Shop.Org – It’s a wrap!

Well it was a wrap last week and just now getting time to post about it.

This was our first event exhibiting our new price monitoring product – It was also my first event exhibiting ever. I have attended a few conferences, absentmindedly, over the years and thought to myself going into this “How hard can it be?”

Now as I sit down to net it all out I just have to say I have left Shop.Org with a new found respect for the logistics, sales, and marketing skills that the folks who work these events have.

A couple of my key takeaways were:

1) Proper Prior Planning – This goes from understanding the event layout and where you are located, to local services support, to showing up and setting up on the first day available (definitely not on the last day!), to product pitch prep, to taking advantage of all the great marketing/media potential that comes with this type of event. We experienced some self-inflicted wounds as well as some from the event support. However most, if not all, of those could have been prevented with proper prior planning. You can wing a lot in life but conference exhibiting I have learned is not one of those.

2) Know your event –

• We have a product that is purpose built with Brands in mind but there are a lot of analogies between Retailers and Brands when price tracking comes into play – its the same data after all. So tailoring our message from a Brand being able to price monitor for minimum advertised price violations or buybox ownership to that of a Retailer looking to do competitive price intelligence or helped us have more productive conversations.
• Also in this category is having an understanding of event turn-outs. As far as attendees go I was pretty disappointed in the overall amount of foot traffic for the exhibitors… and I was not alone. Ultimately we had some great quality conversations and I am sure one or two will convert, but I expected to talk to (or at least have the opportunity to) 5x the amount of people based on the event attendee forecasts. Beyond attendee forecasts how the event was structured really meant folks had to have some predefined interest in your product and peel away, not a lot of random foot traffic (lesson learned around pre-marketing for an event). We will probably still go to Shop.Org 2018 but it will be with eyes wide open!

3) Network, Network, Network – This may seem obvious, but sometimes theres a gap between whats obvious and how you execute. I was impressed with a lot of people that I met on the floor and its infectious to be around folks that are out in front.

4) Presentation – while there were a great number of awesome sales and marketing folks at the event. I was put off with how many folks working their booths spent the majority of time glued to their cell phone or laptop. One booth was so bad that all their folks were huddled around the bar top table in a semi-circle with their backs to the floor and I watched at least one interested party walk away when they were not acknowledged. I am glad to say that this was not a problem at Booth #2112!

All-in-all this was a great new experience for me and a little outside of my comfort zone -but that’s exactly how it should be. Unfortunately we are little late for the Big NRF event in January (not to mention its on the tail end of my Honeymoon), but ShopTalk 2018 and IRCE 2018 here we come!

About FrigginYeah:

FrigginYeah’s PricingIQ is a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform that provides Brands and Retailers with a reliable, high-quality, and scalable brand, product content and price monitoring solution. PricingIQ is the ideal solution when trying to identify BuyBox ownership for marketplaces, dynamically identifying/tracking product catalogue changes, alerting for Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) violations, product catalogue quality scrubs, product variant (sizing, colors, etc.) tracking, and full exposure to all 3rd party Marketplace sellers. Our constantly expanding library of over than 150 retailer sites provide comprehensive coverage of the top online US Ecommerce retailers as well as Canada, United Kingdom, France, and Italy.