Burn The Playbook - B2B GTM Strategies with Marc Crosby

Trade Show Strategy 2025: Turn Conferences into Pipeline with Alison French

• Digital Rebels Consulting

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Trade show strategy that actually drives revenue. In this episode, Alison French, founder of LTO and creator of ShowScout, breaks down how to turn conferences and exhibit halls into qualified pipeline instead of expensive hope. If you sell B2B and still treat events like a “brand play,” this is your wake-up.

What you’ll learn

  • Why conferences outperform big expos for B2B sales, and when to skip a show
  • How to pick events: national vs regional, professional associations, and ICP math
  • The real success metric: ICP-matched conversations, not badge scans
  • Pre-work that moves the needle: account lists, outreach, aligned CTA, on-site workflow
  • Staffing the floor: who belongs in the booth vs roaming meetings
  • Post-show follow-up that doesn’t get ignored
  • How ShowScout helps teams target, capture notes, and sync to CRM without chaos
  • Rapid-fire “Burn It or Build It” on giveaways, booth design, live demos, and more

Chapters
00:30 Welcome + who Alison helps
01:22 The point of trade shows in 2025
03:05 What’s broken with traditional expos
05:26 Who should attend: sales, marketing, execs
08:31 What show organizers must fix
11:49 First-time exhibitor playbook
13:43 How to measure success beyond badge scans
15:25 Pre-work that creates real pipeline
19:36 Booth time vs outside-the-booth meetings
20:56 “Suitcasing,” targeting exhibitors, and ethics
22:15 Credit or blame: who owns results
25:31 What ShowScout does (and doesn’t)
33:59 Where AI actually helps at events
36:58 Burn It or Build It: rapid fire
40:27 One bold move for a 10x10
41:50 Where to book a demo

Who this helps

  • Startup founders and Series A leaders who need pipeline now
  • B2B sales leaders and field marketers who own event ROI
  • RevOps and demand gen teams tired of post-show chaos
  • Industries that sell complex products: healthcare, SaaS, manufacturing, CPG

Guest

Keywords
trade show strategy, conference marketing, B2B sales, lead capture, ShowScout, LTO, ICP, field marketing, booth strategy, post-show follow-up, HubSpot CRM, event ROI, sales activation, accountability, professional associations, regional conferences, pipeline generation, demos, pre-show outreach, buyer intelligence

Hashtags
#TradeShowStrategy #B2BSales #ConferenceMarketing #ShowScout #LTO #DemandGen #FieldMarketing #Pipeline #BurnThePlaybook #DigitalRebels

TAGS (YouTube keywords)
trade show strategy; conference strategy; B2B sales; lead capture app; ShowScout; LTO; event ROI; booth strategy; ICP; field marketing; post-show follow up; HubSpot; sales activation; conferences vs trade shows; regional conferences; professional associations; pipeline generation; demo scheduling; buyer intelligence; Marc Crosby; Digital Rebels Consulting; Ali

Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


Digital Rebels Consulting (00:30)
Welcome in this is burn the playbook. I'm Mark Crosby. Today's guest is Alison French. She is a fractional CMO founder and tech innovator with over 20 years of experience driving revenue at the intersection of sales, marketing, and in-person events. She is the creator of show scout, a sales activation and accountability platform for trade shows and conferences. And she's passionate about helping teams turn events and to predictable revenue drivers.

Her experience leading global exhibitions and scaling startups fuels a results driven approach to in-person marketing. Welcome, Alison.

Alison French (01:02)
Hello, hello, excited to be here.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:03)
Great to have you here. So one thing I noticed that, you know, going to trade shows for my entire career and probably decades before me is understanding that not much has probably changed in the last like 50 years. So what is the point of a trade show in 2025 in one sentence?

Alison French (01:20)
my goodness.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:21)
Maybe two sentences. As long as you want to. What's the point of a trade show?

Alison French (01:22)
Yeah, I would, yeah. And I'm going to say, yeah, I'm going to say,

I'm going to lean into, there's two sides of the house. There's like exhibit halls at conferences, and then there's more of like your expos or trade shows. So I'm going to say lean into the conferences more because that's really where I see businesses getting the best results. I think the purpose of a conference is subject matter expertise. People are attending a conference because of subject matter expertise. So you see it a lot in the healthcare space or professional associations.

Attendees are coming together to share conversations, to learn from each other and to have that network and community. If you're a business that is smart enough to recognize where your ICP is, that works really well because if you think of most tactics nowadays, it's harder to get an email into someone's inbox. If you're sending someone an Outlook, good chance that email is never gonna get in the inbox.

They're in control of their LinkedIn account, whether they accept your connection or not. Same thing with cell phones. And so being in person and being able to go and say hello to the person you're trying to contact and put a name to face and show that you're not a creep and show that you're a real human. Literally, I cannot think of any other tactic I would recommend to an organization who is trying to figure out how to move the needle in sales.

