Trade show preparation: the four sheets a visit runs on

Four sheets for walking a trade show on purpose: who you are going to see, what you will ask, what you write down while you are standing there, and what happens in the 72 hours afterwards.

The four sheets

Sheet 1The target listDecided at your desk. Who you are going to see, why each one is on the list, and the one thing you have to leave their stand holding.Sheet 2The question sheetFour blocks that move from what you already know, to what you think is going wrong, to what it costs them, to what they said they want instead. Two are filled at your desk and two at the stand.Sheet 3The visit cardOne card a stand, filled in while you are standing there. Two per page, so a printed sheet is two stands.Sheet 4The follow up triageEverything you collected, sorted into three piles within 72 hours, because after 72 hours nothing gets sorted at all.

How many stands can you actually see

Live constraint

Days at the show3days

Useful hours a day5hours

Minutes at a stand20minutes

Minutes walking between them10minutes

30 stands. That is the whole show for you, and it is why the first sheet is a list of names decided before you arrive rather than a map you walk.

What this is for

A large trade show is the densest supplier information you will ever stand in front of and the easiest to come home with nothing from. Three days, several hundred relevant stands, a bag of catalogues, and a fortnight later nobody can remember which of the two Turkish valve makers had the shorter lead time.

The failure is not effort. It is that walking a show is a sampling problem being handled as a browsing problem. You can see about thirty stands properly. Which thirty is a decision, and it is a decision that has to be made before you arrive, because it cannot be made in a hall.

These four sheets are the smallest structure that turns a show into a data collection exercise. Decide who to see, decide what to ask, record what was said, then triage what follows. They are blank.

The two questions the card exists for

Two lines on the visit card do most of the work, and both of them are questions people feel slightly rude asking.

What do you make here, and what do you buy in. A stand shows a product range. A factory makes some of it. The rest is bought from somebody else and badged, which is not a problem in itself and is a very large problem if you did not know. The answer changes who you are actually buying from, where the lead time really comes from, and who you would be auditing.

What did they tell me that I cannot check. Every stand produces at least one claim that sounds precise and is not verifiable while standing there: a lead time, a capacity, a client, an approval. Writing it down at the moment it is said, in their words, gives you something specific to ask for later. Trying to remember it a fortnight later gives you an impression.

The rest of the card is the five facts you need before a quote means anything, and they are on the card because asking for them in the room takes ninety seconds and asking for them by email takes ten days.

Printing these

Each sheet opens as a page and prints as one A4 side. Use your browser's print dialogue and choose your printer, or choose to save as PDF. The sheet is the same either way.

Print the target list once, one question sheet for each conversation you are preparing, the visit card as many times as you have stands on the list divided by two, and the triage sheet once. Backgrounds are off and every line on these sheets is a real border, so they print correctly with backgrounds disabled and they cost you almost no ink.

They are for a pen. A sheet you can write on while somebody is talking to you is the point.

Where this method came from

Where the structure came from

The shape is a sampling plan, not a checklist. You have a fixed budget of attention, a population larger than the budget, and a decision to make about which sample to take. The pre show sheet is the sampling frame, the card is the instrument, and the triage is what stops the sample rotting before it is used. The five facts on the card are the five that decide whether a quote can be compared to another quote at all, which is the same list the quote normalizer takes as input.

The four blocks are the ordinary shape of an investigative conversation: establish the facts, find the dissatisfaction, follow it to where it costs something, and let the other person say what they want instead. Rackham's research on complex sales is the source for putting them in that order and for the finding that the third block, not the fourth, is where a small problem becomes worth acting on. Nothing from it is reproduced here.

Source: Neil Rackham, research on complex sales.

A category you buy has three qualified suppliers and all three quote within a few per cent of each other, which usually means they are all quoting the same underlying factory. That goes on the target list as a single line: the reason is three quotes that move together, the artefact you need is the name of the plant, not the name on the letterhead, and the decision if the answer is no is stop asking and go to the country the plant is in. The visit card then has one job at each of the three stands, and by the third one you either know or you know that nobody will say.

What this does not do

It does not qualify a supplier, which needs an audit and a sample. It does not price anything. It does not tell you which show to go to. It has no scoring, no weighting and no shortlist algorithm, and that is deliberate: a numeric score on a stand visit is a feeling with a decimal point on it, and the field that replaces it on the card is the next step you are committing to.

The outcome words on the card are three states, not three scores. There is no weighting between them, no total and no target number of advances, and a show that produced one advance and eleven no decisions may have been a better use of three days than the reverse.

Blank method sheets, printed from your own browser.