If I never go to another trade show... (Score 2)

it will be too soon. Everything about it is misery. You're presenting: Enjoy your extortionate floor space cost, your insane booth manufacturing costs, the (probably much worse now) huge expense of shipping the display, pay for Drayage, pay for carting, pay for carpet, the crazy cost of union labor to install the booth, the $150 an outlet to get 110V plugged in, the $4000 to have 25Mbps of bandwidth that will ABSOLUTELY fail when you have the one customer you were really waiting for in the booth, the fact that you have to send 3 people (at least) ahead of the show start to setup technology.. all while being barked at by tradesmen that you're not allowed to plug in your own gear (better go get in line at the electricians desk and kiss some ass)... Then the show- Never enough business to validate the spend. When you do nail a huge client you met there- you are (at least I have been) always 70% sure you would have pulled them without the show. You really went to make sure he can meet with you and not JUST your competition. You're attending: Enjoy being stalked... I have been followed around by competing vendors while being cornered by solution vendors that riff right into a pitch for something that doesn't apply all while being hawk eyed by the sales manager. If I DO interrupt him to tell him it doesn't apply- I get to hear the sales manager implement his best Always Be Closing routine to try to get that sweet sweet QR code scan. My days of willingly being on either side of this is over at 37 years old. What we need are industry databases with good manicured content and solid ways of navigating through them to find people that fit your needs. Then we can jump off from there. I really like how GlobalSources has done theirs. I think we need way more of that. I wish we could all collectively agree to just be done with trade shows. First post: preview shows a wall of text. I apologize.