Digital Rebels Consulting (02:37)
Gotcha. I love that explanation. And as I've probably learned over the last few years and probably people post COVID is that you got to do more in person. I got to get in front of people and that's how you make connections and create partnerships anyway. And so it's a, good strategy to have, think going forward. As far as like the big trade shows, let's just take conferences out of it. Like what's broken with like just regular trade shows. There's 10,000 people there. ⁓ What do, what do buyers and sellers need to do differently to fix that?

Alison French (03:05)
my gosh, it's so interesting. You know, I had a client going to Pac Expo, which is a packaging show, and lo and behold, they have no way to connect with attendees. So they are paying a pretty penny to go exhibit there, to be in the room where they hope buyers are coming, but the show is not facilitating any form of interaction with attendees. And don't get me wrong, I'm not about shows selling lists. I don't think that's the right path.

But from the business's perspective, when you're looking at an ROI, how do you get an ROI from just hoping people walk by? I mean, at that point time, that's when you need to embrace the support of like the magicians and all the fancy things to pull people into the booth. And then you're pulling people into the booth that you don't even know match your ICP. And that's the really, really hard part. And that's the part I will say with trade shows is they have this allure of like,

if you're in consumer packaged goods, I have to go to Expo West. Like that's where all the buyers are. Okay. So you spend, call it half of your marketing budget for the year as a startup and not a single buyer comes by your booth. that's the, think in my mind, that's the problem. It's like, maybe it's twofold. It's the shows are not helping facilitate the interactions. They're trying. Like there's like the matching and stuff. Don't get me wrong. They are trying some of them, but there's also the component of

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:09)
Mm-hmm.

Alison French (04:24)
It's a business for these shows and so I don't know if I'd say they're preying on some exhibitors, but they're not setting exhibitors up for success. And these companies are just getting burned.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:36)
The word ⁓ complacency comes to mind as I was at least kind of alluding to is that trade shows really haven't changed that much as you know, in my career, I guess everyone's still paying the same amount and probably more just to go to the shows and I don't know, I guess some companies probably think like if we don't show up, then what will people think? ⁓

Alison French (04:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I've had

those conversations with people where they're like, we're just here because we have to be here. My career was in med device for a while. That was a really common tactic in health care. Well, we just have to go. It's a defensive positioning. If we're not there, everyone is going get that. But it could be an and statement, not an or statement. Like, OK, great, you have to be there. And here's how you can drive some measurable qualified pipeline as a result.

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:18)
and I don't think that anybody should feel like they have to be there because if they feel like they have to be there, then maybe you shouldn't be there. ⁓ as far as like the company or maybe the people that are attending the booth, ⁓ and people that are just attending to, meet other people, I don't know. ⁓ but I guess who should attend a trade show. Should it be sales? Should it be marketing? Should it be a mix? Should be executive leaders? Like who should go.

Alison French (05:26)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd say different

sizes of companies would really vary on who is going to be there and what the plan of attack is at the booth. So how did client go to AI for, and they were so smart. They brought their smartest PhDs to be at the booth to be able to answer the really hard questions. And so when they had that person walk up with that kind of purchase intent, they are able to immediately connect them to someone who really showed the caliber of the organization. That was brilliant. ⁓

I've also seen people hire booth workers where they're just paying someone to scan a badge and that I don't usually see as an effective solution if you're trying to drive revenue. So it's striking that balance of what is the outcome you're looking for. A lot of people will do events and say this is a brand play. Okay, but budgets are getting smaller and smaller. Headcount is getting cut. So what if we took the brand play and made it a revenue play? How would that look?

Can we do both? ⁓ And then it's also twofold because it's not just who's at the event in terms of working the booth or engaging. It's can you get your CEO speaking because that's gonna draw traffic to your booth. People are gonna be more likely to connect with your CEO or your chief product officer. Like people are gonna wanna hear from them. They're not gonna wanna hear from the BDR.

And so you also have to strike that balance with shows is recognizing if the company is committing to this, what's the draw? Like nobody wants to come in and talk to a junior salesperson. Like that's just the reality of it. So if you're investing six figures in a show, you know, you want to be, it needs to be a company commitment that we're going to get every last squeeze out of this lemon.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:14)
Hmm?

Yeah, agreed. ⁓ and typically that's kind of what I see too. And, nothing against, you know, BDRs or anybody else that's, working the boost. Somebody's got to do it, but typically at least.

Alison French (07:31)
no, not at all. Not yet. We all start there. I started as a

marketing events coordinator. Like we all have to have that starting role. It's just, I look back and when I was working shows, like I was 21 years old, like every client that would walk up, there's no way I was a booth screener. Like, and that was obvious and I could help them get to who they needed to. But I think it's just being much more realistic about if they put a revenue number on me being a booth screener, no.

Like it was a luxury yachting company. Like, no, they're not going to buy from a 21 year old.

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:02)
The companies that arrange like a lot of the conferences, like what could they do better in order to make it more fruitful, better ROI for companies that are investing money. like, it a better app? Is it a better like show floor design? it, you know, redesigning it? So like the buyers are on one side and the sellers are on the other side. And so at least we know like what team we're on. What could they do better? mean, cause like you were saying,

Alison French (08:22)
Yeah, no. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:27)
I don't know. I haven't seen much that's changed. Some do it good. Some don't. Some have apps where you can, you know, do chat functions and things like that and connect with people. But there's a lot of noise and then that space as well. So like what do the companies and the media companies need to do differently to support the companies that are investing their dollars into the shows ⁓ differently?

