Summer Sales & Marketing Series: Part 4

Making Tradeshows Work Harder for Both Teams

Walk any major produce show floor and you’ll notice something. The booths that draw the most traffic aren’t always the biggest or the flashiest. They’re the ones where something is clearly happening. There’s energy, a story being told, a reason to stop.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when marketing and sales actually plan together before the show, not just divide up tasks.

In most produce companies, tradeshow prep goes something like this: sales decides who’s going and schedules onsite meetings. Marketing books the show, orders the graphics, maybe a giveaway, and shows up ready to hand things out. Both teams work hard. But they’re running parallel tracks instead of a single, coordinated effort.

Here’s what changes when they work together. Marketing can build pre-show content that warms up the buyers that sales is planning to meet. A well-timed social post, a short email to key accounts, or a piece of seasonal content in the weeks before the show puts the brand in front of buyers before the handshake happens. That’s not a small thing. It means sales walks into a meeting with someone who already has context.

During the show, marketing can capture what’s actually happening on the floor. Buyer reactions, product questions, what competitors are saying about themselves. That’s real-time intelligence. And sales can point marketing toward the conversations worth capturing, the ones that tell the brand story better than any planned content could.

After the show is where most companies drop the ball. Sales leads and conversations are not tracked in a shareable format, so follow-up is left entirely to each sales person, and it’s usually transactional. Marketing is not able to extend the shelf-life of the show by building follow-up content that keeps the conversation going such as a recap, a recipe tied to the product being pitched, a consumer trend that connects back to what was discussed in the booth.

Tradeshows are expensive. The return on that investment goes up significantly when both teams treat it as a shared effort with a shared goal, not a sales trip with a marketing budget attached to it.

What can you implement at your company’s next tradeshow to bridge the gap?

Summer Sales & Marketing Series: