Bob Milam, trade show manager at Kerry Americas, is a past All-Star Award winner, a current Editorial Advisory Board member, a Conference Advisory Board member, and an EXHIBITOR Conference faculty member. tradeshowbob@gmail.com

here are two ways to catch fish. You can get on a charter boat, put a hunk of squid on a big hook, and angle for the perfect marlin to mount in your den. Or, you can haul up your anchor, trawl with a huge net, and pick through the mess that you catch to find the keepers.

The method you choose depends a lot on what you’re trying to catch, how much of it you want, and whether or not you want to pay top dollar for each fish or just haul in the whole school on the economy plan. The trade show industry works the same way, only without the nets and that fishy smell.

My personal fishing story began a few months before the 2004 International Poultry Exposition (IPE). My company wondered whether it should fish at all or just cut bait. After all, the IPE hadn’t been what you’d call a prize fishing hole for us. Instead, it was 20,000 attendees looking at all things poultry, from plucking machines to the latest in chicken-house ventilation.

Typically, show management places our exhibit under the heading of “Further Processing,” where we try to sell our crunchy breadcrumb coating that makes chicken nuggets taste so good. Out of 20,000 people, only 53 care about the crunchy coating.

Year after year, we took a bunch of chicken nuggets with the coating, fried them up, and served them to whoever wanted free hors d’oeuvres. So, everyone used our booth as a lunch counter. We engaged in conversations with hundreds of people, and our salespeople were wading through nets full of leads endlessly searching for those few big fish that might actually be interested in our products.

It became clear we had to change our lead-gathering technique. Instead of “gathering” leads, we would “filter” leads, focusing less on quantity and more on quality, ignoring the masses and searching for the prospects who were most likely to become clients.

We started by asking one simple question: Whom did we want to see at IPE? As it turned out, our salespeople knew exactly who our target audience was at the show — including their companies, names, and addresses.

With the list in hand, we set out to see if these big fish had anything in common. After discovering that many of our targeted prospects were outdoorsy people and had gone to schools where college football was king — places such as Texas A&M or Kansas State — we figured that each of them would probably like a new set of binoculars. So we bought a bunch of plastic toy binoculars, and sent them to targeted attendees along with a note explaining that the toy could be exchanged for a real pair of high-quality Bushnell binoculars at our booth.

We then took the food produced by each of our top leads and coated it with our tasty breadcrumbs, giving each contact on our list a chance to taste our crunchy coating on their very own products.

We had 17 meetings in the first four hours of the show, one of which resulted in a $750,000 deal signed on the spot. In total, we conducted 34 meetings, and exchanged 40 toy binoculars, a 75-percent response rate to our pre-show promotion.

The lesson: Whether you gather or filter, you need to determine your fishing strategy before you set sail.

Gather or Filter?

If your primary objective is increasing brand recognition, getting the word out about a new product, or attracting the majority of the show’s attendees, you probably want to gather. If your objective is to attract top prospects, increase face time with highly qualified buyers, or search for those hard-to-find A-level leads, you probably want to filter (a technique that places quantity on the back burner, opting instead for fewer, but more qualified, leads).

The following tactics will help you implement the approach you choose, and ultimately land you the quantity and quality of leads you’re looking for.

Option 1: Gather

If you’re looking to create a rush to your booth, you’ll want to let everyone know what you’ve got planned. Pre-show e-mail campaigns are designed to do just that: reach as many people as possible for as little as possible. Send e-mails introducing your company and letting attendees know where your booth is located and why they should add it to their must-see lists.

To gather attendees at your booth, you need to create a reason for them to come. Build traffic by distributing promotional items, hosting an in-booth contest, activity, or presentation — anything that will pique attendees’ curiosity and get them into your exhibit.

The layout of your booth should be open and inviting: no walls that block attendees, no imposing barriers such as counters or tables. Signage should be bold and eye catching. If there’s not a line or crowd in your booth at all times, you’re doing something wrong.

Your booth staff should be trained to collect leads efficiently. Now is not the time for long sales pitches; you’re focusing on the sound-bite speech. And, with so many attendees expected to pass through your exhibit, a quick, reliable lead-capture system is vital.

Option 2: Filter

The first step when filtering attendees is to determine whether there are enough valuable leads attending the show to make it worth your while to exhibit. If there are, then you’ll need to find out who those leads are, design a marketing strategy to reach those individuals, and get enough of them to visit your booth — and ultimately purchase your product or service — to pay for your presence at the trade show.

At the least, you must identify and contact the attendees you’d like to see and let them know you’ll be at the show. At best, you can set up appointments ahead of time with key prospects and VIP clients.

If you’re not sure who your top prospects are, devise a plan to cull those few qualified attendees from the herd. E-mail all attendees a link to a Web site where you pre-qualify leads via an online survey. Then target the most promising respondents.

While no one wants to be seen as unfriendly on the trade show floor, your booth should not go out of its way to attract everyone. Here, barriers to entry are not only acceptable, they might even be preferable. Meeting rooms are probably necessary. Signage should allow attendees to self qualify rather than attracting every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Consider a high-priced or high-quality promotional giveaway, something of greater value than the branded pens or T-shirts you might use if you were gathering. Remember, since you’re exclusively focusing on a handful of attendees, you can afford to spend more per attendee than if you were targeting the show’s entire pre-registration list.

Whatever technique you employ, let your objective drive your decisions and you’re almost sure to catch the leads you’re fishing for. e