We’ve been creating a lot of blogs for people recently, and something I must sound like a broken record on in every briefing meeting is my insistance that bloggers work with a {good} photographer to get a professional headshot. I can’t tell you the difference it makes. Actually I don’t need to tell you the difference. You can see it just from the before and after above. I can’t believe I’m sharing this with you but I’m reminding myself that I’m doing it for the greater good…

Let’s start with the presumption that a good headshot will make you look your most attractive, professional and approachable. By attractive I don’t mean sleazy or sexy or like you’ve just stepped off a boudoir shot. I’m talking about a photograph that strokes your ego and makes you proud. But it also needs to look like you.

Before I met Matt Pereira my headshot was a picture I’d had taken in a studio in Birmingham several years before (see above). I was one of the female entrepreneurs invited to take part in a cover shoot for franchise magazine. They had hired a make up artist and after several hours (I kid you not) primping and preening we were wheeled out into the studio where we were draped over a chaise longue . To get us used to the camera the photographer initially took headshots of us on a bar stool. I looked attractive but nothing like myself. I limped on with this photograph for several years but I had to laugh when I met the lovely Shelly Van Litt from the Elmbridge magazine at an Elmbridge Women In Business event I was speaking at. Shelly said to me “I’ve been looking at your website today, I wanted to meet you. You look nothing like your photo! I wouldn’t have recognised you if you hadn’t introduced yourself”. That was me told.

Fortunately a couple of weeks later I had the most gorgeous shots taken by Matt and I’ve never looked back. Like I said, a good photographer will take photos of you that actually look like you. But they’ll be of your best self. He or she will capture the essence of you and present you as someone people want to get to know. A good social media photograph has got to be engaging and approachable. And so that means eyes to camera, smiling and saving those sexy pouts for the boudoir shoots.

And a good headshot isn’t just about helping you appear more engaging in your social media profile. It’ll also help your website and blog appear more attractive. Let me show you how. This post has been utterly inspired by a blog we created for Sam Jones (herself a fantastic photographer) for her Home Truths blog. I loved the makeover Rob worked up for Sam, but was blown away when I realised she’d changed her photo. Here was the blog with the old photo…

And here’s the new photograph. Personally I think there’s a dramatic difference between the two, and all Sam has done is changed the photograph!

Donna Pourtyemour of Cobham Pilates is so sold on the benefits of having great headshots that she insists that all new staff have a professionally taken headshot. This shows consistency on her website and ensures that all members of staff come across professionally. Something Donna has found is that by having her website revamped she’s been able to attract world class teachers to her studio and her business is now expanding at a rate of knots. I have no doubt that the professional and engaging photographs (along with the gorgeous new branding and design of course!) have a lot to do with this…

So next time you think you’ll just upload that holiday snap from two years ago, think again. Find a great photographer and get some professional headshots done. It will pay dividends.

Blogging has many benefits. It’ll help you build relationships with your clients and prospective clients. It enables you to demonstrate your expertise.  It helps you gain immediate feedback on an idea. And done correctly you’ll also gain targeted leads for your company which should turn into profitable business. Oh, and the traffic you receive from your fabulous content will also help you in the search rankings.

There’s a reason that I added SEO as an afterthought. It’s because it should be when it comes to blogging. SEO is a nice outcome from a good blog – it’s not the reason for its being.

At the recent Blogging workshop I ran a couple of weeks back with Tom Evans a large chunk of our audience were motivated to blog because of the perceived SEO benefits a blog brings. They felt that if they could just manipulate their blog to bring them in thousands of visitors, then that would have a positive impact on their website. I’m delighted to report that by the end of the day they all felt somewhat different!

Your blog will receive thousands of visitors if the content is great, if it looks good, and if you post regularly. You’ll build up a following of loyal readers who will recommend your blog to their friends and where it features in the search engines will be but a distant memory. You’ll be generating enough business from the blog it won’t matter.

Recently I stumbled upon a blog that had clearly been contrived to provide search traffic for the company. It was an imagery-based website and the images were gorgeous. Sadly I felt a little “used” because the writer clearly wasn’t writing for my benefit. She was writing for the search engines. She’d clearly handpicked a couple of search terms (and no, I won’t tell you what they are) – let’s just say they were lifestyle artist hampshire for arguments sake. Every single blog title was pumped full of these keywords. And scrolling down the list I could see this wasn’t a one off, this was a Search Engine Optimisation onslaught.

Imagine this blog, full of lovely images but pumped full of keywords that mean very little in relation to the post they’re describing. How would you feel as you were reading it? Like a valued reader who just had to return to see what said company had been up to? Or a little used and worthless that the point of the blog was simply to scramble the website up the search rankings.

There’s an art to using your blog to gain traffic and pumping your titles and posts full of “clever” keywords isn’t it. I’m not suggesting that it won’t work from an SEO point of view – I’m sure it does. But my point is that this isn’t a blog.

A blog is your chance to journal what’s going on in your world. It enables you to showcase your expertise, build relationships and generate profitable business. Make the most of the opportunity: if you don’t, your competitors certainly will.

I do realise that we’re in the hottest week of the year and to be talking about Christmas is probably going to get me lynched, but if you sell a product or service that might be suitable as a gift, then you need to be thinking about Christmas right now.

Izzy and I spent a fantastic day at the Sheer Luxe Christmas conference yesterday in Fulham and have come away fully inspired from the wonderful speakers and delegates at the event. And once I’ve trawled through my twenty-odd pages of notes I’ll be sharing many of the gems that came out of yesterday’s conference. But the theme of the event was getting ready for Christmas and for retailers and e-tailers, the time to start thinking about Christmas is now, particularly if you want to get some PR in the glossies.

So if you run a gift or retail business, what sorts of things should you be thinking about in preparation for Christmas?

Start by thinking about your Christmas objectives. What do you want to sell? What are your bestsellers and what will you focus on this year? What lessons did you learn from last year and what resource do you have to throw at this?

How do you need to adapt your tone of voice to the Christmas market? If you sell Pashminas you’re probably selling to women most of the year, but come Christmas you’ll be selling to men. What do they need to know about how your product will make the perfect gift?

When will you start your Christmas campaign and what collateral do you need? Consider a microsite or adapting the design of your homepage to attract the Christmas shoppers. And don’t overlook the importance of printed literature. E-marketing makes promoting your product or service much simpler, but add a catalogue into the mix and you’ll see your success rate shoot through the roof – by up to 40%.

Plan ahead – all of this takes time. And a lot of it. Get planning now while you still have time, because as soon as the children go back to school Christmas will be in the air.

Bear in mind that pay per click search terms will cost you a lot more during the Christmas season as the keywords become more competitive so try and come up with creative ways to promote your business. Consider improving the content of your site to attract and retain visitors.

Email marketing is going to be essential in maximising your chances of success – and now is the time to start building your list. Pop-ups offering incentives to visitors who leave your their email and first name are a great way to add quality data to your list – especially if you offer money off a first purchase and ask them to double-opt in.

And finally plan some tactical campaigns to add into your strategic marketing mix. Don’t stop doing the brand awareness marketing you’re already doing, but think as well about how you can promote your Christmas offering. All of this takes time, but it will be worth it.

Have a fantastic weekend. I think I know what I’m going to be doing…

Gareth Palmer has literally just set up Playscene, a company that specialises in creating fun and imaginative playspaces for children. We met Gareth at this May’s Grow Your Business exhibition and he loved the Flourish stand, so when he booked the EcoSchools show in Peterborough he approached Flourish to help him create an engaging and memorable stand.

Gareth and I worked through an exhibition planning session together and helped him establish what his key angle was going to be for the show. We focused very much on the fact that there was a mix of teachers and pupils in attendance, and Gareth’s focus needed to be on engaging both, but it was the teachers who were likely to become potential customers.

We explored how we might create an impact, and Gareth had some fantastic ideas and together we whittled them down into a cohesive idea that would make sense to visitors. Gareth created his own graphics for the back wall and he and his girlfriend worked incredibly hard painting furniture, baking cakes and creating goody bags.

Gareth had also commissioned a fabulous Storyteller’s Chair which proved to be a real talking point and had also obtained hundreds of seeds to give away to the children which reinforced his ecological commitments.

You can also see plenty of his products on show – and we made sure that we kept them all rustic and natural to make sure that the impact was cohesive. I love the grass green floor and the vibrant backdrop. And how fabulous is the garden planter with all it’s fresh vegetables growing?

Gareth picked up well over 90 entries into his compeition and he’ll be announcing the winner shortly. Then he has the hard job of following up. But a jubliant Gareth was delighted with how the day went. The show organisers were so impressed with his stand they told him it was the best at the show and even used the stand as the backdrop to MP Lord Henley’s press shoot. Not a bad accolade! And proof that you don’t have to be a big company to have the best stand at a show – it’s all about your imagination.

When was the last time you stopped and considered how effectively you market your business’s green credentials? Many of us are so busy trying to get from one day to the next and see out the downturn that marketing our companies’ green credentials has slipped waaaaaaay down the agenda. But should it have done?

I’m mid-way through a series of seminars I’ve been asked to run for Gatwick Diamond businesses on Marketing Your Green credentials. And preparing for and running the workshops has been an interesting exercise. I wonder whether I’ve given enough thought to how I market Flourish’s green credentials, and whether it’s something that matters at the moment? Are consumers as concerned about green as they are about price at the moment? Can you leverage value and loyalty from being green?

Do our clients even understand what being green means? On twitter there was a little confusion I asked my followers: how do you market a sustainable business? And the responses were varied, and interesting. You’ll see from the responses below that despite the buzz-word, sustainable means different things to different people. And many simple weren’t sure what it meant at all!

@thebookwright: Thought for sustainable businesses need a short, medium & long term plan & a stable team of complimentary cornerstones

@essentialCM for sustainable businesses read good to great Jim Collins all about “building the clock” for the future.

@ElizabethCairns re marketing sustainable business …keep your passion alive and communicate that in your marketing messages

@JudithMorgan Wasnt sure if you meant sustainable, i.e. I still have a business in 30 years time, OR sustainable as we use that word now?

@paulfuggle: be clear about who you want to build relationships with, offer what they want & what you can deliver

@MarketingNYC stop being a tasmanian devil doing and trying everything…get a strategy

So is sustainability about reducing resources, the impact of your business on the environment, is it about sourcing locally, creating a business that will be around in 30 years? Is it about the way you treat your staff? Or is it about being socially responsible: about putting as much back into the local economy as possible and adding value where you can?

The truth is it’s probably all of the above. When I asked my first lot of delegates yesterday what sustainability meant to their business, one group came up with the answer “you need to be seen to be being green”. And at a truly cynical level, we can all “greenwash” our companies and pay lip service to the environment, but that’s something that both consumers and journalists will see through very quickly.

As Elizabeth Cairns said, you need to put green at the very heart of your business and communicate that with passion. Which leads me on to asking you the question: Just what shade of green is your business? Are you green to the core? Is the setup of your business focused around reducing the impact of your activities on the environment, sourcing responsibly, treating your staff well and working in the community? Is green at the heart of your business? Or is it on the perimeter? Have you felt as though you “ought to do something” and switched your paper buying from normal to recycled? Neither answer is right or wrong, but how you market your green credentials will very much depend on how much it matters to your business.

According to the experts, Egg – a branding & marketing company in the States, just 7% of consumers are socially responsible to the core, but 70% of the population (I’m assuming they’re talking about the population of the USA) will recycle and occasionally seek out organic food. So there’s a huge market out there for offering sustainable products. But you can’t badge your company “green” and hope that your product will walk off the shelves – there simply aren’t enough consumers that care to their core to make that happen.

No, what you need to do is engage your client with your values. And that’s why I asked you what shade of green your business is. Consumers are looking for brands with values that they identify with. Remember the John Lewis advert I showed you? Ok that’s not about “green”, but to me it’s about sustainability and it’s very much about values. And for their niche in the market, it’s an utterly powerful way of marketing.

Consumers are looking for brands to communicate with them honestly and create transparency. And that’s why you need to put your brand values at the heart of your marketing plan. And if “green” in whatever form is a part of your brand values then you’ll find it much more authentic to market your green credentials than if it’s a periphery activity.

