BackOnce your exhibition space is booked and your exhibition stand is designed, you’ll be likely to be thinking about what exhibition staffing options are available. Getting the right staff to give off the best first impression at an event is crucial to your success. They’re acting as the face of your brand, so be sure to consider the following options when choosing exhibition stand and event staff:
Own Staff
Using your own staff is a common choice used by many exhibitors. The benefit of using your own staff is that they should already know your business inside-out, so shouldn’t need as much training on the products or services you offer. It’s usually also in their best interest that the event goes well to them, especially if commission is offered to sales people manning your stand.
Problems with using your own staff is that some will consider the task of an easy ‘day out of the office’ and they won’t be prepared for how intense the environment and exhibition can be. Staff treating an event like a ‘paid company day out’ can be a recipe for disaster and you need to make sure this isn’t the mindset of your staff. Taking staff out of their day-to-day job can also have negative implications for business-as-usual processes too.
Promotional Agency Staff
Zest, who have one of the UK’s largest networks for exhibition staffing options, claim that only 6% of attendees are approached at exhibitions and that using their staff will increase this amount. Another event staffing agency, Expostars, claim that 65% of exhibitors don’t have a pro active face-to-face engagement strategy for their staff. There’s 100s of promotional agency staffing companies out there – these agencies can provide brand embasseduers, leafletting staff, entertainers and exhibition staff. The benefit of using agency staffing is that they’ll have experience of selling & communicating in an exhibiton environment. Using event staffing can help to make sure productivity stays high in the workplace, especially when you don’t want to take out existing staff away from day-to-day duties. It can also be a lot easier to organise too, especially if an event is booked last minute. If you didn’t already know, ELM offer an end-to-end service and we can even organise event staff to work at your exhibition if you don’t have time to do so yourself.
The disadvantage of using agency staff is mainly related to training and costs. Training exhibition staff will take time and as a representive of your brand they will need to know about the products / services you offer inside out. Event staffing can also be costly too, not only will you need to pay the staff themselves, but also the commission that the agency will take too – so it’s worth asking around various agencies to get the best possible price.
When looking at exhibition staffing, we recommend you consider both options and potentially look into combining some event agency staff with your own staff. This way you’ll get the best of both worlds in combining product knowledge with exhibition sales experience.
