The business days at this year’s India International Trade Fair run from 14 to 18 November. The fair itself carries on until the 27th.
Those are two completely different events sharing the same seventeen halls, and most exhibitors send the same people to both.
That single staffing decision costs more than anything about the stall design, and it is the clearest example of a bigger point: an Indian industrial trade fair is a buying event, not an awareness event, and almost all the advice written about trade shows assumes the opposite.
Two events, one hall
Per ITPO’s own page for the fair, the 45th edition is at Bharat Mandapam across 17 halls, with the B2B window given as 14 to 18 November and timings from 10am to 7.30pm. Worth noting that ITPO’s own pages give the opening day as both the 13th and the 14th, so confirm before anybody travels.
The five business days are when buyers, dealers and procurement people walk the halls. What follows is public footfall: families, students, people who came for the state pavilions and the food.
Both have value and the value is not the same, which means the staffing should not be either. Your most senior person, the one who can talk specification and quote a price, belongs on the floor from the 14th to the 18th. The later days need somebody personable who can hand out literature, answer general questions and take a number.
The common version is the reverse. The founder arrives for the opening ceremony and the weekend crowds, and a junior covers the Tuesday when the procurement manager from a company you have been chasing for two years walks past.
If you only staff properly for part of it, staff the business days. Everything else is secondary.
Why the American arithmetic does not transfer
I have argued, about US B2B trade shows, that the budget split proves the real purchase is presence rather than qualified conversations, and that for a lot of companies buying a pass and skipping the booth is the better trade.
I stand by that for that market, and I would not apply it here without an argument, so here is the argument.
The difference is why the visitor came. At a large American show a meaningful share of attendees are there for the sessions, the networking and the industry calendar. At an Indian industrial fair, a buyer walking the machinery or components halls during the business days is frequently there to find a supplier, compare three of them in an afternoon, and in some categories to negotiate.
Which makes the stall a sales channel rather than a brand expense, and changes what you should prepare. You are not buying awareness. You are renting a room where people who buy what you make have chosen to spend a day looking at options.
That also means the failure mode is different. In the US version the stall fails because nobody qualified the traffic. Here it more often fails because somebody qualified the traffic perfectly and then could not answer the two questions the buyer actually had.
Let them handle the thing
For a manufacturer this is the one thing the channel does that no website, no IndiaMART listing and no video can do.
Put the product on the table. Not a photograph of it on a banner. The actual component, the actual fitting, the actual fabric, in a state where somebody can pick it up, feel the finish, weigh it in their hand and compare it against the one they currently buy.
Half the stalls in any hall are a banner, a table with brochures and two people on chairs. A buyer walks past those because there is nothing to do there.
Related, and it is the only design question worth your time: what can somebody read from three metres away, while walking? Not your company name. What you make, and the one specification that matters in your category. Tolerance, grade, capacity, GSM, whatever your buyers actually filter on. A stranger at walking pace should be able to tell whether you are relevant to them without stopping, because the ones who stop having already decided you are relevant are the only conversations worth having.
Two questions instead of a stack of cards
By Monday a stack of cards with nothing written on them is worthless, and you know this already because it has happened to you.
The fix at the stall is not a scanner. It is two questions asked in the first minute, because most people walking an Indian fair are not buyers. They are students, job seekers, competitors checking your prices, and exhibitors from the next hall.
What are you currently using, and who do you buy it from? This separates a buyer from a browser in one sentence, because a buyer has an answer and a browser does not.
What quantity, and how often? This tells you whether the conversation is worth twenty minutes or two.
Then write one line on the card itself, in the moment. Not later. “500 units monthly, buys from Rajkot supplier, unhappy with lead times.” Three facts. Ten seconds. That card is now worth something on Monday, and the card next to it is not.
The calendar side of following up is a separate discipline and I went through it in the US post, including blocking the follow-up time before you book anything, so I will not repeat it here beyond saying that it applies identically.
Decide what the stall can commit to before you go
Here is the operational decision that separates exhibitors who take orders from exhibitors who collect enquiries, and it has nothing to do with marketing.
A buyer at your stall asks for a price and a delivery date. If the person standing there has to say “I will check with the office and get back to you”, the buyer walks four stalls down to somebody who answered.
So decide, in writing, before anybody leaves for Delhi. What price can the person on the stall quote without calling you? What discount can they give at what quantity? What lead time can they promise? Is there a sample they can hand over, and at whose cost?
Write those four answers on a card and put it in the pocket of whoever is standing there. That is a thirty-minute conversation that converts a meaningful share of your conversations into something that moves.
And then the arithmetic, on your own numbers rather than anybody’s benchmark. Take the quoted stall price, add travel, accommodation, the structure, the samples and the days of your own time. Divide by the number of qualified conversations you had last year at the same fair, or by your honest estimate if this is your first. That is your cost per conversation, and you can compare it against what a conversation costs you through every other channel.
Published figures on this are mostly produced by people who sell stall space, which is why I am asking you to use your own.
Before lunch
Thirty minutes, and the business days start on Saturday.
Decide who stands on the stall from the 14th to the 18th, and make sure it is the person who can quote.
Write the price authority card: price, discount at quantity, lead time, samples. Put it in their pocket.
Then write the two qualifying questions on the back of it, and tell whoever is on the stall that every card gets one line written on it before the person has walked away.
If you’d like to think through whether a fair is the right channel for your category at all, or what to do with the cards afterwards, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on lead generation cover the channels you run the rest of the year. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.