- handbook
- Company
- Company
- Board
- Communications
- Decision making and project management
- Guides
- KPIs and OKRs
- principles
- Remote Work
- Security
- Asset Management Policy
- Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Policy
- Information Security Roles and Responsibilities
- Operations Security Policy
- Risk Management Policy
- Third-Party Risk Management Policy
- Human Resources Security Policy
- Incident Response Plan
- Cryptography Policy
- Information Security Policy and Acceptable Use Policy
- Secure Development Policy
- Data Management Policy
- Access Control Policy
- strategy
- values
- Operations
- Product
- Blueprints
- Feedback
- Market Segments
- Metrics
- Node-RED Dashboard
- personas
- Pricing Principles
- Principles
- Responsibilities
- Strategy
- Versioning
- Customer department
- Customer
- Customer Success
- flowfuseforeducation
- Hubspot
- Marketing
- How we work
- Video
- Customer Stories
- Community
- blog
- Lead Generation
- Webinars
- Social Media
- FlowFuse Messaging
- Marketing - Website
- Trade Shows
- Sales
- Engineering & Design Practices
- Design
- Engineering
- Certified Nodes
- Contributing
- Front End
- Packaging Guidelines
- Platform Ops
- Deployment
- Incident Response
- Observability
- Production Environment
- FlowFuse Dedicated
- Staging Environment
- Project Management
- Releases
- Security Policy
- Team NPM Registry
- tools
- Website A/B Testing
- Internal Operations
- People Ops
# Trade Shows
Trade shows are valuable opportunities to connect face-to-face with our industry—customers, partners, and potential users alike. They give us the chance to showcase our product in action, gather feedback, and build relationships that don’t always happen through online calls. Participating in a trade show is both a marketing initiative and a team effort, and often represents a significant investment.
# Preparing for a Trade Show as an Exhibitor
Planning a trade show well in advance is crucial. From aligning on the goals and messaging, to making sure we have the right hardware, giveaways, and booth setup—it’s a team effort. We break this down into five areas:
- Logistics – budget, team selection, travel, accommodation, vendors, equipment and giveaways.
- Demo – what we showcase during the event.
- Marketing and Sales – messaging, promotion and lead generation and nurturing.
- Design – booth layout and artworks.
- On-site team – prep for the event and etiquette.
# Logistics
After the decision has been made to attend an event, the first thing that's needed is a budget. This will guide the next steps in the event planning. The CEO is responsible for setting the budget and it should be tracked in a spreadsheet alongside all the logistic details, such as hotel details, team arrival and departure times, plus any relatet matter and added to the relevant folder in the Drive inside Fairs.
The planning should start at least six months in advance, so there's enough time to book hotels and for the team to block their agendas. The on-site team should be proposed by the CEO and CTO. Team size will depend on factors such as the event itself, the number of passes included, booth size, and duration. For a team of 4–5 members, consider:
- Two sales representatives or Customer Success.
- A technically skilled member that will be responsible for setting up and dismantling the demo at the booth.
- Someone from any other area that will attend to learn or bring support where needed.
Create a Slack channel with the proposed team and confirm their availability. The name of the channel should have the following format #proj-[event-name]-[year] - e.g. #proj-hannover-25. Use this channel to communicate any updates related to the trade show, it will be especially useful during the event as well.
After the team has confirmed their availability, the accomodation should be booked considering:
- Hotels near the venue are preferred over city-central ones.
- They should include breakfast or at least a fridge in the room to sort that out.
- Most of the team should arrive a day before the event starts, and the person responsible for setting up and dismantling the demo should arrive two days earlier and maybe leave the day after. It's recommended to check this with the team member before booking the rooms.
# Four months before the event
The booth vendor search should begin. Get at least three different offers (here's a list of past and potential vendors) and consider the demo as this impacts the layout, artwork and messaging of the booth. A big plus is having the vendor as near as possible to the venue, so the transport costs are lower and their team is nearby to solve any unforseen issues in a timely manner. Check the options with the CEO and once the vendor is selected, make sure to follow the steps on the vendor section of this handbook to handle all invoices.
