Why You Should Attend Trade Shows
“I don’t believe in trade shows. All that’s there are salespeople trying to get my money by selling their latest gadgets. If I need something I’ll just find it on the internet and buy it.”
Well, that’s one way to do it but it may not be the most efficient use of your time or resources. There are a lot of tools and processes out there. Many may perform similarly but their differences may define what you need specifically as opposed as getting a job done slower, more expensively, or with old technology that’s been surpassed by new techniques.
Let me give you an example. You get your first job tackling a clogged cast iron pipe inside the walls of a building. If you are dipping your toe into the drain cleaning end of the business and have very little experience with cast iron pipe, you may jump into the internet and find a whole host of methods to clear the clog.
Each method, depending on who wrote it, varies from using a water jetting device, a conventional cable machine with a variety of cutting and scraping tools to clear it, or high-speed cleaning machines. Being uneducated with each process you read what is written then select one method that you “feel” may be the best solution depending on how convincing the write up was. Because you’re under a time constraint you pick one and apply it to the job at hand. This is the approach that many take to get technology into our businesses.
Your education to fully know what is available and what would best fit the job you were given was short-circuited. You may continue with this method for years never finding the best solution – until a competitor comes along and undercuts your pricing for this type of work. Your first reaction is that the competitor doesn’t know his costs, will go broke, and soon your customers will be begging you to come back and reclaim your customer. But the call doesn’t come and pretty soon you begin losing more and more business to this competitor.
After the competitor is fully entrenched you begin to learn what they are doing and how they can perform the work for less than your costs. Now you are in the catch-up mode trying to figure out how to acquire the technology, how to recapture customers and get your staff trained on a new method – convincing them to let go of old technology for the new process.
This scenario brings us to your statement of not believing in trade shows. Yes, there are salespeople at the trade shows, as well as new “gadgets”. Even though most – if not all – of the gadgets or processes are somewhere on the internet, the differences that you can find at the trade shows are virtually all of the competitive processes allow you to explore the best solution in a much shorter time commitment than searching out the information on the internet and then digesting it.
Trade shows are a very inexpensive event available to learn about different products, processes, and applications. The collection of these can be viewed in a day or two and can get you educated enough to make an informed choice as opposed to throwing the dice by picking something up with limited information.
An industry show, the WWETT show is coming up February 17th to the 20th. You can use this show as well as others to educate yourself so your competitors won’t end up ahead of you.
For more information, call us at +1-888-354-6464 or email us at info@pipeliningsupply.com.
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