By Keith Reznick

Understand and Motivate Your Exhibit Workers
Most exhibit workers mean well but don't know how to represent their company to its best
advantage. They were not hired to work shows; more often than not, it was never even mentioned
when they interviewed for their job with your company. Most are about as far away from their
comfort zone as they could be and are uncomfortable with:
♦ Engaging and greeting attendees;
♦ Probing to identify / qualify sales opportunities; and

Face-to-face contact is more important than ever in today’s business ever changing business
environment because, among other things:
♦ People (still) buy from people
♦ Most products, services and solutions are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as commodities
♦ Members of the customer’s buying team are increasingly hard to reach C-level managers
♦ Procurement’s role in the buying process is adding increased pressure on pricing/margins
♦ Mergers and acquisitions which have:

Both ‘buy-in’ and ‘gaining consensus’ play an important role in how: 1) decisions are made; and 2)
how companies evolve. Over the past few years I’ve heard the term buy-in (and the problems related
to it) far more often than I’ve heard about consensus. You might be wondering “What’s the difference
between buy-in and consensus? Don’t they mean the same thing?” Although they have a lot in
common, there’s one primary difference.