Filtering Posts by Topic: Big Bill

Want More Visitors In Your Booth? Use A “Big Bill” Like This One To Stop People In Their Tracks And Get More Home Improvement Leads & Appointments…

Attract More People Into Your Booth. Get More Appointments.
Make Follow-Up A Snap. Read These Tips!

Marketing Quick Tips: Home Shows

By Rich Harshaw

Home show season is right around the corner… so it’s time to get your home show ducks in a row RIGHT NOW. As you ponder the best ways to maximize home show leads and revenue, consider these tips:

Tip 1: Is It Even Worth Your Time? Remember the good old days when there was one main show that came to town every year that attracted more attendees than you knew what to do with? Now most cities have multiple shows at different times of the year—and fragmented attendance. The last thing you want to do is pay a ton of money, staff up, then sit around twiddling your thumbs for three days.

So do a little bit of intelligence work. It’s pretty simple: contact the show organizer and ask them for references from last year’s show that you can call, then actually do your due diligence. Call at least five companies and ask them how many years they’ve attended, what the attendance patterns have been in recent years (Up? Down? Steady?), how last year’s show was, how responsive the attendees were, and whether or not they’re going back. Those questions should loosen the lips, so to speak, and you should be able to gather a wealth of information.

If the organizer won’t give you information on previous attendees, you can often find them by searching on their website—frequently the information from last year isn’t updated until just before this year’s show. Of course, if they won’t give you the info, that’s just weird—and a really bad sign.
Read More

You Don’t Have To Hire And Manage A Van Full Of Sketchy Door Knockers To Have Success With Canvassing.

Just Start (And Finish) With One Guy.

By Rich Harshaw

Read to the end of this article for a challenge. It’s limited to the first three companies… so hurry.

About five years ago I had a client in Washington D.C. that had built his entire business on canvassing. You know what I’m talking about—old school, pavement-pounding, number-crunching, knock-till-your-fingers-bleed canvassing.

His secret weapon was the University of Maryland, which was about five minutes from his office. Back in the days before online message boards, he’d post notices around campus on real life bulletin boards and telephone poles advertising high paying part-time jobs for college students. He’d get a virtually unlimited stream of kids willing to pound doors… and in return, he’d pay them $10 to $20 an hour depending on their production. This was back when minimum wage was in the $3 to $5 range. On the strength of those college kids, he built a solid company that always had an abundant lead flow and healthy sales.

Then when the century changed, a funny thing started to happen—the university students stopped responding to those bulletin board notices. Promises of signing bonuses, spiffs, and higher starting salaries did little to change the tide, so he started looking elsewhere, including Craigslist, miscellaneous job boards, and even street-corner day laborers. Suffice it to say, the quality of the canvassers went down… to the point where he abandoned canvassing altogether and got serious about advertising instead. That’s how and when I met him.
Read More