What We Learned at the Fancy Food Show - 5 Things that We Shouldn’t Forget and Neither Should You

This is a great post from one of our client’s blogs:

http://demeterspantry.com/blog/?p=54

I had hoped to write these thoughts up yesterday, but coming back from the show, we all had about a thousand e-mails in our inboxes. (OK, a slight exaggeration, some of us only had about five hundred).  I thought I’d take a few moments and write up a top five list of things we shouldn’t forget to do next year. This was our most successful show yet and we want to build on that; the only way to do that is by remembering what we did.

1. Prepare Extensively Prior to the Show
If you think about the show, there are two major forms of preparation 1) making sure that we and our booth get to the show 2) making sure that potential customers get to our booth. This was the first year that the second outweighed the first. We got information on our website month’s in advance, we sent out e-mails, and we called prospects and got promises to visit us.  Next year, we’ll do more off-line marketing.

Furthermore, when we knew who we were meeting, we researched them and developed a best offer based on what we’d learned rather than trying to figure it out on the spur of the moment.  Were we wrong sometimes?  Of course, but then we could always fall back on figuring it out on the spur of the moment.

2. Partner with a Distributor to Reduce Costs
For a small company, partnering with a distributor to gain comparatively cheap access to the show is a great idea. The upside of working the show with a distributor is that you are assured visits from an established customer base. Epicure executives took the time to introduce us to buyers from some of their largest customers; that was great.

3. Avoid Disappearing within that Distributor
The flip side of exhibiting within a distributor is that the customers that we attracted through our own marketing efforts sometimes had a hard time finding us. Although Epicure Foods is a relatively small distributor, their booth still encompassed both sides of an aisle with refrigeration facilities and dozens and dozens of vendors. We had a number of people say they had come two or three times before finally finding our little corner of the Epicure Foods booth, and that was bad.

Furthermore, we were trying to meet with other distributors.  For some reason, they seemed a little shy about closing business in the booth of a competitor.  Maybe next year we’ll invest in our own booth.

4. Grab Every Opportunity to Promotie Demeter’s Pantry 
Surely chance favors the prepared hand but only if the prepared hand grabs what it wants. As I noted in my blogs over the past week, we interviewed almost twice as many buyers as we were assigned slots, we jumped into a diversity council meeting as a vendor, and we dragged any number of likely looking retailers and distributors out of the aisle and into our booth. This last practice is an effective antidote to the getting lost in a distributor’s booth. Who knows which will pan out, but as Maria’s brother always says, “If you want to win the lottery, you have to buy tickets.”

5. Follow-up, Follow-up, Follow-up
The jury is still out on this. Historically, this has been our weakest area. Partly this has to do with timing - why do they put the Fancy Food Show right at the beginngin of July, the perfect time to visit Greece? - and partly this has to do with sales power - we have always  generated more leads than we can follow up in weeks immediately following the show. This year with a larger sales team and better organization, we can and will follow-up aggressively.

We had a great show.  We look forward to serving our new (and continuing) customers in the coming months with high quality foods from Greece.  And finally, have a very happy July 4th from Demeter’s Pantry.

Posted by Andrew