If I think about brands that place green at the heart of their marketing strategy, I think of Dorset Cereals, Abel & Cole and Riverford. Their marketing communications are about so much more than say, how good the oats and raisins are in the cereal. They’re about community, sustainability and the environment. Dorset Cereals, in particular have taken their brand values much wider than food, their communication is about “simple pleasures”. They build edible playgrounds for schools and they team up with like minded businesses who share their values.

How clever is your communication? Dorset Cereals don’t continually bang the drum that “we’re green, we’re green” – it’s implied through their activities, their copy, their packaging and their design. Is your marketing strategy as sophisticated as that?

Green businesses have a positive impact on society. In the case of my business, that means looking after my staff well, sourcing our consumables responsibly, ensuring that the print we sell is environmentally friendly and putting something back into the community with our Flourish Foundation. If I’m honest, this is at the heart of me, which is why it’s come through in my business. I haven’t yet put together a “green mission statement”, and I probably should. I know that one of the reasons that our clients come to us is for our authenticity and values – but do I need a mission statement to get that across?

The short answer is probably not. Everything about the way we’ve built Flourish communicates these values, partly because we fall into the Autumnal colour personality, which is the most “green” of the lot. All of our print is recycled and uncoated and our muted, warm colours suggest sustainabillity, community and integrity. But marketing your green credentials takes more than a bit of fancy design and an understanding of colour psychology.

It’s about making sure that your communication is consistent. Follow us on twitter and you’ll find the very same person that you meet in the studio, warm, supportive and with integrity. Read our blog and you’ll find the same transparency and “giving” nature as you find in our workshops and one to one sessions. I guess I don’t scream green because green is intrexibly linked with what we do. How about you?

Running a business is tough isn’t it? Marketing, budgeting, planning, sales, people management, troubleshooting and then those “challenges” that seem to crop up that throw us off track – for a matter of hours, days, weeks, whatever! It’s sometimes easy to lose track of why you went into business in the first place. We’ve certainly had our fair share of challenges over the past couple of weeks – as well as plenty of exciting opportunities. But days like today remind me why I’m doing this.

I’ve had a blissful day working with two clients on their marketing strategies. First up, a Garden Designer needing help and focus on her brand and marketing strategy, and this afternoon, a supplier, designer and manufacturer of childrens playgrounds who is attending an exhibition in three weeks (yes! three weeks!) and needs a helping hand on his strategy. Both are industries that I’m passionate about and really identify with, so today has been a real ball.

Working with the garden designer this morning was a lot of fun. Refreshingly she had invested quite a lot of time and money in having a brand identity created (not by Flourish) which has helped give her a professional, serious and attractive look. She also has a professional looking website and a nice handout. Despite that she was just feeling a little “lost”.

Having left the city to pursue her dream, she had finally achieved what she’d hoped for. She was a fully qualified garden designer. But the work hadn’t come flooding in! And she was left confused and unsure of where to turn next. We’re going to be working together over the next three months or so to get her marketing back on track and this month we are working on her brand strategy.

We started by identifying what she’s best at. A long stint in the city had prepared her well. She has a high level of professionalism, is a great communicator and very process driven. That’s going to go a long way in such a creative environment. We also identified that she’s passionate about customer satisfaction and customer service, and has a great sense of style. We laughed as we discussed the designer on Channel 4’s Landscape Man a couple of weeks ago who when quizzed on how he saw his role as a designer answered that the clients were paying for his design and as such it was his job to bully them into accepting his vision! That’s certainly not how either of us see design – surely it’s all about understanding what your client needs and using your expertise to deliver style and substance? But I digress…

Identifying what this designer does best was our first port of call. Next up was looking at her profitable clients. Breaking each group down into what motivates them to commission a garden designer and what they would be looking for. Interestingly we had a big breakthrough here, realising that there’s a big chunk missing out of her portfolio. So plenty of “homework” was given for the next session!

We defined her “style” and came up with a list of evocative words that she can “try on” over the next few weeks to see how they feel in her business. These words are things like drama, mystique and sanctuary which will enable this designer to engage directly with her ideal clients. We also explored the myths these ideal clients hold about her business and explored how we might use marketing to educate, inform and build relationships with these potential clients.

There was a little time along the way to quickly review her website and identify how that was working with her newly defined brand strategy. And reassuringly despite being well designed, it lacked the emotion and approachability that we had defined from our earlier conversations. I say reassuringly, because now this designer has a route map forwards!

