AtlantaEvent.com NewsFlash - Plan your Summer Strategy?

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Jeff Glaze
Editor



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In This Issue:

A look at Internal Marketing - By Kathleen Gage

Motivation ABC’s: Tune Up Your Booth Staff - By Susan A. Friedmann,CSP

Subscribing to the NewsFlash has it's benefits! - Letter from Diana Douglas

Inventor Help: Go Hire a Great Patent Lawyer - By Howard Schwartz

Greetings,

Summer is here as signified by the passing of Memorial Day. The children are out of school and you are thinking about that vacation you have been waiting for all year. You may even find yourself looking out the window daydreaming about it. Let me tell you, you are not alone.

The biggest challenge during the summer months is to focus on our business. There are a lot of things to distract us. It can be something as simple as passing that SUV pulling the trailer with twin jet-skis on the way to work, or as complex as planning that big Fourth of July backyard blowout. What ever it is about work and Summer, they do not mix well. Like oil and water, one seems to float like a film above the Summer months, waiting for the fall for the brain to get back to work.

The most crucial area of our business that suffers is the marketing. In June, July and August, it almost seems impossible to find people at meetings or to get them on the phone, doesn't it? Or is this just an illusion?

The savvy business owner is able to focus on his or her business regardless of the time of year. Therefore I would think that people who you find in the office on a beautiful day will be a much better prospect than the one who is eeking out a living via voice mail while trying to catch a few rays.

The hard truth about business is that it gets tougher in the Winter months from just before Thanksgiving until around mid January when all of the New Years parties have worn off. But by then we are scrambling around the Holidays and we are trying to keep things afloat.

One can't help but think about the story of the ant and the grasshopper. As the ant worked through the summer months, the grasshopper partied and danced the days away and was literally on vacation. As winter approached, the folly of his behavior became clear as there was little or no food to be gathered to last through the winter.

The ant on the other hand had maintained working diligently to expand his supply of food and was prepared for the winter when it arrived with plenty for all.

As we go into the summer months, lets see what happens if we become like the ant and plan for the winter slowdown. Go ahead and take that vacation, but be sure to bring your thoughts back to the office when you return and take full advantage of the rest and relaxation that you experienced to dive in and make your business grow.

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Jeff Glaze - Editor

A look at Internal Marketing

By Kathleen Gage

Are your sales people burnt out? You may want to check. Have they clocked too many twelve hour days? Do they have enough frequent flier miles to charter a jet to Mars? Are their faces permanently skewed into perpetual smiles from chatting with hundreds of thousands of trade show attendees?

Answer yes to any one of these questions – or even chuckle at a situation a little too close to home – and you’ve got a problem. Working a trade show is hard. Keeping your team motivated can be even harder, especially during a busy exhibit season.

However, it is vitally important that your sales team is not only at the show, but excited about being there. Enthusiasm is contagious – and absolutely central in creating positive word of mouth about your products and services. When your sales staff are fired up and genuinely motivated to share what they know about your products with the buying public, they are more effective salespeople.

Luckily, creating this enthusiasm is as easy as ABC!

Address the Individual

Selecting the proper people for your booth staff is the first step toward a great show. These people are your company’s ambassadors. Pick employees who are helpful, courteous, and professional. Make sure they have excellent product knowledge and customer service skills.

They must also have a positive attitude about working the trade show. Attitude is everything – and it manifests on an individual level. Walk around a trade show floor, and study the people staffing a number of booths. Body language alone will show you which employees don’t want to be there. Simmering resentment plays out in tense posture, negative facial expressions, and sour attitudes – none of which help generate sales.

Why might your staff be averse to attending the show? It may come down to cold, hard cash. Sales staff frequently feel that working a trade show interferes with their normal selling routine. Commission-based employees may actually be losing money by attending the show. Address these concerns proactively, resolving scheduling and compensation issues so your staff are free to concentrate on the show.

Give each staff member an individual goal. This could be generating a number of quality leads, a target number of new contacts, or something similar. Having a goal increases accountability, forces unproductive habits out of the picture, increases productivity, and builds motivation.

Bring In the Brass

Do whatever it takes to involve your management team in trade show activities. You may have to pry them out of their corner offices, but it’ll be worth it. Having upper management participating in training programs, pre & post show activities, and the actual show validates the trade show’s worth. It also generates an in-house enthusiasm which will carry over onto the sales floor.