Alison French (08:31)
And yeah.

I think it'd

be really interesting to stop and consider where is the bulk of the revenue coming from the show? is it attendee? Like, who are they protecting? If it is attendees, like if the bulk of the revenue is coming from attendees, I don't know. Like, I don't know if they need to change anything. ⁓ But my knowledge is a good percent of revenue does come from the exhibitors and exhibitors aren't going to come back if they don't see an ROI from the event. So how can we help them connect those dots? if it's what...

A common one I've heard talked about in the industry is first time exhibitors. What kind of support can be given to first time exhibitors and recognize this isn't just a sale. Like I'm not just selling this 10 by 10 now. I am selling a positive experience at this one show. So they come back next year. And generally speaking for the industry, they have a really positive experience of what it means to be in a show. Because when you look at

the actual event side of the house, like an event market, a field marketer that's doing everything. That is a complicated process. When you're working with unions and you're looking at the vendors and you're trying to figure out how this all works, that alone is like a whole separate knowledge base. Then you get to my side of the house, which is like, how do you turn this into ROI? That's a whole separate knowledge base. If you're a founder of a CBT company and you're going to the show for his time, like you've never done a display, you've never had these experiences. So I think

Really focusing on how can we better help those first time exhibitors, I think could be a starting point because it adds more value to attendees, it adds more value to exhibitors, keeping people in the event space wanting to come back, I think works well for all of us. So I think that would be something I would say. ⁓ The ones I've seen do really well,

Digital Rebels Consulting (10:20)
Mm-hmm.

Alison French (10:28)
You know, brain date's a common one that's being used. It's trying to connect people for interactions. A lot of shows have their own apps or their own skin versions of apps. The problem I see, and I recognize where shows are coming from, but we're trying to put such a detailed wall between the client's CRM, but it's like, you've got the batch scan, you've got the show app, you have the client's CRM, you have their existing customers within the CRM, you have prospects within the CRM. That is hard.

Digital Rebels Consulting (10:54)
Hmm?

Alison French (10:54)
There's a lot of walls that are being put up. And so when you walk away from a show and you've been using the show app and then you get back and you're like, cool, so how do I copy and paste this into my CRM so I can give my VP of sales notes? Like there's no easy way to do that. So that would be the other thing I think shows could do with even within the walls that they put up is just make it a little easier for sales and marketing to leverage the data that's coming out of the show.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:20)
Gotcha. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity there, especially for CRM. There's a whole lot of issues just with CRMs in general and people not using it or using it properly. And that's a, that's a whole topic for another, ⁓ burn the playbook. so just curious as far as like, let's just take first time exhibitors. mean, walk me through like, what would the, the playbook look like, so to speak, as far as somebody going to a show, identifying what show that should go to, what do I do when I get there? What do I need to display?

Alison French (11:29)
⁓ my gosh, I'll have to really geek out on that one day.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:49)
What does during the show look like? And then maybe post show, like what's an optimal like setup for that.

Alison French (11:54)
Yeah. And I will say it's been 20 years since I was the person facilitating, booking the show and all that. So my kind of field marketing hat is a bit old. And so I'll say, go to something like trade show university podcasts. Like he has amazing step-by-step guides for someone doing that side of the house is like getting your first booth created and stuff like that. But I would say when it comes to the show you're going to, that's probably the most crucial decision. Professional associations all day.

And I would say, start at a regional one. So I had a client that was going to an ophthalmology and optometrist conference in the state of Iowa, if I remember correctly, like just a regional show. It was great. It was a great chance to interact. It made a very easy way to connect with his ⁓ target accounts. It was great. I would say start there, like professional association, where your buyers are, and maybe go small. Start there.

much more cost effective, make sure you have your system in place for pre-show outreach, post-show follow-up. Use that as your trial run where you're not investing 50 to 100 grand driving distance to your house. You don't maybe even have to stay overnight. Start there, see how you do, see how it goes, feel like, you get a lot out of it from a revenue perspective, and decide, okay, are we ready to go to the next national show?

And it's hard. mean, was a national versus regional. You won't get as many buyers at a regional show. Like if it's a regional conference, attendance will be down, but the cost is so much more affordable that it should you should be able to walk away with quality pipeline to continue conversations to justify that cost and then be better prepared for the national.

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:15)
How?

Make sense. Start small, scale up just like anything else in business. ⁓ So I go to this regional show. How do I know if it went well? You know, I go through, I scan a bunch of badges, I got a bunch of business cards, I leave, I go home. How do I know I did a good job or not?

Alison French (13:43)
⁓ Yes.