Finally we defined, in a nutshell, her brand strategy: what she’s best at, who her target clients are, her style and how she’d like to be perceived.

As the designer said, much of what we did was breathtakingly simple and obvious – but she’d needed some support and guidance to get there. We weren’t talking about reinventing the wheel today, but we were forensically examining her business and looking and what we do to maximise on this designers strengths and communicate powerfully enough to win her more business moving forwards.

Next month we’ll be looking at her pricing: how she can price herself at the right level to be able to attract the right sort of clients and make a profit. We’ll be looking to create “packages” where we can for her services which will make her business model much more streamlined and will make marketing herself much simpler. I left the session energised and rejeuvenated. It’s wonderful to be working with such a passionate, talented and committed lady – and I’m hoping that she might be thinking the same

There’s an important, and often overlooked, correlation between the strength of your brand strategy and the effectiveness of your marketing activity. In other words, people who have defined their niche in the market and communicate that consistently, find it much more cost effective to market their businesses than those that don’t.

Have you defined your niche yet? It’s pretty simple. You look at what you’re good at, what you want to be known for and what your clients love about you. Then you look at what your competitors are doing, and what they’re known for/ good at. Ideally there will be a nice slot for you somewhere that you can occupy: your niche.

Let me give you an example. A client of ours makes widgets. Those widgets are beautifully designed and expertly made in the UK. She’s utterly detail focused and so that’s the niche she’s chosen to occupy: high quality/ great design. Over the past couple of years she’s found that a lot of competitors have sprung up around her; many of which are outright copying her designs. And a fair few have copied her marketing design too – her website, brochures etc. and because she’s been on maternity leave, she’s understandably let the communication slide. She’s slipped into a nasty situation where they’re all jostling in the same marketplace for the same clients. It’s easy to get cross and upset about this, but ultimately she’s got to “own” her space and that should fend them off. They’re not all offering the same product, hers are higher quality and she leads the field in design, so by making sure she communicates where her niche is, she can quickly and cost effectively get things back on track.

So how do you go about owning your niche in the market?

Once you’re happy that you are really occupying a “niche” (because there’s no point in directly competing with your competitors) then you need to keep that niche at the centre of everything you do. And by that I mean sitting down, and actually mapping out what you’re going to do to communicate your brand position. That could be that you create “engaging brand identities and powerful marketing campaigns that help people grow their businesses”; it might be that you’re the “UK’s leading colour consultancy” or that you’re a “gardener with knowledge”.

Once you’ve defined this, map out what marketing activity you’re going to undertake to communicate this. This is such a powerful thing to do because not only will you save money (ie you won’t be tempted by that last minute “deal” in the local newspaper to take a full page advert), you’ll also find that your marketing is a whole lot more effective because your target market will be attracted to what you do; and they’ll “get” it much faster because throughout the year you’ve been talking to them consistently. So how do you do this?

Well you find activities that will support this, and you also make sure that at every opportunity you’re reinforcing and re-communicating your brand strategy. In other words, you stay focused. Many small businesses make life difficult for themselves because they fail to carve themselves out a niche, and once they’ve got that, they rarely communicate that niche via their marketing activity.

I’m going to visit a potential client this afternoon who owns a children’s shop. This is an enormously competitive marketplace to be in: you’re competing with the multi-million pound marketing budgets of the likes of JoJo Maman Bebe, Gap and Monsoon. And you can compete on a smaller scale, but you’ve got to be focused.

Once we’ve worked out what her niche is, we need to communicate that in everything she does. She already has a plan to run a competition (fantastic idea!) but she’s got to be clear on what the style of the shop is and who her target market are. She needs to make sure that when the winners’ photoshoot happens it’s done in a location that supports her brand strategy and that will appeal to her ideal client. And all the design of the entry forms and adverts needs to look instantly engaging and attractive to her audience. And then once she has these photos, she needs to use them in a way that backs up her niche and makes the most of them. And that’s just one piece of marketing that she needs to think about!

“Owning” your niche is hard work. It takes focus, determination, and frankly, some investment of your time, if not your money and someone elses’ time, upfront. But it WILL pay off. You’ll find that you spend less time and money in the long term on marketing that doesn’t work; and you’ll also find that your marketing is much, much more effective for it.

