcomes compared to those that reallocated 50% or less or 49% or less.
00:15:26
Speaker
Another finding was that firms who reallocated to three plus new lead gen channels were five times more likely to report positive revenue outcomes compared to those who only invested in one or fewer channels. And to us, that makes sense. I think that trade shows are a big draw for a lot of people. They're fun events and they can be great lead gen channels.
00:15:53
Speaker
It can also be hard to attribute those channels and a lot of your ROI on a big show or a big event depends on your pre-planning and your follow-up. Have you already scheduled meetings with key stakeholders before you even get to the event? Do you have an SDR team and a marketing automation platform to follow up with the leads you do capture?
00:16:15
Speaker
So our hypothesis is that these firms were forced to reallocate to other channels and found success there. And that bared out in the rest of the data when we looked at how those revenue outcomes were impacted. And anecdotally as well, we've had some clients come to us who same horror story like
00:16:37
Speaker
Oh my gosh, our best channel dried up. We don't know what to do. And they invested in an outsourced SDR campaign with us, and it's successful for them. And they're not sure they're gonna reinvest in trade shows like they had before, because they found success with these other channels. So
Success of Reallocated Budgets
00:16:55
Speaker
it's a really interesting phenomena, but from what we're seeing, it seems like other firms are finding success if they put their money where their mouth is and invest in these other channels.
00:17:07
Speaker
Hey folks, let's take a break to hear about today's sponsor. And we are back. For those that didn't invest, it was less than 50% of their budget that they invested somewhere else or maybe they didn't invest anything at all. What do you think the reason behind that was? Because like almost like a panic, like we got to hold on to our money just in case or just not knowing what to do.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's hard to look back and remember exactly how much uncertainty and fear there was heading into the height of the pandemic.
00:17:50
Speaker
People were canceling contracts. People were getting laid off. There was a lot of uncertainty about how long this was going to last. And just like now, we're unsure when trade shows will be back. There was that uncertainty last year as well. And so maybe some firms were thinking, hey, by the end of summer, it's going to be over.
00:18:12
Speaker
Hey, maybe by this time it's going to be over. So let's just wait. Let's just hold our chips and see. And fortunately the pandemic just hasn't wound down as quickly as we've wanted. So it's, you know, hard to speak for every organization, but I think there was probably an element just not knowing when it was going to end thinking that maybe they could restart trade shows, you know, maybe around now.
00:18:37
Speaker
And maybe too, just thinking that it was best to hold the cash and see if they could, you know, if their inbound channels or the other initiatives could keep them alive and growing. I guess some people had their budget totally slashed for that altogether and weren't given the opportunity to reinvest it in a sales and marketing area. That's true. Yeah, absolutely.
00:19:03
Speaker
I wonder how much of the success is also because at least I know at other companies when we got to trade shows, it was a lot of fun and maybe not a lot of work.
00:19:16
Speaker
And now, you know, you got to put that money somewhere else. And if you're having to stay home or having to stay in the office, it's definitely going to get a little bit, probably at least a little bit better productivity out of working with a company like yours, or even doing an ad campaign instead online versus that schmoozing and face-to-face time and party that you get at trade shows sometimes.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It's the attribution is tough and a lot of these events are expensive. It costs a lot of money to fly your whole team out to Miami or Austin or wherever the event is and put everybody in a hotel. You got to pay for the schmoozing and the display. So yeah, it's definitely expensive and
00:20:03
Speaker
I think that's another thing that we pulled out of the data. You didn't have to reallocate all of that money, the whole $100,000 you were going to spend. If you even reallocated $50,000, if you can find some success there, you can generate an ROI because you're not spending as much as you were. The important thing is that you reallocated and you started an initiative to cover those losses.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, I guess if you think about it, you're paying a lot of money for people to sit for a while at the airport, sit for a while on a plane, sit for a while on the way to the hotel. And you definitely would get, it seems like you would get more bang for your buck by reinvesting that money in a different medium or something. Certainly.
00:20:50
Speaker
Okay. Well, so the study going back to that shows that more than 90% of businesses are attending virtual events and 40.2 say they are finding that those are better than in-person trade shows or generating leads. So do you see this as a fad or do you think it will go back to more in-person events at some point?
00:21:13
Speaker
So virtual events are certainly here to stay. This was another finding that surprised me. I was really shocked to see that 40% of respondents said that virtual events are just as good as in-person events for generating leads. It was pretty evenly split in that sense. You know, it's kind of like,
00:21:34
Speaker
to make an analogy like field sales versus inside sales. You can get in your car and drive an hour to see someone and hopefully you create a strong impression and you can win that deal. Or you could spend that hour and you could all 20 people from your office. Obviously it's not as impactful as a touch point, but there is a certain amount of, I guess math for lack of a better term, right? If you make enough touches, you can win something there.
00:22:02
Speaker
What I've heard from speaking with people is that with virtual events, you're going to see more leads, just like you're going to get more touches. The leads are not going to be as high quality. With virtual events, what's really important is getting back to your follow-up point.
