What trade shows do as an outreach to your customers in far-flung convention centers, permanently installed demonstration centers do for them when they come to visit your site.
If you haven’t considered a demonstration center for your company, it is really worth at least exploring as you fine-tune or invent your customer relationship process.
While going out to the customer, either on a one-on-one visit to their site or an engagement at an industry trade show, connecting your sales and management team and your products with your customers and prospects is critical to closing sales and building long-term relationships.
Companies as diverse as Honeywell, Boeing, Fujitsu, Retalix and NCR have used demo centers for years. The centers are a way to not only engage the customer at the selling company’s site, but actually entices buyers to come and visit. This is their chance to not only see the product in a detailed working environment, it is also a way to meet the people who build it and get to know them.
In creating a center it is important to realize that once you’ve made the decision to make it reality that you have three key parts that have to remain in balance toensure that the center becomes reality. This becomes a critical partnership between these three groups:
- Product marketing and manufacturing (the folks who supply the product)
- Facilities (the internal team that controls the space and structure within which your demo center will reside).
- Design (the team–usually a trade show design house–who will design, fabricate and install the fixtures in the space).
It is a tricky balance and one that has to be thought out and mapped out from the beginning.
In subsequent posts we will discuss each of these elements in detail along with the basic formulation of an effective demonstration center.
TTSG
