At a trade show, somebody is on your stand from the moment the doors open. Whoever walks up gets a handshake and a question about what they’re working on. By the last day you know which companies stopped by, and which of them were serious.
Your website gets visitors like that all year. Nobody’s on that stand.
Engineers and buyers read your product pages from their desks, compare you with two other suppliers and leave. Unless they fill in a form (most don’t), you never find out who they were.
What does your stand do that your website doesn’t?
It notices who walked up.
Think about what happens at a show. A company stops at your stand because it has a job on. Someone from your side says hello, finds out what they make and what they need, and takes a card.
Back at the office, you sort the cards into the ones worth a call and the ones that only came for the free pen. (There’s always a pile of those.)
Your website gets the same visitors, for the same reasons. What it doesn’t do is say hello.
| At your stand | On your website | |
|---|---|---|
| Who turns up | Companies with a project, customers saying hello, people after a free pen | The same mix, every day of the year |
| What they look at | The machine on the stand and a brochure | Your product pages, drawings and lead times |
| What you find out | Their name, their company and what they’re working on | How many visits there were |
| What happens next | Someone follows up the good cards | Nothing, unless they fill in a form |
Most of what a show costs is the stand and the days your people spend on it. With your website, you’ve already paid for the stand. You just haven’t put anyone on it.
Who walks onto your website?
The companies you’d be glad to see at a show, and some you’d never meet there.
Your website is open when your stand isn’t. So you get the engineer who missed the show and the buyer comparing three suppliers on a Tuesday afternoon. You also get the customer who has bought from you for twenty years, looking at something they’ve never ordered.
| Who walks on | How you’d spot them | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| A company you’ve never dealt with | A name you don’t know, back on your product pages more than once | A new customer, to replace the ones you lose |
| A customer of many years | Reading about products they’ve never ordered from you | More business from someone who already trusts you |
| A customer who’s gone quiet | Their first visit in months | A reason to ring before somebody else does |
| A company in a country you don’t sell to yet | Visits from abroad, more than once | A clue to where your next distributor could be |
| Competitors, students and your own suppliers | You’ll recognise them | None. Leave them at the door |
Every year a customer or two retires, sells up or drifts off to someone else. The first row is where their replacements come from. The second and third are how you hang on to the rest.
You can’t see any of this today, because your analytics counts visits, not companies. Website visitor identification (software that names the companies on your website) fills the gap.
When someone browses from work, the visit comes from their employer’s network, and the software looks up whose network it is. You get the company and the pages it read, without anyone filling in a form.
Who should be on the stand?
Whoever would follow up the cards after a show. In a firm your size, that might be you.
You wouldn’t leave your stand to whoever happened to be free. You’d put someone on it who knows the products and can tell a serious buyer from a pen collector. The website needs the same person, for a lot less time.
It doesn’t need a marketing department. It needs one list of companies a week, and someone who reads it on a Monday morning. They pick out the few worth a call, the way you’d sort the cards after a show. Then they hand each one to whoever knows that company best.
If someone already looks after your marketing, they can build the list, and you or your sales manager can read it.
Either way, put one name next to the job. If it’s “whoever has time”, the list will sit unread by Wednesday.
What do you say when you ring?
The same thing you’d say at the stand: what are you working on?
At a show you don’t open with “I saw you looking at our stand”. You ask about their project, because that’s why they stopped. A phone call works the same way. You know which products they read about, so ask about the job behind them. Offer a drawing or a sample, and leave it there if the timing’s wrong.
If it’s a company you’ve never dealt with, you’ll also need a name to ask for.
What you shouldn’t do is open with the website. “We saw you on our site” makes people feel watched, and it isn’t a reason for them to talk to you. The job they’re working on is.
Is your website busy enough to bother?
Count companies, not visits.
It’s usually the first thing an owner asks, and it’s a fair question. If your website gets a handful of visitors a week, there’s nobody to staff it for yet.
But a visit count undersells an industrial website. Nobody reads about hydraulic couplings for fun. The people on your product pages are there because of their job, and those are the visits worth putting a name to.
Our take: find out who’s already coming before you spend anything on bringing more. A bigger stand doesn’t help if nobody’s on it.
So try the handshake test. Run visitor identification for two weeks and read the list yourself. For each company, ask whether you’d have stepped out from behind the stand to shake their hand. If the answer is yes for even a few of them, your website is busy enough.
So, who’s on your website?
Right now, people you’d want to meet, with nobody there to meet them. Engineers with a project, buyers comparing suppliers and customers looking at something new turn up every week of the year, and leave without a hello.
You don’t need a bigger website or more traffic to change that. You need someone on the stand. In practice that’s one list of companies every Monday, read by whoever would follow up the cards after a show.
Want to know who walks onto your stand this week? Try Snitcher and see which companies are on your website.