00:22:20
Speaker
Do you have a strong marketing automation platform? Do you have an SDR team that's performing well? Are you gonna be able to maximize those leads that are less interested? Maybe it's just an email, right? So you have to nurture them over time. And that's kind of the math that people are trying to figure out when balancing virtual events versus these in-person trade shows. Yeah, and like, what was it? What's his name? Jeff Gooberman, is that how you say it?
00:22:49
Speaker
Yes. Um, so I know that he had mentioned one of the things is that, you know, you can, like you were also mentioned cast that wider net. So whereas you might get seven or 800 people going, you might get another thousand in a virtual event as opposed to what you would have gotten in real life. So it definitely does make a huge impact on the number of leads. But then also like you're mentioned, you don't have that opportunity to kind of really
00:23:19
Speaker
narrow it down to those that are qualified leads quite as easily as you would when you're having those conversations at a trade show event. Right. I think a lot of the appeal for in-person trade shows is they're normally
00:23:35
Speaker
higher ups going, they're not entry-level people. You're not going to fly your new employee across the country to represent your business. So you have a lot more executives and director-level contacts at these trade shows that might be able to quickly identify the interest and move a deal versus with the virtual event
00:23:55
Speaker
even if that volume is higher, the types of people you can attract would be larger. So to round out the example too, if your business is a smaller business and you can't afford to send even one person to an event, maybe you can afford the $500 to send someone to a virtual event and they can participate and generate leads. And so I think that's part of the calculus as well.
00:24:24
Speaker
This may not be anything that you actually heard from any of the event planners you talked to, but did any of them say what companies are going to have to do to keep people from getting fatigued for enjoying these?
Future of Hybrid Events
00:24:38
Speaker
What kind of special things they need to do to make sure their virtual events don't become just another webinar? Yeah, so that's a really great question.
00:24:49
Speaker
It's interesting because moving forward, there are going to be probably hybrid events. So yes, you can fly out and attend the event. You can also attend virtually. And they're looking at ways they can marry the two and create a comprehensive experience. One of my big predictions is that there's going to be a new emphasis on the quality of the content for virtual events.
00:25:18
Speaker
So with an in-person trade show, there's the bar, there's the buffet line, there's getting to take a couple days off of work and go. There are a lot of things really grind people to these events.
00:25:32
Speaker
outside of even the keynote speakers, right? But you know those speakers, but maybe that's not the main draw. With virtual events, the quality of the content needs to be high enough that people feel reason to attend and they walk away with something that isn't just a good experience because there is no virtual bar, right? There's no virtual buffet line. So the quality of the information I think is gonna be a big emphasis moving forward. And with that, I also spoke to a woman, she does,
00:26:01
Speaker
Audio video for these page shows and these events and she said that we're going to be blown away by the the virtual recreations and the things that they can do digitally to make really engaging.
00:26:18
Speaker
content that is still a type of keynote, but that is recreated in a totally reimagined way. I'm really excited to see what they come up with here over these next couple of years. Yeah. Didn't the paper say something about that it could take six years for the trade show industry to rebound?
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, so if we look at comparable vent 9-11, it took six years for air travel to recover.
00:26:49
Speaker
PricewaterhouseCoopers is estimating it'll take five or six years for the market value of trade shows to recover. But we also found another really interesting data point, which is only 41% of respondents plan to restore 100% of their original trade show budget.
00:27:10
Speaker
So the flip of that is 59% of people in businesses are not planning to completely restore their trade show budgets. They have reallocated to other channels now and a lot of senses and a lot of times they're finding success with these new channels.
00:27:28
Speaker
So it takes a company to sponsor to send you to an event, right? They have to invest that money. So if you're only investing a portion of what you used to, maybe it's one trade show instead of two, or maybe it's only virtual events. So I think even if the appetite
00:27:47
Speaker
or events returned quickly, there's a reality that if firms are having success with their other channels, they're not gonna fix that something that isn't broken. So it's a really open question how long it'll take for that attendance to recover. And the last point I'd like to make there is possibly see a snowball effect too. You know, trade shows are highly attended. There are a lot of people, there's a lot of buzz around the event. Let's say that
00:28:15
Speaker
only 59% of people attend. Okay, well, if I'm a business, I'm thinking about this trade show, it has 60% of the attendance it used to, am I going to be able to generate an ROI with 40% less leads from the event? How does that
00:28:32
Speaker
affect me and if I pull out, does the next business say, oh my gosh, now we're only at 50%. Can I generate an ROI? So there's a lot of questions to be answered to see when these events will really recover. You know what these event companies should start looking at is, have you seen that movie, Ready Player One?
00:28:55
Speaker
I've not, no. It's almost like a virtual world, but you have like a character and you're walking around in different worlds and talking to people. Oh, but I said that a minute ago. You said it would cost too much. Oh, well, I thought you were just, I thought you were just making like a visual thing, but I was thinking like the whole body thing and like you can walk around and talk to people and stuff. Yeah, that would probably be there. You know, that I, that I could get behind, but yes, it definitely would be.
