[EXHIBITOR EDITION] Maximize Your Trade Show Investment

Trade shows can be a powerful marketing tool. Hear from Jay Menashe of Exhibitus, Inc. as he shares how to justify your trade show ROI to management and secure continued support for 2026 and beyond.

Sean Riley: Hi, and welcome to a special exhibitor series episode of unPACKed. I'm your host, Sean Riley. Trade shows can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Hear from Jay Menashe, Senior Director, Strategy and Growth at Exhibitus, Inc., and learn how to justify your trade show ROI to management for continued engagement in 2026 and beyond.

So with all the fancy introductions out of the way, welcome to the podcast, Jay.

Jay: Thank you. Really excited to be here.

Sean Riley: Oh, the pleasure is all ours. So we’re talking trade shows, and to kick things off, let’s say I’ve decided that I’m at a company and we should be in a trade show. How am I selling that? What tips—what have you picked up along the way—to help me take my case to management and say, “Guys, we need to be in this trade show. We need to be exhibiting.” How am I selling this to the upstairs people?

Jay: Yeah, it’s going to sound probably pretty obvious, but taking their own words and using them against them. You take those overarching goals for the company and show how any event will ladder up to reach those. Trade shows are such a great opportunity for lead generation. So if you’re talking to company goals—“We want to increase pipeline by X dollars,” or “We need our sales, the revenue, to be here”—there’s no better place with a higher concentration of those types of people to be.

Sean Riley: Interesting. That is a good way of turning goals back in that favor. You touched on leads, and I’ve been covering trade shows for years—that’s my background in the trade press—and you always hear about quality leads versus quantity leads. And I guess the thing that I’ve always thought about is: How can you really control who’s coming into your booth? How am I determining that I’m going to get quality ones versus just getting a bunch of quantity ones? How do exhibitors create more high-quality leads? Can they? And what factors determine whether something is a high-quality lead versus a lower-quality one?

Jay: I don’t think it’s really about controlling who comes into your space because it should be welcoming to everybody—unless you’re literally closing off the borders of your space, which in most cases I push against doing in the first place. But it’s really just about arming the people on your side of the staff who are asking the right questions. You’re going to know what qualifies an attendee to either move them to a demo to see what you’re talking about or bring them into a meeting room. So it’s really just making sure your lead retrieval tools are also equipped to drop in a multiple-choice answer for those. And you want to know what kind of budget they have. You want to know the timing of their decision-making, asking the very specific variables that will obviously lead them to be a higher-quality lead for you.
Because coming from the sales perspective, if you just get a name on a list, it’s worthless. But if you get a name on a list with, “Hey, they are looking to buy in the next three months,” or “Looking to engage in the next year,” or whatever it is, you can help prioritize who they’re talking to and when, and then they’re going to be excited to follow up.
So it’s really just about what are a few short, easy questions that’ll help inform your team. And also, it’s part of a natural conversation. You don’t want to be like, “Hey, I need to ask you this dozen questions,” and they’re very formulaic. You just get into the normal rhythms, like, “Hey, you’re at this event; you’re going to be asking these questions anyway, so let’s come prepared with it.”

Sean Riley: So that’s interesting—so a lot of times you’re determining in your booth if it’s going to be a high-quality lead.

Jay: Oh, absolutely.

Sean Riley: And it might be a high-quality lead six months from now, but it’s still a quality lead—it’s just you’re going to determine how soon it’s going to actually be. But that’s a way I’ve never really heard it framed before. Okay, so the PACK EXPO portfolio of trade shows includes big shows, regional shows, and international shows. They’re all in different cities. Why is it so important to consider shows of different sizes when you’re laying out your trade show calendar? I guess the devil’s advocate would be: “Why can’t I just go to the biggest one? That’s going to have the most people. That should solve all my problems.”

Jay: So not everybody can go to the big shows, but you have to think about when an executive is planning out their year—they’re not going to dozens of events. So you’re going to want to pick the shows that you think are the highest probability of them showing up. Usually, I would say the big shows are probably that—where you’re going to have the most influential people there, whether it’s a decision-maker or somebody who’s going to get your name in the ring for consideration. But I think regional shows absolutely have their place. Some of the best shows I’ve been to from an attendee standpoint have been at those regional shows where it’s like, “Hey, it’s down the road for me. I couldn’t get to PACK EXPO, the national show, so let me go to the one nearby so I can at least see the latest trends, talk to some connections I’ve had over the past, and redevelop those relationships in different areas.

