If you are responsible for planning your product strategy, product portfolio or its implementation – i.e. the design of new products or services – then you are certainly looking for various sources of inspiration. One of these may be a visit to a trade fair. 

When you return from the trade fair, you may find that this source was rich in information or, on the contrary, you may come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time and money. The preparation for this visit has a big influence on this assessment.

Let’s start with the organizational side. 

It is worth planning your trip a few months in advance. During the trade fair period, nearby hotels are overcrowded. In addition, their price often rises a few days before the opening date of the fair. 

Trade fairs generally last several days. The people who are „on the other side”, i.e. the exhibitors, get tired and lose their „freshness” with each passing day. This is perfectly natural. With this in mind, it is advisable to plan your visit on the first or at most the second day of the fair.  Accept the fact that other visitors have also come to this conclusion, so it may be crowded.

Most trade fair organizers provide information about who will be exhibiting on a dedicated website. A large proportion also create dedicated apps. These often offer the possibility to download a virtual or ‘printable’ entrance ticket. In this way, a lot of time can be saved by avoiding queues at registration.

It is important to analyze your list of exhibitors. Some of them are your current or future customers, suppliers, cooperators or competitors. Grouping them according to this category is a good first step. For each of these groups, you need to prepare the purpose of the talk and observations of what they are exhibiting. 

A list of the companies you plan to visit, with location information, will be very useful. You will find this information on the website or in the app. Trade fairs are often located in several halls. You can sort the list by location. This will reduce the time spent searching for the companies you want to visit and going „back and forth”. Such a list will also serve as a checklist to keep you updated on who else you planned to meet. It is a good idea to print out the list, but more on that later. 

Some visitors walk for miles between the stands, take hundreds of photos – but do not talk to the exhibitors. And if they do talk, they ask obvious questions, the answers to which can be found in publicly available materials. If you limit yourself to such activity, it is probably better to stay in the office and browse the websites of the companies you are interested in. In order for the visit to turn out to be the valuable source of information mentioned at the beginning, the questions need to be prepared in advance. 

You can prepare a list of questions on your own or as a group. The second way has the advantage that the list of questions will be extended to include other people’s perspectives. For example, project managers can ask about collaboration opportunities, commercial details, engineers about technical details of presented solutions, testing methods, patent protections. Each person invited to ask a question helps to create a complete list. 

Being on the spot, having dozens of conversations, it is easy to forget or confuse the information received. To avoid this, you need to have some kind of note-taking system. I tried three ways.

Laptop. After each conversation I had, I looked for a place to make a brief note of the meeting. The main problems with this method are that you don’t have the questions available during the interview, so you may forget some of them. Admittedly, you can always go back and ask them, but it’s a waste of time. Finding a place to take notes on your laptop is often not easy. There are a limited number of such places, so you have to go there every time – another waste of time. Creating a note after the interview, may cause you to omit or distort some information – I’m particularly thinking of technical parameters, names etc. 

Tablet. You have the questions in front of you, you take notes as you speak, plus you can take photos and paste them directly into your notes. This is the biggest advantage. Any other method of note-taking is not linked to the photos you take. You will have to combine them with the text on your return or after each conversation – again, time is needed for this. 

I often mention time, which, despite appearances, is not that much. A working day generally lasts about 7-8 hours. You have to deduct time for lunch. If you have, for example, 20 companies you want to visit on your list, you have about 20 minutes for each meeting (including time to get there and sometimes waiting in line to ask questions).

Paper notes. Advantages similar to notes on a tablet. The problem of unlinked photos with notes remains. 

Taking photos. If you are not using a tablet, you will need to combine your photos with your notes later. What will make it very easy to sort them is a routine of taking photos. The first photo I take is a photo of the trade fair stand with the company name on it, followed by photos of interesting items, materials, business cards. If for some reason I return to the stand I was at earlier and take more photos – I follow the same routine: the trade fair stand with the company name, then photos of interesting materials. 

An alternative to taking photos is filming. The biggest advantage of this method of recording is definitely more information compared to photos. There are also two disadvantages. The first is the longer time needed to film interesting things. The second, combined with the main advantage, is the interpretation of what is most important on film. While a photo shows exactly what we were interested in, there will be much more information, shots on film, which may make it not so easy to remember what was most interesting when visiting a particular stand. On the other hand, people watching the footage who were not at the trade fair may notice something that they would not have had the opportunity to notice in the photos. 

Other tips:

• If you receive new (previously unknown) information during the interview, it is worth verifying it with a representative of another company with a similar profile.
• Pay attention to how companies present their products, services. What is their „selling story”?
• A visit to a trade fair wearing clothes with your company’s logo on them may „stiffen” some interlocutors. I don’t encourage you to hide the name of the company you work for, but I don’t encourage you to overexpose it either.

Summarizing and following up on the threads initiated at the trade fair is just as important as preparing for the trade fair visit. This stage will allow a final evaluation of the effectiveness of the visit.

It is good practice to prepare a trade fair report which includes the answers received to the questions prepared in advance, photos, videos, contact persons and, most importantly, a brief description of the next steps planned. These plans do not have to be for every company visited, but should address those that we consider to be key. 

Examples of actions include:

• contacting people who were given to us as competent to answer the questions we asked at the fair, but were not present there. 
• Verifying important information received at the fair that may have an impact on the description of the requirements of a product we plan to design or are in the process of designing.
• Incorporating newly learned requirements for the product/service being designed into the application description.
• Signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with those companies with which we plan to work more closely and exchange information.
• Sharing and presenting the report to the people who co-created the list of questions before the fair, the people responsible for the product portfolio in the company.
• Verification of the patents you heard about at the fair.

A trade fair trip prepared and executed in such a way gives a good chance that, both in our opinion and in the opinion of our co-workers, the event will be remembered as interesting and valuable. It can also serve as an inspiration for others on how to organize a visit to the next trade fair.