Many employees value the opportunity to build personal relationships with upper management. Mingling together in the trade show environment can help create a culture of recognition and appreciation. Never underestimate the power of personal recognition. A compliment from the boss carries a lot of weight, and can spur your staff to even higher achievement levels.

Tangible rewards also provide an effective way of encouraging higher levels of performance and can encourage friendly competition amidst your booth staff – with the end result benefiting your bottom line.

Create a Team

For best results, everyone in the booth should be working together as a team. Having a group that helps each other wherever and whenever necessary doesn’t just happen. Great teams don’t serendipitously occur -- they are made.

Designate your teams before the show. Pre-show time is needed to give team members time to get acquainted, develop trust, and learn each other’s strengths. If you’ve got a large staff, split them up, mixing technical and sales staff. That way, you’ll always have customer service and product knowledge skills on the sales floor. Have them establish plans of action for working the show, and promote a certain level of autonomy within the groups. This creates a sense of collective responsibility.

Be sure that the whole team is aware of and fully understands the company’s goal for the trade show. Additionally, teams should set goals for the show. These will dovetail nicely with the personal goals set by individual staff members. Offer incentives for those teams that meet – or surpass – those goals. When you have good team chemistry, you’ll find team members coaching each other and striving to keep the collective morale up.

Revisit your team roster throughout the show season. If a certain group doesn’t click, mix it up. Switching team members may enhance overall performance. If you have a staffer that doesn’t work with any team, perhaps utilizing them at the trade show is not the best use of their skills.

Don’t forget the Details

Rewards and recognition should be constant – and they don’t have to break the bank. A small gesture like morning coffee costs next to nothing, yet shows you care about your team. One creative manager provided gel insole inserts for her sales staff – a thoughtful present for folks on their feet twelve hours at a go.
Which brings us to E – for Enthusiasm. An Enthusiastic booth staff will turn in a top notch performance. It’s as easy as ABC!

Written by Susan A. Friedmann,CSP, The Tradeshow Coach, Lake Placid, NY, author: “Meeting & Event Planning for Dummies,” working with companies to improve their meeting and event success through coaching, consulting and training. For a free copy of ExhibitSmart Tips of the Week, e-mail: susan@thetradeshowcoach.com; website: thetradeshowcoach.com

Inventor Help: Go Hire a Great Patent Lawyer

By Howard Schwartz

Inventors should review hiring a top tier patent attorney, versus filing on their own or even worse doing nothing to protect their most important asset.

A patent is the property right given by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to an inventor. It gives the inventor an exclusive right over the invention preventing others from making, using or selling the invention stated in the patent deed. The main purpose behind issuing of patents is to enable the inventor in recovering developmental costs and help in facing the competition.

The patent is a way to extend legal protection to the inventions ranging from communications to technology. However, the process to get patents is long and tiresome and it is where the need of a Patent Lawyer is felt. The process to get patent is not simple. You need to argue your case as to why your invention is worth any patent and how the invention is different from other products already in the market. Patent applications seldom get accepted in the first instance. The role of the patent lawyer is to redo the application and submit it again with new information so that it is accepted.

The patent lawyer makes an inquiry about the invention or idea and then conducts a search whether a patent has already been issued for a product or service similar in characteristics. It is only after a complete and thorough inquiry that the patent lawyer advocates the case for the issuing of a patent. However, the inventor can himself search for the validity of a patent by going through the Patent and Trademark Office's Web site at www.uspto.gov. It generally takes three years for the patent application to clear because of huge stack of applications in the Patents Office.

How do I register for a patent?
Filing for a patent application electronically, by using EFS, the USPTO's electronic filing system for patent applications saves a lot of time. The various types of patent applications are:

- Utility Patent Application
- Design Patent Application
- Plant Patent Application

The patent lawyer makes the complicated and tiresome process of getting a patent simple and trouble-free.

For additional information and tips for inventors, please review:hjventures.com/patent/patent-inventions.html

About the Author:
Howard Schwartz is a partner in several business strategy groups, including HJ Ventures International, Inc. Howard has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs worldwide with a focus on writing business plans for companies interested in raising capital from Venture Funds and Angel Investors. Howard’s business plans have secured several million dollars in funding. For more information: hjventures.com