Malcolm Lotzof: Trade Shows of the Future

>> Vince: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony, I'm Vince Thompson assumed spelling. Imagine attending an international trade show catching your

favorite keynote speech even networking with potential business partners all without leaving the comfort of your desk. Malcolm Lotsloft assumed spelling,

CEO of InXpo is expanding the reach of physical events with his customizable virtual trade shows. What is a virtual trade show?

>> Malcolm: Once you arrive you can expect pretty much what you'd expect once again at a physical event. You'd arrive and you'd see

a theater, an auditorium where we hold our breakout sessions. You'll see a three dimensional exhibit hole with many, many booths and

then you go into the booths and interact with the booth representatives and ask them questions, talk to them either through text chat,

video chat and pretty much engage. And that's the goal here at the end of the day is to go beyond the normal interaction with a website

which is more click and download and get information and this is taking the Web 2.0 approach where you're actually interacting with

people at the site as well.

>> Vince: There's some instant benefits, right, travel, expense, what are some of the other benefits that one gets from communicating

in this fashion?

>> Malcolm: It's an elimination of travel so no travel costs and no travel time. But the other benefits are more generic branding,

lead generation, pipeline acceleration, networking, education so there's lots of different benefits.

>> Vince: Given that this is moved from a physical space to an online space where many more of the elements are trackable I'd imagine

you get quite a bit of data.

>> Malcolm: Absolutely that's one of the big advantages we have in that everything that happens at the event is tracked and when we

combine all that information together with their profile, which we've captured, we have a huge amount of information that's relevant

especially for lead generation. When it's a physical environment you really don't know who was there and who wasn't there. In our

environment you know exactly who was there, what they read, when they came, and what time they didn't come, a lot of help to any

organization that's looking for compliance. One of our exhibitors said he was surprised by the fact that he was able to analyze the

actual text chat and understand what people were looking for and by understanding what people were looking for out of his product line

he was then able to communicate that back to sales reps so those are different kinds of benefits that we never envisioned but come

out of the data that becomes available to you as part of this exercise.

>> Vince: Is this a replacement for physical events?

>> Malcolm: We don't like to look at it as a replacement for physical events we have many of our clients that are publishers or

physical event hosts; they own a property and they're looking to generate more revenue from their properties than they're doing today.

So we'll have publishers that might have a physical event in a magazine and supplement it with and online event and the beauty is where

you can only have a physical event once a year you can have virtual events pretty much any time you want, it's just pretty much switching

it on, inviting the audience to come and preparing the content obviously.

>> Vince: So Malcolm you've run a couple companies before tell us what brought you to this one.

>> Malcolm: I've now been involved in three different companies with a group of good friends and we've been partners there is really

three of us that have been partners for 20 years now. First company I started was a financial systems company and we grew that to

a nice sized business and sold that to a public company. We then started a new company which focused on professional automation, time

and billing systems, we built that also up to about 150 people and sold that to a preipiad phonetic company. After that we took a

little bit of a break, we started this in 2004 the same group we decided not to get back into finance we wanted to do something with

the debits and credits didn't have to balance we thought it would be easier, it's not necessarily much easier it's still building softly

but the beauty is that I have, you know, a group of people that have been together with us for 20 years and there are probably 15 people

in our company today that started with us 15, 20 years ago.

>> Vince: What's your secret to building a great team like that that sticks together?

>> Malcolm: We have some fundamental principles in the company that we've stuck with for many, many years they're basically knowledge

and care. There are times when we go out on a sales call and somebody will say to us, well, who's the CEO here because you're all

like jumping in whenever you want to jump in? And we have a story I'm C in CEO, I'm control and concepts. My other partner is E he's

responsible for the company's environment and entertainment. And then we have a third partner he's O and he does all the work he's

operations. So we all know what we're supposed to do and we do what we do well and we really don't step on each other's toes and

it's lasted for 20 years.

>> Vince: Amazing, amazing, Malcolm Lotsloft thank you so much for being on Dog and Pony.

>> Malcolm: Thanks Vince, it's great to be here.

>> Vince: CEO of InXpo. As always if you have questions, comments, ideas, just want to hang out and read our blog you can do so

at DogandPony.com, I'm Vince Thompson, thanks for watching.