Sean Riley: Interesting. And I guess the other thing that would be—with a more intimate show like a regional show—you get more face time. If you’re in a big show, you’re in and out; you’re dealing with other people that are coming in. But in a smaller show, there might not be as much traffic.

Jay: Absolutely. And you’ve got to hope and assume that the traffic is higher quality in these smaller shows as well.

Sean Riley: Because they’re targeted—they’re going there with a reason to be there versus… yeah, okay. Interesting. So PACK EXPO also offers a variety of sponsorships and speaking opportunities. The Innovation Stages, for one, are some speaking opportunities. If I’m an exhibitor, I’m thinking, “That’s taking me out of my booth. So how is that helping me?” What are the benefits of participating in sponsorships or speaking opportunities at a show?

Jay: So I think there are a lot of reasons to do it. I think it’s hard to differentiate yourself when you’re just in the booth. A lot of the same companies—they’re saying the same thing; they have the same products and services that they’re selling. So if you’re showing that you’re a thought leader and you’re providing value on top of just what you’re selling, it’s just an easy way to, A, drive people—quality traffic—to your booth. Because if they listen to you speak and they hear what you have to say and they want to know more, they’re like, “Oh wow, that’s somebody I can definitely work with,” or, “That’s somebody that can help me get better at my job.”
So to tap into one of those sponsorships and be on a speaking stage—especially in an Innovation area—that’s going to help you drive that quality traffic we were talking about earlier.

Sean Riley: Personally, I’m always drawn to booths that have stuff in action—machinery in action. So what do you suggest for companies that are exhibiting, for demoing a product onsite at a show? Any tips for that? What do you suggest?

Jay: I think it’s creating some kind of hands-on engagement. How can you demonstrate what it’s like to work with you—either from a production standpoint, like what you’re buying, or like, “Hey, this is what it’s like to go through the customer cycle for us. This is what it looks like to do the R&D. This is what it looks like to be onboarding.” Give them a physical example, because that’s going to be a big part of what separates you—the ease of working with you. What kind of service levels am I going to get? How do you communicate throughout the process? What are the clear expectations—from price to service—all across your sales funnel? And if you can create that kind of atmosphere in your booth, I think it makes a huge difference.
If you can create something in your space that touches the human emotion side of the sales cycle, I think you’re in a lot better place. So if you can separate yourself differently by thinking about those emotional touchpoints… I talk a lot about storytelling in your space. What story are you telling? What pain are you solving? And that’s really what it comes down to in a space: How do you separate yourself with engagement and hands-on interaction? People want to do something—they don’t always want to hear all the features and benefits of your products. I want to know, I want to feel it, I want to see it, I want to be a part of it.

Sean Riley: Interesting. And then when you reach back out to them post-show, they’re going to take into consideration that you have a connection—you stick out to them from the show.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Think about how many booths at PACK EXPO are doing a very similar thing—and how are you going to really separate yourself? If they had 15 conversations that are solving the same problem, how are you standing out? We were the booth that did it completely differently, and we brought you into our story. I think that’s a great way to separate yourself.

Sean Riley: Very good. All right. So let's see if we can tie everything up for everyone who’s listening. If events are your go-to-market strategy—like this is where we're putting a lot of our dollars and our efforts—how am I connecting my pre-event touchpoints, my in-booth story, and my post-event follow-up into one journey? The pre, the at, and the post—how am I laying that out as one smooth plan?

Jay: Yeah, I think you need to think through it all ahead of time. I talk about event marketing—it's really a microcosm of an integrated marketing program. You have to think about all three phases and have some kind of continuous journey throughout it. What is that consistent message that you're telling from the beginning to end and in between? And yeah, you have to have those steps in place before you show up, because otherwise it's just not going to happen. There are so many moving parts before the event, so many moving parts during the event, and then once you're done, you want to be done. It's all so exhausting that if you don’t have the follow-up in place and you don’t have your sales team amped up and ready to go, it’s just not going to go anywhere—and you’re just going to leave a lot of money on the table.

Sean Riley: Okay. That's awesome. This has been great, Jay. I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your day to come on here and help exhibitors with some of the things they can use to take advantage of PACK EXPO shows. So thanks again for coming on here, Jay.

Jay: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Sean. I really appreciate it.