Trade fair or targeted outreach: where a manufacturer's money goes further

Compare them on the cost of one qualified conversation. Count everything you spend, including your own people's time, and ignore the price of the stall or the list taken alone. A fair gives many short conversations in a few days with buyers who walk up to you. Outreach gives fewer, chosen conversations over several weeks. Which is cheaper for you depends on how many of the fair's visitors fit your product.

Define the thing you are counting

Both channels produce activity that looks like success: a stack of visiting cards, a list of opened emails. Agree one definition before you spend. A qualified conversation is a talk in which you learn three things: what the person needs, roughly how much, and whether the person has a say in buying it. Anything less is a contact, not a conversation.

Count contacts too if you like, but keep them in a separate column.

The worksheet

Fill one column for each channel. The figures below are illustrative, to show the method; use your own.

Work out the totals yourself. The point of the table is the last two lines, which are easy to skip.

What each channel demands afterwards

A fair loads the follow-up into the days after it. If your team returns tired and the cards sit in a bag, the money is lost. Our note on a same-evening routine for visiting cards shows how to avoid that. Budget the follow-up hours before you book the stall.

Outreach asks for the opposite: steady, boring work. Someone must research the list, write messages that mention the buyer's own product, and call on the second and third attempt. It dies when that person is pulled onto a rush order. If nobody owns it, do not start it.

Which fits which kind of product

Think about who is in the room, not about the channel's reputation.

• A fair suits a product buyers want to see, touch or compare, sold to a wide range of buyers who are all in one hall for the same purpose.
• Outreach suits a product sold to a known, small set of buyers: perhaps a few hundred plants that use your item. You can name them, find the right person, and write to each about something specific.
• Neither suits a product that is bought only after a long technical trial, unless you already have a way to run the trial. Fix that first.

If you cannot list the buyers who fit your product by name, outreach will be weak. If you cannot say what share of fair visitors would buy, the fair will be a gamble.

An invented case: an industrial chemical blender in Vadodara

Take an invented blender in Vadodara making cleaning and degreasing compounds for factories and workshops. The owner has always taken a stall at an industrial fair in Mumbai, and comes back with a pile of cards and a few orders, unable to say which cards led to which order. All figures below are made up.

For the next fair the owner books a smaller stall. In the weeks before it, letters go to a list of maintenance heads in plants within reach, naming the type of equipment each plant runs and the product that suits it. Eleven agree to meet at the stand. The owner also decides to count a conversation only when the person names a use and a quantity.

After the fair the cards are sorted. Of the eleven pre-booked meetings, six pass the test. Of about sixty walk-ins, nine do. The pre-booked meetings cost the letters and some time. The walk-ins cost the stall. The fair's value, the owner sees, is the room in which the meetings happen. Only two of the fifteen qualified conversations turn into quotes within the next season, and one into an order, so the owner moves some of the stall money into the list work and keeps the smaller stall.

Certain chemicals are regulated, with rules on labelling and sale. Those rules differ by state and body and change, so check with your own adviser or the regulator before you put claims on a stand or in a message.

When the answer is neither

If you have no sales person with time to follow up, spend nothing on either until you do. Both channels convert spend into conversations, and conversations only help if someone carries them forward. A smaller step may be better: a listing in the one directory your buyers use, plus a phone number that is answered.

Also pause if your delivery is stretched. New conversations that you cannot serve do more harm than none.

Run the sums for your last fair

Take the last fair or campaign you paid for. Add every cost, count the qualified conversations by the definition above, and divide. Then do the same sum for the channel you did not use, with honest estimates. If the outreach side wins and nobody has the time, outbound sales prospecting is the service, the manufacturing hub has more for factories, and you can tell us what you need to have the comparison done on your own figures.