ListingsTech booth at National Association of Realtors Conference
ListingsTech got a booth at last weekend’s NAR show in New Orleans. My procrastination actually helped a little here… we got a pretty good both location – a corner in the middle of the trade show floor. I guess somebody canceled. After a frantic week of last minute preperations, Laurie, Robert Clments and myself packed up and drove down early Friday morning.
The NAR show went well. We were pleased with the good list of sales leads we left with. We spent a lot more hours on the show floor than for a SEC or Exemplar Setup Toolkit trade show. Friday was 3 hours, Saturday and Sunday had 7 hours each and Monday was 5 hours. The long hours were good and bad. For the style of consultative sales we are doing, it worked out well because I had time to spend with each customer. I was talking with sales leads for almost all hours of the show. The bad part was we didn’t have much time to spend in New Orleans. Other than some nice dinners, Laurie didn’t go out at all. Robert and I went out to hear some bands and see a friend of his Saturday night. We were out late. Sunday morning started out rough!
After getting some good response on Saturday, I thought Sunday and Monday for sure would be slow. Saturday was the busiest day, but we got good leads on Sunday and Monday, too. I got a really good lead Monday right as the show was about to close.
Monday, with Robert in charge of our booth, I left to check out some of the other booths. There are competitors out there, but nobody has the template driven system that we use for ListingsTech. A highlight (for me) happened when I went looking for the booth of my biggest local Atlanta competitor. In the exhibitor list, it showed that this company had a booth. I even saw their booth going up while we were moving in. But, when I went to “spy” on Monday, their booth was gone (as if it never existed). Laurie and I guessed they had moved. Their location was bad. Laurie asked around and found out that they had packed up and left the show entirely the day before! Another fun thing happened when Laurie and I stopped by the Google Maps booth. They were showing some real estate sites, but I noticed that the sites they were showing didn’t actually integrate Google Maps. The presenter had to flip to from the demo web site to a GUI program to show what the web site integration “could” look like. I showed a Google rep one of my web sites that actually integrated Google maps and suggested maybe they could use my site for their demos. The rep looked suitably impressed and asked if it would be OK if somebody from Google contacted me later.Another fun thing happened when Laurie and I stopped by the Google Maps booth. They were showing some real estate sites, but I noticed that the sites they were showing didn’t actually integrate Google Maps. The presenter had to flip to from the demo web site to a GUI program to show what the web site integration “could” look like. I showed a Google rep one of my web sites that actually integrated Google maps and suggested maybe they could use my site for their demos. The rep looked suitably impressed and asked if it would be OK if somebody from Google contacted me later.The “budget booth” I created worked well. We had a full color, 10′x2′, $200 sign I had printed at Kinko’s. It came out looking great and it let people passing by know right away what we did (“Real Estate Websites”). Quite a few people stopped, looked at the sign, then started talking to us. At the last minute, I built a pair of bar height tables out of plywood and we bought some bar stools from Wal-Mart. We draped the tables with some inexpensive fabric. On each table, I put a 20″ LCD monitor, our keyboard and mouse and sales literature and props. The bar stools came in handy when sales consultations got long. This inexpensive furniture worked well. It was wasn’t as polished as real trade show furniture, but it was lots, lots less expensive, matched our selling style and ultimately served the purpose.
Another fun thing happened when Laurie and I stopped by the Google Maps booth. They were showing some real estate sites, but I noticed that the sites they were showing didn’t actually integrate Google Maps. The presenter had to flip to from the demo web site to a GUI program to show what the web site integration “could” look like. I showed a Google rep one of my web sites that actually integrated Google maps and suggested maybe they could use my site for their demos. The rep looked suitably impressed and asked if it would be OK if somebody from Google contacted me later.The “budget booth” I created worked well. We had a full color, 10′x2′, $200 sign I had printed at Kinko’s. It came out looking great and it let people passing by know right away what we did (“Real Estate Websites”). Quite a few people stopped, looked at the sign, then started talking to us. At the last minute, I built a pair of bar height tables out of plywood and we bought some bar stools from Wal-Mart. We draped the tables with some inexpensive fabric. On each table, I put a 20″ LCD monitor, our keyboard and mouse and sales literature and props. The bar stools came in handy when sales consultations got long. This inexpensive furniture worked well. It was wasn’t as polished as real trade show furniture, but it was lots, lots less expensive, matched our selling style and ultimately served the purpose.With this show, I feel like we have established that ListingsTech is a viable product. We now know for sure that there are real estate professionals actively seeking a superior web site. That is the customer we are looking for. The sky is the limit. The market is huge. They all know they need a great web site. We have the best real estate web site software available.
[...] On Thanksgiving day, John Hull and I ran the Atlanta 1/2 Marathon. John lives downtown and his girlfriend was willing to drop us off at Marta at 6am, so I spent the night with John. I had been working like crazy getting ready for the NAR show, so I had not much at all in the month. I managed to keep up John for a few miles, but around mile 3, I told John to go ahead without me. After about 4 miles, I felt pretty darn tired. I managed to keep running to the finish line, but I was not feeling fresh. My time was just under 2 hours for the 13.1 mile course. I finished in 337th place in my age group. Well, at least I got some good training in. Hanging out with John and Kara was fun. By the time we got to Thanksgiving dinner at Laurie’s aunt and uncle’s house, I was ready to eat! [...]