Sell Out Once Your Sold Out
Sarah Breymeier
Exhibit halls are getting harder and harder to sell out… or at least that’s what I thought when Ann and I took on organizing the upcoming Balance Health Physicians Educational Conference.
I was definitely confident that we would hit our commercial support goals, but I was not expecting to get a multitude of requests to exhibit once we had hit our maximum capacity for booths. Suddenly, the cliche of you want what you can’t have came into play.
Once I posted that the exhibit hall was SOLD OUT, we had a massive influx of requests to get in! I thought about how nice that would have been to get those requests two months ago vs. two weeks before the event.
So here lies the dilemma. I certainly don’t want to encourage lying to vendors and stating that an exhibit hall is sold out, when it is, in fact, not sold out; but I definitely want to know how we can all harness this sense of urgency energy. Here are some initial ideas you may want to test:
Make your early bird discount much shorter than the past. I’ve seen early bird specials go until the last 30 days before the meeting. That’s not early. Create a short window and stick to it.
Don’t budge. What I mean is once you are sold out, don’t make room to accommodate requests. This simply creates a precedent that there is always time to get in at the last minute. Yes, it might be a struggle to say “no” the first year, but if you can uphold the policy, you should see exhibitors taking your seriously the next time around.
Select sites that have smaller spaces for exhibitors, resulting in exclusivity and a higher booth rate. I struggle with this one a little bit as I’m not a huge advocate for increasing exhibitor fees; but if this strategy results in more quality interactions between vendors and DPMs, the juice may be worth the squeeze.These are some quick ideas to try. If you decide to take any of them on, we’d love to hear about it or help create a case study.
Thoughts? Questions? Email Me!
Sarah Breymeier: beheard@podiatrymeetings.com