Carefree Communications

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Recently my company Franklin Spirko Media which offers Internet Marketing services exhibited at the Fort Worth Entrepreneur Expo. Overall we had a great show and got a lot of great leads and met a bunch of really cool people. Mostly people looking to build a business or people already doing it. There is something special and magical about thousands of entrepreneurs getting together. There is excitement, enthusiasm and optimism at a level that only people who are willing to take risks and work hard to turn ideas into reality.

Of course at any trade show there are always people you can only call parasites. They wander the isles pitching their wares to people who all PAID a fee and took the time to set up booths. Now when people visit our booth I do want to hear what they do and what their company is about but I don’t want them selling to me especially in a way that makes it clear they have absolutely no real interest in what our company does. At this latest trade show there were three “professions” that had plenty of representatives that really wore out their welcome. They were….

“Business Coaches” - This has become a generic over used term that covers a variety of positions that are simply “business consulting” in various packages. I know quite a few people that do this that are pretty damn good but I also have been “pitched” to by perhaps over 100 so called “coaches” that I would not want advice on how to find the highway from let alone running my business! At this show I piled up a total of 5 Business Coach Business cards that went directly into our booth trash can. Typical approach - Coach - “What does your company do?” Us - “Well we provide Internet Marketing services that help companies get leads and business online, we try…(cut off in mid sentence). Coach - “That sounds like a great business what I do is bla bla bla bla”

They practically verbally puke all over you with crap clichés like - “Everyone needs a coach”, “Even Michael Jordan needed a coach”, “Most people know what to do they just need someone to help keep them doing it”. Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut the hell up! First Mike’s coach KNEW HOW to play basketball, every does not NEED a coach and for God sakes if you need to be accountable get a job and let a boss keep you accountable because you are not cut out to run a business.

To all business coaches let me say paying a fee to buy a franchise and have two weeks of training does not qualify you to tell me how to run my company. It certainly is not a license to harass vendors that have paid for booth space at a trade show.

Network Marketers - Oh for the love of god please stop telling me about your “next trillion” or what ever other nonsense you are spouting. I don’t want to come to your meetings, I don’t want to bother my family about your crappy vitamins and I sure don’t want some guy that can’t even scrape up the money to have a booth at the show as my “mentor”. - There were also quite a few Network Marketing people there who did have booths, they did not wonder around bothering others, to those folks good luck building your pyramids full of dream big clones but do try to encourage your MLM brethren to have a bit more sense.

Bandwidth Sales People - By bandwidth I am talking about people that sell “data” and “voice” services like T1s or perhaps Business DSL. I also added to my trash can a nice stack of cards from these people that seemed to be at this show in unusual force! What a bunch of jerks these guys were and as soon as they saw “President” on my card they were on point like a dog on a whole covey of quail.

Not even the fake interest that “business coaches” pretended to have. Strait to “so how man phones are at your office” and “who provides your bandwidth” followed by “we should meet to see how we can help each other”. Again I wanted to shot SHUT UP!, just shut the hell up.

Now, exactly how do you propose we “help each other” there bud. You didn’t even bother to read the name of my company on my shirt before you started burning verbal calories, you have no idea what the heck it is that we do and you source of leads is apparently bothering people who are currently trying to promote their own companies. Additionally please bandwidth is a commodity today I can shop vendors up to DS3 and higher online and get pricing and proposals in no time and never deal with someone shoving a business card in my face.

To be fair I have to say I have done probably well over 200 different trade shows in my career and all of them have “parasites” and they are not always the three I mentioned above. I have had my fill of other professions at shows most are “agents”, “advisers” or “consultants” of various forms.

What I would like to hear from readers is what shows have you participated in and what were the various parasites that harassed you at them?

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I just took a look at a website that I really liked from a company called Resource Bridge. Resource Bridge provides a variety of solutions for Web based training solutions that allow companies to train clients, employees or customers more effectively then via conventional classroom solutions.

I remember back when a company I was a sales manager for introduced a new high end product that required extensive training. Most training the managers simply did with our reps in the field. With this release though the product was announced in January and orders were to be taken by February 1st. There was no time for me to travel into my 13 different states and train every rep and the company wanted to control the training very tightly because it was such a new product and a new industry we were going after.

The solution was to fly more then 130 sales reps to Chicago and train them at one time. This was expensive in the form of over 100 hotel rooms, 100 airline tickets, rental cars, expensed dinners and reserving conference rooms for several days.

It would have probably saved my company over 100,000 dollars to have done remote training for this launch and a company like Resource Bridge to do that training. Just something to think about as you or your company does planning for training vendors, partners, clients or customers.

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