00:29:23
Speaker
a bit expensive, but it would be pretty cool. So maybe in that six-year span, they'll be coming up with something like that. So one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is which channels did you find for people where they reallocated money to have most success when they were generating those sales?
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah, so the most common place to reallocate that budget was to virtual events. And interestingly, our respondents overwhelmingly were having a lot of success with their investments. So we decided to look at
00:30:03
Speaker
the number of people who said it was at least somewhat successful and compare that to the number of people who said they had no success at all. And we created a ratio. So for virtual events, there were 5.5 respondents who had at least some success with those initiatives for every one respondent who said they had no success at all. So that was a 5.5 to one margin.
00:30:29
Speaker
The most successful panel that these firms reallocated to was in-house marketing. And that one killed the other options by a 16.9 to one margin. So there are almost 17 people who had success with their in-house marketing initiatives for every one person who didn't have any success. And I think that makes sense. Most marketing firms know what they're doing and you're not gonna pump money into a marketing firm that isn't generating anything.
00:30:59
Speaker
were the SDR based initiatives they were in for outsourced marketing, they were all right about eight to one. It varied slightly, I think the range was 7.9 to 8.3, but they all really were grouped pretty tightly. So it's
00:31:17
Speaker
Still though, even at, you know, eight to one, that's a pretty good ratio of people finding success. So it seems like our respondents had success across the board, you know, varying degrees. And that success is probably somewhat dependent on the business itself, right? And maybe even industry.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, some businesses can have better luck with an SDR team. I think too, if you have an SDR team already, you have a sales manager and a process for generating leads, you can hire a new SDR and make that your initiative.
00:31:54
Speaker
If you don't have an SDR team, it's going to be pretty tough to stand one up from scratch. So maybe you invest in marketing and maybe that's where you've already been investing, so it's successful for you. So you can see how those individual business characteristics can determine where you invest your money and then how successful that investment is.
00:32:15
Speaker
So Alex, before I ask you our favorite question to ask people, is there anything you'd like to wrap up with? And we'll include in the show notes a link to where people can find the white paper. Is there any parting thoughts you'd like to share? Yeah, I think if you are a business who has typically relied on trade shows for lead generation,
00:32:40
Speaker
and you are still holding out hope that trade shows will be back by let's say Q3 or Q4 and you're holding that budget back. I would advise you to consider investing in another initiative now for a couple of reasons. Don't let your competitors get a jump on you.
00:33:04
Speaker
Businesses are finding success with their other Legion initiatives. You don't want to sit on your hands while everyone else moves forward.
00:33:11
Speaker
The other thing is just the uncertainty of trade shows is a little bit uncertain. So, you know, I think we all hope that by the end of this year, everything's back to normal and trade shows are as busy as they ever were, but we're far from certain of that future. So I would hedge your bets now and look to develop other channels that can be successful for you and sustainable moving forward.
00:33:36
Speaker
All right, thanks Alex for sharing this information with us today. So now we're going to get a little personal and ask you a just for fun question. So if you weren't the marketing director at SalesRoads, what would your dream job be? That's such a good question.
Dream Job Discussion and Closing
00:33:55
Speaker
You know, when I was living in the Caribbean, I met someone whose job was to go to different hotels and write reviews about their experience and the hotels paid to send them there. And they just laid around and sampled the food and took pictures. And I think I can, and everything was free. Of course. Yeah. They have to put their best foot forward, right? You don't want a bad review. I wonder if that's a hard industry to get into.
00:34:25
Speaker
I'd probably get all the dumpy motels. Yeah. Can I go to the Rosebud Motel? Right. That might be a fun one to say at that. That's true, that's true.
00:34:40
Speaker
You never know who might be there. What were their names in the show? I can't even think of their names. Rose. David and Alexis. That's a good show. I love that show. That was funny.
00:34:59
Speaker
All right. Again, thank you for talking to us and sharing all this information with us. If people want to get in touch with you or connect with you, how should they do that?
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah, so you can shoot me an email at eckhart at salesroads.com, that's A-E-C-K-H-A-R-T, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn at alex-eckhart, so first, dash, last, and I'd love to answer any questions you have about the paper or the research.
00:35:32
Speaker
And we'll definitely make sure to put that in the show notes along with a link to the white paper. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can reach me and Stacey on social. We are on Twitter and Stacey is at Stacey underscore Jax. And that is S-T-A-C-Y underscore J-A-X. And you can reach me at Elena underscore Jax. That's A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X.
00:35:57
Speaker
And if you're not a Twitter fan, you can always look us up on LinkedIn under Stacey Jackson and Elena Jackson. Talk to you next time. The B2B Mix Show is hosted by Stacey Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, Jackson Marketing. If you need help with your B2B inbound marketing efforts, visit us at JacksonMarketingServices.com.