Yeah. I always

tell people a badge scan doesn't mean anything. People come home really excited that they're like, I had 100 badge scans. I'm like, yeah, but did they match your ideal customer profile? Because I'm OK if it's a badge scan of a company that matches your ideal customer profile, because you can use that as an in for much later on. But if the person's company doesn't even match a company that would ever buy from you, and they're just coming to get swag, it's

going to deflate all of your marketing metrics. So say you dump them into a nurturing program and you're going to go like, why is no one engaging? They're actually interested. So that would be the one measure of success I'd encourage everyone to lean into is don't even get into purchase intent. The people you talk to, did the companies match your ICP? Yes or no. If you walked away with 20 conversations with counts that match your ICP that kickstart your pipeline,

Start there and compare it to your other marketing metrics for leads because you should be tracking your paid media programs, your email marketing programs, your SEO programs. So you should be able to say in a ⁓ normal month, how many qualified leads, and I'm not going to say marketing qualified, like qualified, like they match your ICP, come to the site and compare that to the event. Better, worse, similar, because I had one client go to the event and in three days they walked away with 80 deals.

They had 10 people there. They did a lot of pre-work. But there's not a lot of marketing campaigns and channels that can drive that volume of qualified interactions in 72 hours.

Digital Rebels Consulting (15:19)
an example, you were just describing what sort of pre-work goes into getting that much success out of a show. just because I know that I've been to a lot of shows exhibited on the behalf of different types of companies. can tell you that there was never really a pre-work, any briefing. ⁓ here's what we're going to say. Who's here? We're looking forward. This is the game plan. This is what we need. Here's the quota. ⁓ what's the pre-work?

Alison French (15:25)
Yeah.

They did it flawless. It was one of the most senior teams I've ever worked with, but they were a startup. So it was kind of both sides of the house. So really senior sellers, really senior marketers ⁓ and leadership who has been down this path a few times. So they came in exceedingly prepared. I mean, the amount of pre-meetings from marketing side of the house and then looping sales into the side of the house. They call it six weeks in advance.

It was a full court press of just everything we can do to get the messaging right, to get the messaging aligned, to get the call to action right. I think that's something that most people fail to pay attention to is what is that call to action? Everybody is driving towards because if the whole organization is not online, it's really hard to measure success. So I had one client, it was all about getting demos booked at the booth on a calendar for after the show.

Well, we went and emailed people within our CRM that we knew were in attendance, because it was a professional association. So we can connect the dots on that and said, hey, we're going to be there. We've rolled out some new functionality, so to speak. We'd love to talk to you about it. By the way, if you come and book a demo during the show, we'll give you a free pair of AirPods. It was enough to motivate behavior because

The exhibit hall is always like around the corner. It's not convenient. So you just have to figure out what behavior you're motivating and have everybody aligned on the same thing. So when they catch the founder and they're trying to talk to the founder in the hallway, he knows to point them to the team to get the thing booked. Like everybody's working together. So I think that is the first thing I would encourage is just like, make sure everyone knows what the goal is, what the call to action is, what the outcome is. And then when it comes to the pre-show targeting, I think that is kind of the make or break for an event because

If you can start conversations or if you can just know who you're trying to talk to on the show floor, either way, you're going to be more effective. If you go just stand at a booth and hope the right person shows up, that's just not going to happen. But if you at least know that these are the 50 accounts I want to talk to, or I know that these 300 prospects that are in attendance match my ICP, so I'm going to reach out to them on LinkedIn and say hello.

You got to find a way, and it's just a matter of internal tech stack, internal knowledge, bandwidth. mean, those are usually the tripping points I see most organizations stumble through in why they're not doing it. I actually find startups do better because they're so used to being lean and scrappy and just kind of like, there's no, I have to run this by regulatory or can I get security clearance to add this tool? Things like that really get in the way.

So startups tend to be a little nimbler, but like I would never have a team invest in a show if I wasn't established in each person in attendance had a certain number of people they were supposed to be trying to connect with. Obviously more will trickle into the booth, but some measure of success and then really looking at the coverage rate and saying, okay, if you're supposed to meet 100 accounts and you met 20.

That may be a good coverage rate. That may not be a good coverage rate, but at least you can have the conversations and say, out of curiosity, why did you only meet 20? ⁓ I was so busy. The conversations were in depth. There's too many floors. And then you can plan for the future and say, okay, now we know we were over ambitious and you can pull back.

Digital Rebels Consulting (19:02)
⁓ How much time do you think should be dedicated outside of the booth as far as just, ⁓ I mean, if you go to like a pack expo, for instance, let's just say there's a thousand booths there. and you know, like they're, right there. Should you just go out and talk to those people that are those booths? ⁓ should we set up like top to top executive meetings, like ahead of time outside of the booth, breakout sessions are typically happening for.

Alison French (19:23)
Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (19:28)
⁓ you know, subject matter experts and keynotes and things like that. So how much time should we focus in the booth and how much time like outside of the booth and what have you seen like to be most effective?

Alison French (19:36)
Yep, I would say your best sellers should not be in the booth. They should be, if they have assigned accounts, like they should really just be focused on getting out and meeting with those accounts. That's where marketing can be really effective support for manning the booth and like helping kind of, because they understand the marketing propositions, they get the value, they know how to connect the dots into that initial lead. So sometimes having marketing support on the booth front and allowing sales to be out and about trying to make those connections.

