My Trade Show Experience

I had the opportunity over the summer at my internship at a Christian book publishing and distributing company to travel to Indiana for a Christian bookstore trade show. The goal of our company was to sell B2B. We were selling wholesale books and Christian products to small bookstores around the country. I was not personally doing the selling, but I was alongside other salespeople listening in on the transactions and how the whole process works.

The aspect that surprised me the most was how casual the process was and how almost every customer who came to our booth was someone who had either bought from us before or who had a prior connection to us. This showed me how important building relationships in sales is. I heard many conversations about personal topics and very casual conversations. Most customers also knew exactly what they wanted to buy before coming to our booth. We had catalogs and displays ready for those who just wanted to browse and figure out what they wanted to buy, but it was rare that they had no idea what they wanted to purchase. Many customers even had order forms already printed to make the sales process much easier for everyone involved. Often the only thing that the salespeople had to do was to submit the order. I understood that this sales process is not the typical case in sales, but it was interesting to see.

As I said before, one of the most important things I learned from this experience was the importance of knowing your customer. In the cases that I had observed, knowing information about the customers was much more crucial to the process than knowing the product itself. This connects to our conversations about not focusing on the product, but on the customer. Very rarely was there in-depth conversations about the books themselves, but mostly on the customer.