Provide access to the vendor so their able to order the necessary services such as electricity, upload the booth blueprints for approval, and anything else that's required to build the booth. Take into consideration that these services are provided for an extra cost, same as wi-fi, cleaning, the leads app that need to be order from our side as soon as possible. The available services will vary from fair to fair, it's recommended to check the expenses sheet from past events to get an idea of what might be neeeded and the cost.
# Two months before the event
For every trade show, we bring giveaways and marketing materials like flyers or business cards to hand out to the visitors. Check in advance if it's possible to deliver these directly at the venue or the hotel and order the items accordingly. If it's not possible, coordinate this with the team member that's closer to the event location, so they can bring them along.
Make sure to create a booth schedule considering the demo set up and tear down, the fair distribution of hours at the event, and how the first days are always the busiest ones. The team should plan their travel and book their tickets considering that schedule and the assigned budget.
# Two weeks before the event
Hold a briefing meeting to share a checklist with the on-site team to prepare for the event and cover all the necessary details. Plan also a retrospective meeting for the week after to asses what went well and what needs improvement and create a document to take notes, share it in the event Slack channel and pin it, so everyone can start adding notes while they're there.
# Demo
The demo is the opportunity to shine at these events, is the way to show FlowFuse in action and how it addresses the pain points of our users. Make it the star of the booth. It should be interactive, shiny and reliable.
The CTO will lead this project alongside the team member in charge of the project and the details must be shared with the person in charge of searching booth vendors at least for months before the event, so it can be considered for the layout and technical aspects of the set up.
# Marketing and Sales
The event itself is a marketing activity, but it should be promoted well in advance to attract the biggest possible audience to the booth. Just waiting for visitors passing by to look at something that grabs their attention in our booth is not nearly enough. The purpose of this event and investment is to streghten relationships with current and potential customers and partners, as well as being discovered by a new audience that might be attending but haven't heard of us before.
These are the recommended marketing innitiatives to cover the basics, but new proposals and experiments are encouraged as well:
# Around four months before the event
A landing page of the event should be created, under the /events/ section. It should include all the relevant information about Flowfuse participation. If by that time all the details haven't been confirmed, start with the basic and iterate. Ideally it should include:
- What we’re showcasing or demoing at the fair.
- Video.
- Contact form.
- Link to free passes (if available).
- Booth location and details.
- Giveaways.
- Contests.
- Special events.
If the event provides free passes, send a dedicated email to customers and ICPs in our database, inviting them to attend and sharing the landing page link. Share it on socials as well, the sooner this is available the bigger is the opportunity to capture new leads, and keep posting about it once a week.
Research who might be attending to the event, sometimes the event page provides a list of exhibitors or attendees. Make sure to share this list with sales for outreach. Getting meetings booked before the event is the first goal of the promotion efforts.
If there's a partner that won't be attending as an exhibitor, they might be interesting in presenting at our booth. Reach out to see if it's possible to plan a special event that could attract a crowd at the booth and include it in the promotion planning.
# Three months before the event
Alongside sales and the CTO, define the booth messaging considering the demo and the company messaging, use this to select or create the taglines for the booth artwork, and the content for handouts, banner or anything that requires the design department services.
# Two months before the event
Choose the giveaways that align better with the messaging, audience, storage space, budget and that might be useful on a day to day basis. Remember to consider the weight when deciding the amount of items, specially if a team member will be bringing those items as part of their luggage. Check the logistics section to decide when to order the items.
The on-site team should have some branded attire and business cards, don't forget to include those in the artwork requests and the orders alonside the giveaways.
All these things are ordered online, the usual vendors are Vistaprint and Stickermule as they usually have an online store for each country, make sure to place the order in the corresponding page so the delivery is possible in a timely manner.
Increase social media activity and start posting twice a week.
Define a leads strategy with the sales team, what will be the success metric, a plan to meet the goal, and a follow up plan after capturing the leads. This is the whole point of this type of event, the success is what happens after it's over, we should be able to generate a positive ROI from the trade show, so having a plan before the team gets there is crucial.