I think one of the things we've talked a lot about is you're going to a show to target attendees, but there's also the flip of you're going to show to target exhibitors. And that's another highly effective, I mean, yes, what do they people call it? Suit casing? I forget. There's a word for it. Some shows you can get away with it, some shows you can't, but like they don't want you walking around trying to sell your products to the exhibitors. But if you go to a show on the last day,

and you're just saying hello with a friendly face and maybe bringing a bit of a swag to brighten their day, you can usually strike up a conversation with someone and they're just gonna be that much more likely to reply to your email after the show. That's all you're trying to do is build that like name to face recognition so when they see a sea of emails, they're like, yeah, you're human. Okay, I remember meeting you.

Digital Rebels Consulting (20:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I didn't know you weren't allowed to do that. I thought that I was encouraged to do that as far as ⁓ suit casing or going around and targeting. I've been breaking the rules all these years.

Alison French (20:56)
I swear, I think that's the word. I don't know. Well, I think there's

so many and it's such a fine line. you get, this is the concept of like the old school approach of like, some of it doesn't change. So maybe 20 years ago it was written in the contracts. I don't know. But I've definitely had some old school people be very firm and like, that's not allowed. That's called suitcase. I think it's called suit casing. And they probably get it wrong. ⁓ But it works. It's an effective.

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:22)
I don't know.

Alison French (21:24)
It's no different than going to say hi to your customers. If your customers are exhibiting and you're walking around to do name to face, like it's another effective way to do it. So that would be my one thing to encourage people on is just really think about where your buyer is. And if you can't get to your buyer, can you get to the company because their salespeople are going to have pity on you and realize you're a salesperson, I'm a salesperson. It's a good karma. Like I'll help you out.

Let's figure this out together and they'll usually give you the name and then you can use the name and say like, hi, I met John at the show and you're just that much more likely to get that conversation started, which is really all we're trying to accomplish.

Digital Rebels Consulting (22:06)
Makes sense. When it's all said and done, whether it's a good show, bad show, who takes credit and blame for whether it went really well or went really bad?

Alison French (22:15)
It's so interesting. ⁓ I would just be exceedingly cautious on what the measure of success is. I would say...

you have to have your funnel metrics in place. Like you just have to know how these deals are flowing through your funnel. So you can identify where is the problem. They weren't qualified. Is the problem. There was no purchase intent is the problem. We can't get them to actually show up to the discovery call is the problem. They ghost us after the discovery call. Like, cause if you don't know that

It's impossible to say if the show is success because people will immediately jump to ROI and they're saying ROI is all that matters. Well, ROI requires closing deals. So if you are not tracking all those steps, because it reminds me of my consulting world, I'll have a lot of people say like, okay, well, what if we just pay you a kickback? Like for every deal you help us get, we'll just give you a commission. like, I don't own the sales cycle. I don't own product market fit and I don't own pricing. And it's like,

a good reminder to people like, I'm very good at what I do, but there's a lot of this that's outside of my hands. And so to equip the team going to like, okay, what was that CTA we were looking for? The one client, was demos booked on the calendar before people left the show. So in previous years, they'd have maybe 10 prospects that they had to chase down to try to get a demo booked. This time around, they walked home with 22 accounts booked demos. That is a win.

saves time, like they're not chasing down, the volume had increased. So therefore the offer of the AirPods was effective because it got more people. That would be where I would say is really lean into what is that single measure of success. And then maybe you're breaking it down into twofold. What is the measure of the booth success? And then what is the individual sales team in attendance as tied to the ICP? And I think this is where I personally, I don't know if I would

ever recommend someone going to a show if they didn't have an idea of how to get to a contact list. And I don't mean like buy a list. I'm just saying this client I just described, it's a professional association. They do not release a list. We know that. But it was in healthcare. So we had a general idea of like these medical practices are likely to be part of this organization. So we were able to put our strategic hats on and figure it out. Same thing with the optometrist show.

Digital Rebels Consulting (24:26)
Mm-hmm.

Alison French (24:36)
There was no attendee list, but we could do a geographic range around a show, use some job titles and have a good enough solution. If you can't do that, kind of like PacExpo, you're putting yourself in a position that it's going to be really, really hard to show an ROI because you're hoping people stop by the booth.

Digital Rebels Consulting (24:56)
Yeah, you've said hope a few times and as we say, hope is not a strategy, but I think that there's probably a lot of hope that goes into a lot of these trade shows and sales and strategy. would imagine like the foundation of if it's a success or a failure, it's probably not because of the show itself. It's probably just the foundation of your business. And I guess the success of your day to day, how your executive leaders and your managers and everybody cascades information and prepares and.

Alison French (25:01)
Not in.

Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (25:24)
You even know who your ICP is because that might be something that's still kind of like waffly as far as not really sure we'll sell to anybody. But a lot of that probably needs to be figured out ⁓ way in advance before you even get to the show or before you even start talking about prepping for a show. ⁓ So you developed Show Scout and how does that solve all of our problems?

Alison French (25:31)
Mm-hmm.

