Trade shows are excellent opportunities to get in contact with your market, meet potential customers and to talk with future end users of your products. The American culture at work strongly prompts technicians and decision makers to go to trade shows and users groups. The main problem you will face over there, is that the audience is very distracted—there are hundreds of booths to visit—therefore they will only have a few minutes to spend with you. If you can grab someone's attention, chances are the sales discussion will follow the trade show. You should send at least 3 representatives from your company on a first trade show:

• A technical presenter, who masters the art of demonstrating the product in less than 10 minutes. This is a very complex thing, because you should not detail too much but at the same time you have to show all the key features: the ones that will show an immediate return on investment to the customer.
  
  
• A sales representative, with a double task. First, he will drag people to the booth. His job is to talk to people passing by the booth, and to convince them to sit down to attend the presentation—in 15 seconds. To achieve this, he has to streamline a perfect speech, or he may organize a contest with a raffle to push the prospect to fill out a qualification form, which may help a lot (Americans always like goodies!). His second task is to discuss with the prospects who want to go further, immediately after watching the demo: make an appointment, give price ranges, and why not close the deal if the attendee is a decision maker who controls his own budget.
  
  
• An assistant, whose only roles are to collect qualification forms, scan badges and distribute goodies (T-shirts, stress balls or other) in exchange for completely filled-out qualification forms, and of course manage marketing collaterals supplies.