Brochures can provide great comfort for most sales people when they’re manning an exhibition stand. Having a brochure for each product lures them into feeling they’re in a selling nirvana.

Be warned though – there’s a real shift happening when it comes to customer-centric sales and marketing. This is no less apparent in the exhibition environment. Buyers want innovative solutions that directly address their problems.

Ask yourself, what’s going to be more effective in your sales discussion – a company brochure or a bespoke digital solution?

My take on the limitations of brochures:

• You collect zero data – i.e. who took what, what did they read, did they forward it to someone else (or turf it)
• Humans can be too polite; we take brochures even when we’re not interested
• Most of us (bar politicians) are environmentally conscious
• Company products and services are constantly evolving (existing brochures can quickly become obsolete)
• Professional print production is expensive (factor in all the costs, including design and delivery)

I’m not suggesting this is death of the brochure. They still have their place.

This article is to provoke thought on why switching to digital could be a smarter solution for your business.

This is why touch screens rock:

• It shows you’re a company that moves with modern trends. Think of the brand experience for your buyer. They will directly associate it to other areas of your business
• You will avoid time wasters. People tend not to give you their details unless they are genuinely interested
• It’s much easier to collect contact details and talk next steps. Details for information can be a very powerful tool
• You can track who is interested in exactly what product without the need for additional administration (cue smiling sales person)
• It creates a targeted profile on each customer. This is extremely important intelligence for all areas of your business
• You can measure the success of each exhibition by using the supporting data

Touch screens will soon become the norm. They address so many of the challenges both sales people and buyers face at exhibitions.

Our clients who have successfully implemented touch screen solutions into their exhibitions have now retired their hard copy brochures to the company archives. The touch screen solutions that we are producing for our clients have been received really well by teams and are often used outside of the show environment because they can be updated easily and everyone can have the information they need at their fingertips.

If you have read this far, I’m guessing you could still be curious. Call me for a chat so we can talk through how we can help drive your sales through the roof.

Jess