Hints & Tips for a successful MWC17 — Episode 2

This it the second part of a number of articles I intend to write for a successful Mobile World Congress 2017 based on my experience exhibiting at the event for the last 6 years and visiting it since 2008. The first episode can be found here.

Doing it the wrong way

I’ll start this episode sharing a personal story from 2012 when we, as a company started exhibiting our products and platforms in MWC12. Back then we had in mind that it is an event like all the other local exhibitions and conferences we participated in the past. So we setup a small booth putting nice graphics on the walls, we printed and carrying 1000 brochures to Barcelona all the way from Greece, we invested on freebies and small gifts and we stand in front of our booth waiting for the passing-by people to stop and ask for our new platform and technology.

It was a disaster or to be fair it was the most inefficient way to participate as an exhibitor to the Mobile World Congress.

We paid a great amount of money for a very small booth at the upper right corner on the second flour, Hall 8. No one was in the mood to stop at a small not glamorous booth with a couple of guys showing some technology. Especially when this people has already walked more than 10km all the way from Hall 1 visiting huge pavilions like Google’s or Intel’s and Samsung’s.

I have many more stories to tell from that era, some of them sound entertaining now but they were not back then, at least for us. So we learned two things from this “failed” experiment:

First, it is a waste of time, money and resources to have a very small booth in a so glamorous event with so big players.

It is also a waste of resources to stand in front of your booth waiting for someone to pass by hoping that this guys might be someone really interested in your products. You have to be active and not passive.

Being part of something bigger

After MWC12, we came back at the office and discussed what went wrong and what really had value for Cytech. We understood that we should change the way we present our company in this event and if we want to participate in MWC13 we should learn from these two points above. So, to make the long story short, I decided first to participate and then to lead a team that would organise a Greek pavilion to MWC13. This would solve the first problem for the majority of the Greek small and medium sized companies. And so we did for 4 consecutive years. MWC17 will be the 5th Mobile World Congress for Greece.

But we haven’t yet solved the 2nd problem. We had a nice pavilion with bright lights and 64 sq.m of space, screens, colors etc.

But we were still standing in front of this big pavilion each company next to the other waiting for passing-by visitors to show some interest for our products.

It wasn’t so efficient at the end even if we collected more than 250 business cards. People was coming in the pavilion and was visiting companies’ booths but at the end of the day and after we came back home and ran a small survey, we realized that the outcome was really poor.

Too many leads, too few potential partners and customers.

I’ll close this episode here and I’ll come back with a new article in a few days describing how we, as a company, decided to solve this problem.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy this series of articles and I encourage you to share your experience from similar situations by commenting below.