Virtual Trade Shows

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>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power's Daily Report. Today we continue our conversation with Russ Rothstein and we'll talk about virtual trade shows. Welcome Russ.

>> Russ Rothstein: Thank you so much for having me again today.

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Gerhard: Tell me about the idea of creating a virtual trade show.

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Russ: What happened is it really came from our users. Basically a lot of small businesses and midsized businesses have to go from 1 to 3 trade shows a year and quite honestly it's a big decision cause you have to decide are you gonna go as a traveler, as a visitor, are you gonna have a booth there, how many people are you gonna staff there? Often it's a 5,10,$15,000 decision and you really get to network 2 or 3 times a year, 5,6 days of 52 weeks.

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Gerhard: And here's the worst part, 80% of the trade shows leads that sales people collect they're never followed up on.

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Russ: That's right because a lot of times you don't even know if they're real leads or just people walking through the trade show. So what we've done is we've put the entire trade show online. So we let you set up a booth at Sales Spider for free and we let you network and promote your products and services to all of our users. Think about it this way we had 20,000 people yesterday on our site. 20,000 visitors a day that you can promote your product to in a booth. Now what's even more interesting than that is you can get paid advertising dollars by Google, through Sales Spider, a partnership with Google to promote your booth. So you make money every day while you're promoting your products and service.

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Gerhard: And you get extra traffic because they promote their booth.

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Russ: The more people they invite to come the bigger sales department gets the more people who come to the trade show.

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Gerhard: So you're turning your site into a platform.

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Russ: That's exactly it. We've become a platform and our users become a brand who invite more users to come. They get to promote their product to a whole new segment of people.

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Gerhard: So Russ who will be the ideal candidate for a trade show? Can you describe a scenario?

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Russ: Small business, a midsized business who wants to sell products to business people ok so you're really not trying to go around to the consumer so let's say you are selling office furniture or if you're selling sales training courses, any one of those you start a booth, it's free. It takes you what 15 minutes to start you put your logo and what you do also is you start a subject you start a conversation and you invite members in. Automatically you've built up a group of people. The more people you invite, the more people you're making and actually we show you on your dashboard how much money you're making that day from advertising. So if you don't make any sales that day you'll make money from advertising that day and if you want you can talk about your website or you can say hey go online, phone me on my 800 number. You can do anything you want to promote your product and services and people will buy them cause people are coming there to look for businesses and they can actually search for your booth if you will by the subject so if you're in office furniture they'll look for office furniture and they'll say oh while we're looking for it let's go talk to people who have the booths.

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Gerhard: So what you're saying is that you have the little chatting center in the computer on the computer screen and can go from show to show.

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Russ: Absolutely. Show to show, category to category, industry to industry, searching for what you want, promoting for what you want. Sometimes you're gonna go as a visitor and walk around and sometimes you're gonna go to promote your booth and it goes 24-7, 52 weeks a year and there's no $20,000 fee.

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Gerhard: And you don't charge for your booth space.

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Russ: No, it's free.

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Gerhard: You can get money from the second play which is the advertising.

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Russ: We make a lot of money from partnerships with advertisers and promoters and a lot of these companies are doing everything they can to build their site.

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Russ: And what is the possible objection? Some people might say I can do it myself.

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Russ: We're just one way for you to market and sell your services. So you should have an ad in the Yellow Pages. You should inaudible cold call. You should have sales people. What we're saying is probably once, twice a week you should man your booth, promote conversations and get people talking to you. If anyone wants to buy from you they can email you or message you in your booth so actually you'll get a ring just like you got on your cell phone and here you have a bar saying hey I want to talk to you I'm at your booth right now. It's pretty cool.

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Gerhard: So where did you get the model? There are a number of virtual trade shows out there right now and I haven't heard of one of them that is really doing well.

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Russ: It didn't start with a trade show. We started with a social network. We you know we began with getting sales leads then we moved to a social network where people could connect with each other and we followed the wave of 2.0. We saw the trends over the students, the MySpace and the Facebooks and the trade show came up because the users started telling us well what if I wanted to connect online and then we thought well this is not actually that hard to do. It's all a question of building layers and layers of development. At this point now we have to have the platform.

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Gerhard: Russ this is an excellent idea. Check out salesspider.com and go through some virtual tradeshows that makes your life a lot easier.

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Gerhard: Thank you Russ.

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Russ: Thank you so much for having me today.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====