How about you? Have you had experiences of this either way? I’d love to hear from you!

If you would like some one to one help, you can find details of our client marketing strategy sessions here.

What’s stopping you from marketing your business the way you want to? Money? Lack of time? Or peer pressure from your competitors?

You probably wouldn’t think that your competitors would stop you doing things, but look a bit closer and you might see things differently. Recently we’ve been working closely with a client who has an enormous amount of talent for what she does. Having brainstormed how she might promote her business effectively, workshops are something that have come up time and again.

But twelve months on we’re still awaiting that elusive workshop date to be booked into the diary.

She’s accepted that it will work. But something’s holding her back.

Well it’s not that she doesn’t have the time. Nor is it that she doesn’t have the money. What’s stopping her is the fear of what her peers have to say when they see she’s running these workshops. She’s a bit worried that they’ll think “who does she think she is?” to do this training. And most of all, she’s worried that these peers will be angry at her for breaking the industry “code”. For somehow letting amateurs in on the professional secrets.

And I get that. We all have that “who do I think I am thinking I can pull this off” moment. Hell, there are plenty of people that have more detailed, expert knowledge than me on specific subjects. While I was writing my book I would be fired up one moment; anxious and depressed the next having spent another hour looking at industry “experts” who had been in the exhibition business for 50 years and thinking “Who do I think I am to write a book on exhibitions? What do I know?”

But I carried on because I knew I could bring a new dimension to the accepted wisdom on exhibitions. And there simply wasn’t another “how to” book out there on exhibitions for small businesses. But I digress. My point is that if I had spent even a small proportion of my week hanging out with those industry experts I don’t think I’d have got past Chapter One. Because I’d have talked myself out of it.

It’s easy to think that you’re not good enough/ don’t have the experience/ don’t have the right to run your business in the way you want to when you’re constantly being influenced by your competitors. But what would happen if you started hanging out with your clients, and listening to them more than you listened to your peers?

I reckon you’d become more confident, you’d be more attuned to what your clients wanted, and you’d start grabbing every moment and running your business the way that you wanted to. What do you think?

Have just received this glowing review from a local publication, Guildford Means Business from Ezie Publishing and as it’s so lovely I thought I’d share it with you. Over to you John Hines and John Ashcroft… (and thank you. My mum is delighted

The exclamation mark is the most overused – and misused – pieces of grammatical notation. In emails it is abundant. The result is that everything screams for attention and nothing gets it. When they are used correctly they make their subject stand out from the rest. They give it an enduring life of its own. When the Theatre Guild in New York launched a show called Away We Go, no one gave it a chance. It bombed on tour and it was only just before it was due to premier on Broadway that advice was sought. Impresario Lawrence Marshall’s suggestion was not only to rename it after the US state his wife came from, but to add an explanation mark.

Oklahoma! is still running 60 years later. In fact, a west-end production is playing at the New Victoria Theatre this week (May 10th – 15th). All this came to mind as I started to read Fiona Humberstone’s book exhibit!. It’s a book which gets your attention. More importantly, it’s contents comprise truly easy ways to get customers’ attention. It is the ‘Lawrence-Marshall-advice’ that will change the way your company exhibits forever..

Getting the right kind of attention

The book contains one of the most powerful, successful business practice sentences I’ve ever seen: everyone in business should read it. It’s lines two and three on page 61. “If you can just switch your focus from what you want to sell to what’s motivating your VISITORS, you’ll be on the road to success.” For VISITORS, substitute ‘clients’ or ‘prospects’ or ‘customers’ or anyone else who can help make you successful.

The sentiment of the rule is universal. It works for our magazine editorial too, when we tell contributors that we do not do advertorial. “If you can just switch your focus from what you want to sell to what’s motivating your READERS, you’ll be on the road to success.” exhibit! is the road map to success

We’re trying it out

It’s easy to write two dozen column inches of review about a book. With exhibit!, though, we are going to do something entirely different, Because the GROW exhibition is almost upon us, eZie-publishing is taking this book to task to see if it works. Our ad on page 23 and our stand display atGROW (stand XX) is right out of page 127 of Fiona’s book. It’s a simple exercise in collecting data which the book goes into great depth about.