I wish I could solve all your problems. I wish

I was a technical founder who could just like get everything out of my head and just make it happen. I have a good friend who's a technical founder and she blows my mind. She'll get an idea and within like 24 hours she has a prototype. ⁓ It's so cool. I, Show Scout came to be from all of my clients going to show. So in my fractional CMO hat, I tend to lean more towards businesses.

that are right around the series A mark or maybe an established business that has had kind of consistent steady revenue and they're really looking to upscale maybe for an acquisition or the founders are looking to sell. so there are people who are looking to suddenly kind of have a bit of a hockey stick growth moment is typically the groups I deal with. ⁓ Low and bold, surprise, surprise based on this conversation. Conferences and trade shows, especially the professional associations is where

the best quality pipeline was coming from, just hands down. I'm a digital marketer early in my career, and so I will be all about inbound and SEO and all the things. Come to realize when I led my last startup and had to get involved in sales that marketing qualified leads don't actually mean a lot when you need to get revenue to keep a business running, because without revenue, you do not have a business. And so it kind of...

shifted the way my marketing strategy works to really lean into what is driving pipeline that has the chance to convert. ⁓ And so where Show Scout came to be, it was as simple as I had a sales team go to an event. We had marketing automation planned out to be able to deploy to help get more meetings as the show progressed. I got ghosted by the sales team.

They would not tell me, like there was no feedback loop. There was just like, and so my, as the marketer, I'm always, you don't mess with sales. You do not do anything in an automation that could make the salesperson look bad. So we scrapped it. And then I came out with just like a softer prototype, like just press this button. Like just let me know if you met them and it started to work. And so it's been an evolution since then of realizing I love HubSpot. I mean, I sort of love HubSpot.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:52)
You

Mm-hmm.

Alison French (28:02)
I'll take that with a grain of salt. I love HubSpot for the interaction between sales and marketing. So we can geek out on that another day. ⁓ You can't really take the HubSpot app to a show. There's too many contacts, the way the list works, like nothing happens. Show apps are great because they're trying to connect everybody, but it's hard to overlay your ICP on a show app. Like it's hard to go from 8,000 prospects to the 50 I want to meet. And then...

trying to think same thing with an exhibitor list. It's like I've had people who are using the notes app on their phone, trying to keep track of everything. And so I just kept thinking like, gosh, there's just got to be a simple way to do this. And that's where Show Scout came to be. It was really just meant to be an in-person CRM companion. And that was the vision. I think I launched my prototype a year ago and that was my vision was just kind of MVP, I guess you'd say. And just can we...

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:54)
Mm-hmm.

Alison French (28:55)
better equip people in the palm of their hands, the exact people they're trying to target. So sort it by booth number. So they're going consecutively. Can we add prioritization? So I want to meet my priority ones first. How can we do it just to make it as efficient as possible to get through a show? Give them the ability to take notes in one spot that instantly goes back to the CRM. So we're not mucking around with business cards or what data like.

We do voice memos, we do pictures. I find pictures a really effective way to remember conversations. ⁓ So all of that can be trapped on the contact record or the company record, goes all back into HubSpot. ⁓ Or we can do a CSV importance of someone else's serum, depending on what they have. But that way, when the rep comes back, they know exactly who they met. They know who they didn't meet. And most importantly,

marketing can deploy an automation to everyone they didn't meet and say, I'm so sorry, we didn't get a chance to meet. Do you have time to connect this week? Like you can just take action a little faster, which that seems to be, I mean, we can talk speed to lead, but I think in the case of shows, it's just follow up at all. Like I think it's really common for there to be a delay getting the CSV file to the team and then it takes the team a while to process it because they're kind of fuzzy after the show and they're getting back in the swing of things.

Digital Rebels Consulting (29:52)
Mm-hmm.

Alison French (30:10)
So by the time it gets sent over to sales, it's like two weeks has gone by. Like, and to your point, people aren't going to remember the conversations two weeks later. And so I think it's just like, can we just like remove some of that friction? That is really where Show Scout started. And now it's evolving a little bit more into a sales activation platform in the sense that, okay, I will geek out when I go to a conference.

Like I will be front row listening to speakers, connecting with them, like keeping track of it, like tweeting lessons that I'm learning because I would like to get a PhD. This is just my happy place, but I'm realizing that doesn't come naturally. And so how can I feed the sales team this knowledge? Like the CEO from your target account is on the stage in five minutes. Like here's what you should do head on in there or

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:44)
Hmm?

Alison French (31:00)
that contact is posted on LinkedIn, go comment on that. Like how can we facilitate more quality interactions because shows are busy, there's a lot going on, it's really hard to stay focused, it's really hard to do some of this stuff from a mobile device when you don't have your multiple screens and cross-referencing. And so that's where I'm at right now is can I help?

provide that buyer intelligence so that when they do walk up to a booth, they know what to say. So it's not just like, hey, is John from purchasing here? can we, you know, even just giving headshots, like, okay, so here's the 100 counts you want to go after. Here are the prospects in attendance from those accounts. Here's their headshot. So I've had a customer once, she was brilliant. She would go into these shows with such a small target list. I'm talking five people, 10 people.