# One Month Before the Event
Prepare a social media content plan covering pre-event, live updates, and post-event content, and assign an on-site team member to be the DRI of the content creation on-site. The most important piece will be a video of the demo, this should be recorded as soon as possible. It's recommended to do so at first thing in the morning as it's the quieter time of the day.
Other type of content that's proven to be engaging is team pictures, tagging the team members for them to share as well. Our followers like to see the people behind the project and if someone has already stopped by our booth they'll see a familiar face and it's more likely that they leave a message or interact with the post.
Make sure to create a detailed briefing, provide examples and details of what is required and when.
# Two Weeks Before the Event
The sales team should send personal emails to those who redeemed free tickets, inviting them to book a meeting at the booth with one of the on-site team members. These should be personal emails, not newsletter or marketing emails, as this is a personal invitation to someone who already knows the company and redeemed their ticket using our link.
Company participants will review the event's messaging framework, practice the pitch, record it, and share it on the Slack channel.
# During the event
Execute the social media plan with the content that the on-site team create while they're there.
# After the event
Sales and marketing teams will follow up with leads as per the pre-defined strategy.
# Design
Around three months before the event, the booth vendor and booth messaging must have been defined. Following the vendor's technical specifications, the demo layout, devices, and the messaging, prepare the required artwork for the booth. There are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- The background colours of the booth should be inviting, although red is one of our brand colours, use it only to highlight some small portions of the artwork.
- The top corners near the halls are the most visible sections, make sure to include FlowFuse and Node-RED logos in those areas.
- Around 1.70m from the ground up won't be visible at all times given the traffic at these events, so don't add any text or relevant info in those areas.
- Don't add too many elements or text to the walls, people won't stop to read everything that's written on walls so keep it short and easy to read.
- Review the text more than once, look for typos or inconsistencies and make sure it's good to go before sharing the final artwork for production.
Create the artwork for the handouts, banner or any material that needs to be printed and delivered according to the content prepared by marketing. This should be ready a month before the event at the latest, so there's enough time for production and delivery.
Make sure to update the video loop for the screens, check the taglines, customers and partners logos and add any relevant info like upcoming events, webinars, promotions or anything that might be valuable to attendees. This can be delivered up to one week before the event.
# On-site team
The team should confirm their availablity around six months before the event, when they're invited to the trade show.
As part of the logistics planning, a booth schedule will be created and accomodation will be booked. Considering those things, travels should be planned and booked two months in advance.
If anyone wishes to take days off after the event, it would be ideal to add the out of office event to the team and personal calendars right after booking the travel tickets, so the retrospective meeting can be planned ahead of time considering the team availability.
A briefing meeting will be held and checklist will be provided two weeks before the trade show, so everyone can prepare for the upcoming event.
At arrival, the team should ensure to check all the items on the list, follow the booth schedule, adhere to the leads strategy plan, social media plan and booth messaging, while maintaining professional booth etiquette. See dos and don’ts from ESN for reference.
# Preparing for a Trade Show as visitor
When visiting a trade show you should prepare your trip. Fairs usually publish a list of exhibitioners. Scan that list with names you want to visit, and write these in a document. Than order that list based on stand location. Fairs can become rather big, and going back and forth over the area doesn't scale. Review also the traveling salesperson problem.
Further, please get yourself a few business cards. While a bit old-skool, they serve a purpose and are easy to give out.
# Stand visits
Each conversation you have and stand you visit, try to understand who you want to talk to and what your goal is. It's OK to ask someone at the booth if they're the right person to talk them.
Keep your phone in your pocket at all times, give full attention to the person you're talking to. Reply to missed messages and calls after you've left the stand.
When giving out business cards, ask for one back, that way there's a mutual connection if one side forgets to reach out or loses your business card.
Your phone is kept in your pocket at all times.
# Post-visit
Go through the business cards you collected and reach out to each and everyone of them. Thank them for the conversation and ask if there's any questions outstanding you can help them with. Consider adding these contacts to HubSpot.