Adapting to the trade show to meetings shift. (Meeting & Event Guide).

If you've been dealing with a lot of companies who have increased their meetings and corporate events budgets, get used to the good news: dollars are flowing out of trade shows into meetings in a mass exodus.

The reason? According to many Fortune 500 exhibit managers in high-tech and (what s left of) the dot gone world, trade show budgets have been decimated. When revenue takes a dive, the easiest thing for the CFO to cut is the trade show budget. Because most C level executives see trade shows as a mysterious black hole when it comes to ROI, many companies are placing their bets on producing their own meetings and events where they can better control the results.

Controlling the invite list is a top priority to getting results. Big trade shows like Comdex bring in 150,000 people, but if 90% of them are not your target, you end up with a booth clogged with the wrong prospects.

In a small meeting or event, targeting attendees is a fairly simple task. Buying lists from brokers can get you the exact job titles you are seeking, and using your own in-house database is the best place to start. Location is also a key. Most small events will draw 80% or more of their attendees from a 50-mile radius. In a city like LA, there is a fertile field of attendees in just about every vertical market imaginable.

If you re making the shift from trade shows to meetings, consider starting small, with a target of a few hundred attendees not thousands. With a tight job market, attendees are looking for a genuine opportunity to learn something that makes them more valued to their employer. Plan educational seminars that are more than just advertisements, and if you can attach a certification program to it through your industry's association, that s even better.

Don't underestimate your competition, which, by the way, is not your business rival. Your event will compete in the mind of the attendee with other events they have been to, as well as professional trade shows. From your event website to the location and property, make quality choices that will ensure a positive impression on your target market.

If you are planning a small event and an online registration system is not possible, use your own in-house database or spreadsheet. But make sure you create professional attendee badges and send them out to confirmed invites in advance. This is a good way to cut down on your no-show rate. The mag stripe credit card style badge typically used at the big trade shows is the best option, especially in today s security-focused market. Mag stripe badges are impossible to duplicate at the local Kinko's and provide meeting planners with a professional look and feel.

Using mag stripe badges also opens the door to many professional capabilities, such as attendance tracking and even lead retrieval systems for corporate partners. While lead retrieval the process of collecting and qualifying leads has been a standard at large trade shows for more than a decade, it is rarely seen at smaller corporate events. Yet as big corporate exhibitors find themselves increasing at smaller events, the lead retrieval process is not only expected, but required.

You have to collect good sales lead information even at small events, says Joshua Stevens, trade show manager at Xerox. A scribbled note on the back of a business card is never going to make it into our CRM (customer relationship management) system, so electronic lead capturing for us is mission critical. Stevens uses a PC-based software solution to capture leads at all of their shows and events. Instead of scribbling notes, he clicks off the answers to a series of questions on his PC, such as product interest, timeframe to purchase, size of the deal, and so forth. And he can type as many notes as he wants. Using his system (NewLeads Survey-Builder), Stevens can get the leads from the show or event to his sales team within a day of the end of the event.

The lack of lead retrieval systems at events is typically a cost issue. According to registration expert Kathy DesJardin, the cost of bringing in a big registration company to provide lead retrieval is just out of the question for many meeting planners. DesJardin spent 20 years with trade show registration giant RCS in Ventura before going to join the smaller NewLeads to head up meeting and event services.

NewLeads brings full color mag stripe badges and attendance tracking tools to the meetings market for prices that big registration companies won t even look at, she said. The advantage, she says, is that they are able to print and encode mag stripe badges using the meeting planner s existing database or spreadsheet, without bringing in any big (and expensive) onsite registration program.

Attendees view the mag stripe badges like a professional business card for the meeting or event, something on a par with big trade shows. Meeting organizers see the badges as a way to tighten security. Continuing education (CEU) seminar providers use the badges to scan people as they go in and out of the seminar rooms.

With tighter CEU and CME (Medical Education) audit demands, you must have something that is more verifiable than a bar code on a piece of paper, said Kristin Hedman, of meeting planner First Contact. Mag stripe badges work very well and clients, like Oracle, appreciate the professional appearance of their logo on the badges.

Some providers, like NewLeads, have found a way to quickly scan attendees without using just a mag stripe on the badges. By also printing a small bar code on the front of the badge, NewLeads scans attendees with special Palm Pilots using built-in laser scanners. This is fast and easy and allows us to gather hundreds of scans in a minute, said NewLeads founder and CEO John Hasbrouck. We can then hot sync the scans and run instant reports on all of the attendees, something that takes other companies weeks to produce, according to Hasbrouck.

Yet Hasbrouck says the mag stripe is still needed for other purposes like lead capturing and email cafes. Mag stripe badges are typically encoded with all of the attendees contact information. A bar code used in seminar scanning merely carries the person s registration ID number, which is all that is needed for attendance tracking. Hasbrouck also suggests using the mag stripe badges for taking attendee satisfaction surveys, where Tablet PC s armed with mag stripe readers can be used as roaming survey stations.

According to top meeting planners like First Contact s Hedman, understanding the success of your event is fundamental to retaining your corporate clients. At the end of the day, after all of the hard work and perfectly executed events, she says her clients still want to know the metrics on the attendance, the seminars, and the attendee satisfaction level. She adds that without a solid mag stripe badge at the foundation, this becomes an antiquated process of doing it all by hand.

Information for this article was provided by NewLeads, Inc, which occupied offices at I-lope and Olympic until 2001, and is now located near Ventura. Among its clients are many meeting planners and corporate exhibitors, including First Contact, IBM, Xerox, Eli Lilly, Sears and hundreds more. For more information, visit newleads.com or call Kathy DesJardin at 877-775-3237.