Picking the Dream Team:
Field Marketing Staffing Explained
You’re standing at a booth that cost no less than $75K, considering the cost of the booth, the design, the swag, and we haven’t even added up the travel for the attendees…..and you can see that the team is not bringing the magic. An expo booth design can only take you so far. An engaging, articulate team with the perfect mix of sales, product knowledge, and pizzaz is what you need to take the experience to the next level and really deliver some results.
Here’s my dream team for a growth stage B2B SaaS company at a trade show. Spoiler alert, it’s not who lives closest to the event:
🎣 The hook: Who will this audience pour into the booth to talk to? Your CEO? The celebrity CITO? Get the event on that person’s calendar as early as possible, and treat the pre-event outreach for that person like a separate ABM motion. Their dance card should be full the entire time. Try to get them a speaking slot if possible and keep them there just for a day or two
🙌🏽 Partnerships: Charisma, check. Deep understanding of the product, check. Former sales background, check. Team player, check. If I could recommend you just have one type of employee at a booth, I’d tell you to put your partnerships team in the game.
💵 Sales: If you have a division between enterprise and mid-market, have an even split of those folks. The big key here is that they will have some way of tracking the credit of influencing a deal that comes through. AND that they have VP of Revenue buy in for completely passing off their meetings to others for those days. Someone saying “it’s the end of my quarter” while they hide in the corner on their laptop is understandably under pressure to deliver and the executive team hasn’t aligned around the priority of the event. Work that out before the event and put them in a position to succeed by participating fully. If you can’t get assurances that this time will be protected….switch them out for CS.
🔮 Product manager: To me, product managers are the therapists of an organization. Active listening and sharing truths between marketing and engineering is exactly the kind of energy you want at your booth. Scenario: an attendee has a burning question about your product….it’s too complicated for the sales org…they leave with a promise of getting an email. Lame. What if they came to the booth and they had an incredible product manager answer their question in depth. They would leave feeling like they had gotten value out of the interaction. That’s what you want.
🃏Wild Card: Did the marketing ops manager run events in their past life? Tag them in. Did your rev-ops director come from a massive company where they had to get event-approved and vetted? Tag them in. Does somebody have that special sauce that you wish you could just have them as your next event hire? Tag them in. You’ll want one other person that gets “it” at the event and leads by example to the others.
Are you inspired to tap some new teammates into the event ring? For the right person, they’ll see it as a benefit of working at the company. Free travel, meals, and an experience of a crazy amazing tech conference? Sweet.