You probably have heard the question many times: “Why exhibit at trade shows?”   And you’ve likely answered the question from the standpoint of how trade shows help your company in the marketplace.  Yet there’s a lot more to it than that.

Here are 4 sets of benefits trade shows offer, at all levels of your professional life:

How Trade Show Helps You:  Whether you are working your trade show booth, attending keynote sessions, or just meeting people in the aisles, trade shows provide a fertile ground for advancing your career.  You learn more about your clients, prospects, competitors, and industry, gaining insights that never would have come to you while sitting at your desk.  You enhance your professional networks. You may even meet the person who will give you your next job.

How Trade Show Helps Your Department: If you’re in sales, you get a pile of leads, talk to clients, strengthen relationships, and get more face time with the same people you’ve been trying to reach for months, even years. If you’re in marketing, your brand is enhanced, better known, and your products get seen by a broad audience.  If you’re in engineering, by working in your tradeshow displays, you get first-hand feedback on your new products.  And if you are in company management, you get to see how your company compares to its peers in the marketplace – and even improve its standing.

How Trade Shows Help Your Company: Trade shows help your company become a player in its market.  It is an efficient way to reach various audiences, including clients, prospects, potential employees, and business partners.  In helping achieve your company’s sales and marketing goals, trade shows provide an essential service to your company’s overall core needs.

How Trade Show Help Your Industry:  Your overall industry gains advantages when it gathers together at its industry trade shows.  They gain consensus on the direction of your industry, while they take the pulse of its top issues, trends, and concerns.  Trade shows foster and accelerate innovation. They offer an exciting and efficient marketplace of products, services, and ideas.  Trade shows strengthen the professional and personal bonds between industry members.  They help provide a forum to voice new issues and growing challenges. Trade shows help bring new professionals into the fold, and educate them on how to succeed in their jobs. Trade shows provide an avenue to celebrate success.  And large trade shows can create such a large footprint for your industry that it breaks through the collective clutter to provide your industry with national, even international attention.

Trade shows provide multiple dimensions of value, for you, your colleagues down the hall, and your peers across the country.  So the next time someone asks you, “Why exhibit at trade shows?,” share with them the big picture of how trade shows help provide value on so many levels.