The other side of exhibiting is speaking. It’s easy to say, as I have seen in other “how to” books, “Speak at seminars: it will boost your company’s exposure.” It’s nowhere near as easy as that. Look at the seminar list for GROW YOUR BUSINESS on page 17. Many of those names keep popping up all over the place. Getting onto those lists takes perseverance. exhibit! comes up with a superb way of starting. Look at the scan of Fiona’s “Creating a speaker sheet” page above.

This book has page after page of such working guides. Not words about what you should do, but checklists to ensure that you do it. And these are not incomplete lists, where the way to complete a project is to employ the writer as a consultant. exhibit! has everything: it’s Fiona’s entire exhibiting knowledge.

It’s like having a professional exhibition consultant by your side, 24 hours a day.

You can see if it all works for yourself

Go to the seminars at GROW and see how others put their stands and their presentations together. Especially, go to Fiona’s own stand (she is speaking at 10.00am and her stand number is 35) and you will see everything she writes of in practice.

Normally when a book is launched the author will sit at a desk for 60 minutes to sign copies, spending perhaps more than seven seconds with each customer. Fiona is going to be there all day. There’s no escape for her. She will be all yours at the Guldford Spectrum on 12th May. She’ll tell you how this book will help you grow your business at GROW YOUR BUSINESS. And I guarantee that you’ll get considerably more than seven seconds.

I think that deserves an exclamation mark!

And you can see the GMB4 – Fiona Review here.

There aren’t many things that really make me cross, but people who attend an exhibition with the express and sole purpose of selling to the exhibitors is something that really winds me up. I suspect they see it as a big opportunity: “All those businesses in one place? I know! Let’s go and tell them about our business!”

Take last week’s Grow Your Business as an example. Our stand was busy but out of the corner of my eye I could see two guys waiting patiently for us to become free. How nice, I thought, they must be keen to chat. And keen they were. “How can I help you?”, I asked, with a smile on my face “We were wondering if we could talk to you about our business. We make corporate videos for websites. Is that something your customers might be interested in?” they said.

“Well I would be delighted to” (Cheshire cat grin now developing and voice raising an octave to the sing-songy style you often hear when speaking to a group of toddlers) “But not here and not now. Give me a call in a couple of weeks”

I was very polite and hopefully inoffensive. I suspect, from the feedback we’ve had from the exhibition, that other exhibitors may not have demonstrated such patience.

Tell me; is it unreasonable of me to think that if an exhibitor has invested several hundred, or even several thousands of pounds at an exhibition; they’re there to generate more business? They want to spend their time and energy on building relationships with potential clients. As exhibitors, they’re probably not looking for new suppliers.

Now that approach does seem slightly skewed. After all; exhibitions are also about networking, building relationships and putting names to faces too. And I always make a point of meeting other exhibitors at these shows – and no, not to sell to them, but simply to forge a connection. But it’s those visitors (and there are always a handful at any show) that come with the sole intention of visiting every exhibitor and expecting them to spend 10 minutes talking about their business. That’s what gets me. A complete lack of respect for the fact that these exhibitors have spent a lot of time and money on their stand; and here’s Joe Bloggs trying to take the cheapskates route by selling his product/ service on their doorstep.

So there it is. Slightly uncharacteristic rant over. How can you productively, politely and firmly stop people trying to sell to you when you’re at an exhibition? After all; it’s your time and money you’re on; you need to be sure that you get the most out of the opportunity.

I think the only thing to do is to be polite but firm. Employ a huge grin and tell them that you will be delighted to speak to them in a couple of weeks once the activity from the show has died down.

Resist the temptation (and I speak from experience <hangs head in shame>) to say in an exasperated tone “Look, I’ve spent a lot of time and money on this stand. I’m here to win business. I don’t want to sponsor your expensive yacht and I certainly don’t want to talk about it now”. It may feel satisfying at the time, but your visitors on your stand may well be less than impressed at your approach!

I honestly think that if every exhibitor politely but firmly rebuffs these salespeople, by the fourth or fifth stand they will give up. And that’s got to be better for all of us. What tips do you have? I’d love to hear what has (or hasn’t) worked for you