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:47)
Mm-hmm.

Alison French (31:48)
She knew everything about them. She knew what they looked like. She would be able to see them across the room at a lunch and figure out how to appropriately go, hello, and say hi, what mutual friend they had. I mean, it was of a caliber of selling that I've never seen before. And so if people are willing to put the time and energy like that into it, it'll go a long way. Yeah, yeah. I know, I know, I know.

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:10)
They're not going to do it. I'm shaking my head if you can't see me just because I

know that, uh, I probably have that mentality and probably you do too, as far as just doing research and due diligence ahead of time. And like, you know, I have a photographic memory and I try to understand like who it is I'm looking for. And like, what do I want to talk about if I bump into them? Cause that's another thing. Like if you don't know who it is that you're looking for and you're standing right next to them at a lunch line or something, that's a missed opportunity. And typically you can't just look over and see everybody's name and badge. Um, that's a whole nother issue.

Alison French (32:22)
that's cool. Yeah.

Exactly.

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:39)
I should have like big targets on our backs as far as like, work for this company. You shouldn't have to be like a mystery of who I am and who I work for, but.

Alison French (32:40)
Well, and you might.

and then you see the account,

but if you're not prepared, they maybe they're at the right company, but if you're not prepared with what you're going to say, you're just going to look like a sleazy salesperson. So you have to be prepared. And I think that comes into leadership or whoever is ultimately on the hook for the investment is if it's a founder at a small business, like that really comes from to your point about hope. Like you can't just hope. Like what is the plan to make this work?

And I think sometimes trade shows are this really interesting space where you get a lot of people who wear very different hats in their normal day-to-day jobs coming together trying to do a trade show. And so maybe the sales manager whose BDR is at the event, they don't know how to manage their performance at an event because they've never come from a company who had events, nor was that ever something that they are really supposed to be handling. So I think

That is one other component of it is like, how can we better help the entire team to set boundaries of what we're trying to accomplish when we go to these? So that way when people are asking what's a success, we can speak to those leading indicators.

Digital Rebels Consulting (33:52)
I'm curious if there's an AI component to your app and at least research that is inside the app, outside the app, but I always got to ask an AI question on this podcast.

Alison French (33:59)
Wow. Yep. Yep. yeah. No, I love that. Yep. So we are using

AI. A big part of our AI right now is that ICP matching. So really trying to help people figure out who are they targeting and then the buyer intelligence. So do we think, you know, if you have a laundry list of 5,000 companies, there's no way a human can go through and identify who's the fit. So that's what we are turning to AI mostly for right now. ⁓ Then the buyer intelligence side is why do we think this company

would be a fit for us and pulling in the ability to make those connections, shared colleges, shared technology, whatever it can be, ⁓ how can we try to figure out a way to make a connection to bring it all together? So that's the primary focus because I feel like the attendee kind of the contact side, account side is the most difficult. I was about to say trifical to if anyone has kids and watches Bluey, you know that word. ⁓ Welcome to my life. And so. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:55)
with you.

Alison French (34:56)
⁓ it's like,

it's just part of the family lingo now. ⁓ That's the part that's hardest for people. The next phase for us is where we're getting into these smart alerts. Okay, so and so is taking action on the website. So and so is posting on LinkedIn. Right now we automate everything, but it's not AI driven. ⁓ It is through AI prompts and then automations that are taking action. And then the part where I think everyone's dream state.

is when this is actually being pushed in the CRMs and it's making it easier for reps to take action with follow up because it's not a complicated first or second touch when it comes to follow up. So how can we do it in an authentic way that the reps are on board with? Because that's the hard part. In my fractional work, I do a lot on how to support founders with their content, with their...

investor updates, how do you match a founder's voice? How do you make sure it's all sounding like them? And so there's a lot of work I've done in AI in that capacity, which I think could be very much carried over into the follow-up component for trade shows.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:57)
Nice. ⁓ I recently started to use, ⁓ AI to take like pictures of the attendee lists and, ⁓ breakout sessions. And then I would ask it like, who should I meet with and which breakout session should I go to based on my ICP and based on my business. And it's actually given me pretty good results and it saves a lot of time.

Alison French (36:07)
Yes.

Yeah. Yes.

It's so smart. It's so smart. I mean,

is the biggest. Time tech stack and general knowledge of the tech stack is like the biggest limitations for most people. So whatever they can do, I'm part of the exit five B2B marketer community and a woman created a really cool custom GPT about is this a good show for me to attend? And she put in all the details. So now when she's evaluating shows, she just dumps that in and it's like,

Don't read within the wheel. Figure out what works, and if AI helps you get there, heck yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:46)
As long as you try, gotta, know, these new tools is just how you use it and kind of come to creative ways. can, extract knowledge and things like that out of it. let's pivot to the burn it or build it rapid fire segment, which is everybody's favorite segment of the burn it or burn the playbook podcast. I'll just throw out a bunch of different topics. You answer one way or the other, burn it or build it and maybe a brief reason why. So we'll start with number one giveaways.

