Who is this trade-fair IITF 2011 for?

We walked through hall after hall, moved from one stall to another and my overwhelming impressions were:

1. The IITF 2011 is no longer aimed at the business visitor- not overtly like it used to be when I used to participate.

In those times we used to look forward in dread to the general public days- where you would be shouting at the top of your voice to make yourself hard- and yet not make any sense. Your “target audience” would be muscled out by aunties and uncles, with babies in arms in many cases.

And, now? Exhibitors are looking forward to the general public days- who will come to be hardsold pressure cookers, electric ovens, food processors, blood pressure monitors etc. Almost all companies have turned their presence into a branded retail store.

2. There seemed like a lot of companies who exclusively sell through the tradefair channel-

they do not have a shop, they do not have a website, they do not have a salesforce, they do not have distributors/ stockists; nothing.
They only go to tradeshows and sell there and then- in many cases, expecting the customer to carry the product back with them. I guess the customers would only part with their money in exchange for some “hardware”.

3. Where are the engineering products? The auto-components, the other light engineering products?

I can only guess at two reasons:

1. Marketing and relationship building and searched for partners have moved online- so instead of spending (say) 1 Million rupees on having a presence at the IITF 2011, companies are spending a fraction of the money on SEO and being found. Then there is phone and email for dialog and final meeting to sign the contract.

2. For those still interested in exhibiting at the trade-shows, there are increasingly specialized shows.

3. Delhi is no longer the only venue for trade-fairs in India. Folks are exhibiting closer to the markets: in Chennai, in Mumbai and other places.

Logistics of reaching IITF 2011:

First, the prudent thing to do: and I suggest you do the same:

Take the Metro!!

Get off at Pragati Maidan, and follow directions. We bought business visitor tickets- if you are visiting the tradeshow only for a day, you can buy it right at the Metro Station itself. Or else, take a HOHO bus from right outside the metro station- for FREE- and go to either Gate 1 or 2 where you can buy either the Rs 1500/- season pass or Rs 400/- daily ticket. These are for business visitors. If you wanted only the daily ticket, you could have bought it right at the Metro Station.

At Gate 2, we subjected ourselves to security check and entered- it seemed to me that the security check process, while thorough, took a long time. This was day 1 and they were coping with only business visitors- it will be interesting to see what they will do on a regular (general visitor) day.

General visitors: 19th to 27th of November, 2011.

Here’s a slide I put together which makes the point.

The first one, an account of a recent trip back to my engineering college, IT-BHU, went viral on Facebook and LinkedIn. It had 410 FB likes and 10 LI shares. It had 70 comments on the blog, triggered discussions on FB and LinkedIn groups. Even today, it pulls in tonnes of visitors. As someone, who blogs infrequently and writes on no particular topic in general, this was huge. On a few days, the visitor count was more than 500.

On one hand, it was surprising to see it happen – the post had appeal to only a very small, limited group of people – only those who have studied in IT-BHU (around 10,000 to 12,000 would be alive today – given that our batch sizes were not more than 300 or so till very recently. Having more than 3000 views of this post, was surprising.

My take on the post per se’? It was well written, but I have written better ones. Many of which have sunk without a trace. Take another post that I did couple of months later. It described the life of a chaiwalla and his wife, who sell tea close to my office. I thought this was one of my better posts – but, it sunk, like most of my other posts do.

So, what is the lesson for marketers?

It is crucial to have a customer for a product you are building- having tonnes of them is even better and having a place where there is significant gathering of them is just great. Now, here we had a product (the first blog post) where we had a product called “Nostalgia”, we  had the 2 alumni groups of ITBHU on LinkedIn and another on FB who were happy to read and pass it along.

As for the other product, the second blog above about the chaiwalla? It may be nice, but I am not known as a creative author or a celebrity blogger who anyway will get traffic. The market for this would have perhaps been on some creative writing sites where folks go to discover recently written articles. But, no matter.

What do you think? Do share comments and your own insights in bringing products to market.

I spent a most enjoyable 3 days on the ITBHU campus. While I have posted my impressions of the visit elsewhere, I thought I would post some thoughts on entrepreneurship in general. I said all this and more in my interactions with the students: formal or informal. Just to reinforce, in no particular order, here they go:

1. Focus on identifying the problem first; your solution comes a lot later.

2. An idea, a website, a business plan: they are all nice. But, customers, especially paying customers are best.

3. Spare a lot of thought on how you are going to sell.

4. Involve others; build a team. You can’t do it alone.

5. No one is going to steal your idea and make millions unless you have developed hardcore technology/ IP which need protection. This is even more true in the internet space.

6.  Think of execution; spare a thought for the challenges. And, what do you bring to the table.

7. Do not discount education. While many successful entrepreneurs were college dropouts and Tagore won the Nobel Prize without any formal education, don’t draw the wrong lessons.

8. Do not feel if you did not leave college as an entrepreneur, life will not be worth living. Your time will come.

9. Whoever told you he had a formula for entrepreneurship, was either a moron or a liar or a book-seller.

Here’s the slides of my talk to the students. I stuck very loosely to the slides and spoke mostly extempore. So, I am sorry there are no transcripts.

Allow me two minutes as I get to the point.

We have all bought a printer, from the very basic to more advanced. While we haggle the price down to the last Rs 50/- (~USD 1), we postpone the thought of the cost of printing - the ongoing relationship on even a monthly basis you have unknowingly signed up for.

Yes, right. I am talking about the cost of the print cartridge.

Okay, now to the point – why is all this relevant to CRM?

Simply, when you buy a CRM software, you are so “into” negotiating the per month license fees per user and beating him down on the customization, you fail to notice the one item on the table, which unnoticed today, will bleed you big going forward.

It is the storage cost.
In an earlier post, I have talked about The real cost of CRM implementation.  Let me spend a little more time on how you will slowly start bleeding on so-called low-cost CRMs.

You buy a CRM (SAAS) for USD 25/- per license per month. Let us say you have 10 users. So, your outgo on license fees per month is USD 250/- per month.

But, you only get 500MB of free storage for your entire organization! Go above that, and you pay USD 4/month/GB.

500MB?? You will run through it in the first month with your ten users generating activities, mailing literature, quotes and invoices and so on.

Let’s do a back of the envelope calculation for how much file storage can really be needed.

Quotes pdfs: 10KB per file

Invoice pdfs: ditto

Literatures send on email as attachments: 500KB to 1 MB each.

How long will it take for you to reach your limit or free storage? 1 month? 2 months? Know this; more time you spend on the system, more will be the storage that will pile up.