Alison French (36:58)
I'm sorry.

⁓ if they have...

If they're tied to an action you're trying to drive, definitely keep it. Burn it if it's a stressful.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:20)
Got it. I would say typically burn it myself. I'm not allowed to answer these questions, but ⁓ I did. ⁓ Burn the giveaways ⁓ booth location.

Alison French (37:29)
Mmm.

Like where are the right locations someone should go for? Okay. does it matter? Yeah, it does. I saw someone get tucked by the bathroom once in a corner, like, it really crushed the show. So like, yes, it absolutely matters. Look at throughput of traffic. Look at who you will be next to. If anything, try to figure out a non-competing brand that you can draft off of who has a similar buyer and

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:34)
Doesn't matter. I guess is a better question because I know that.

Alison French (37:56)
would have a draw and try to park yourself next to him.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:59)
bathroom would actually be kind of like a good traffic area. Someone just comes out of the bathroom and like, yeah.

Alison French (38:01)
It's just an awkward conversation starter if you think about it. Like, did you wash your hands? Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:08)
⁓ I'm guilty of this ⁓ outrageous booth design burn it or build it

Because a lot of these booths, all look the same. Should just stand out.

Alison French (38:16)
Hmm.

may not be a popular, but I would say burn it only because some of the best booths I've seen are really, really clean and really articulate what the business is. And it's just like one color, one statement, and you walk by and you're like, that's cool. That's what you do. So sometimes I don't think it has to be outrageous to stand out.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:35)
⁓ Free food, I guess this goes back to giveaways, but if you're giving away food, burn it or build it.

Alison French (38:40)
Burn it. You're spending money on people who aren't your ICP.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:43)
Makes sense. What about live demos?

Alison French (38:45)
I'm going say burn it as well because the staffing to size of the booth, usually you can only engage one person in a demo at a time, maybe. so depending, I mean, if you added some really amazing projection system and it was appealing to everyone and it was kind of the ongoing thing possibly, but generally speaking, it's going to work against you because no one will approach you when you're in a demo with someone else because you look busy. So I generally speaking say just aim to get it scheduled after the fact or move to a private.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:12)
Agreed.

Alison French (39:13)
Like I've seen some people do that. Demos are happening somewhere else.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:17)
Yeah, that makes sense. I've seen that some shows where they have like a little demo sidebar section that makes sense. bad scan quotas.

Alison French (39:24)
No, burn. It's not serving anyone. It's a vanity metric.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:30)
AI written follow up emails.

Alison French (39:33)
I'm going to say go for it as long as you have a copy editor, someone looks at it. Why not? Why reinvent the wheel? If you're good at using AI to help you, go for it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:42)
What if it's a spray and pray sort of tactic? Because I've received like lot of emails follow up from shows that I've been to. I'm like, I never met you. I would never need to buy anything from you.

Alison French (39:44)
Oh no, it's Burn It. Oh no, no. Yeah.

I would, yeah, I would burn that. look at it as like, from my perspective, it's like, okay, you can take the notes out of Show Scout or your voice memo you recorded. You can immediately get that over, have it draft the message based on what you were saying. Like that's where I look at AI is like, heck yeah. Like use that all day long, but what you're describing, no, I'd burn that all day.

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:12)
It all depends on how you're using it. I'll give you the last word, one final question. You get your own 10 by 10 booth, you get two reps, 48 hours. What is the bold choice you would make that most teams wouldn't to just crush your trade show or conference?

Alison French (40:27)
I would only go to a show where I knew I could get a hold of the attendees ahead of time. Like I need to know who is going to be in that room. And then I know pretty much everything else is gonna work out just fine.

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:37)
So it's all about the attendee list.

Alison French (40:39)
Yeah, and it's not, the show doesn't have to give you the list. You're a professional association and you generally speaking know who's in your CRM as part of that association. You just need to know when you're going there that you have a general radius of who you're trying to talk to. I mean, it can be, I just had someone wanting to go to the Qualtrics seminar and it was like, cool, well, that's just a tool that you can pull up in data technology so you can just.

reach out to people who match your job title, use that technology and just ask them if they're going. Like the show doesn't have to give you the list to be effective at starting conversations ahead of time. It's just a matter of time. How much time can you devote to this? How wide are you willing to go? You might have a miss, but the person's like, actually I like what you do. That sounds great. So that would be it. If you cannot kind of like pack expo, who knew who was going to go there? It's just show about packaging. That is very, very broad.

But if you're going to pick out a show with a general idea of these are the buyers that are going to be there that match my ICP and you know how to loosely get in touch with them, I would say it's worth it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:40)
Nice. Show up with a purpose. I think that's kind of the thread that people need to probably understand. And if people want to book a demo with Alison French, where would they do that?

Alison French (41:50)
Yeah, our website is joinLTO.com and LTO is from the roots of lead to opportunity. It's realizing that leads don't mean anything if you can't convert them to opportunities.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:01)
Thank you so much for joining the burn the playbook podcast. All right Cheers

Alison French (42:03)
And great. Thanks for having me.


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Marc Crosby - Digital Rebels

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