Three tips if you are exhibiting at CES:

• Don’t fill your booth with anonymous “booth boys and girls” — hired solely for the days of the show — who know nothing about your company or your product. They hurt you tremendously when media comes to learn about you. If all they can do is say “I don’t know” and the three talking points you teach them on the first day, you may as well let them stay home. Either replace them with employees who know what they’re talking about, or open up the booth space these young people take up.
• Make your executives available. The worst thing that can happen is that media who wants to cover your company is told to “come back later.” Even if they only five to ten minutes per media member at pre-determined times, that would serve you far better than the “they’re not here and I don’t know when they will be” line.
• Plant the seeds of relationship with the media that visits. Do not blast them with a mass e-mail after the show. Rather, write down or record their interests and topics immediately after their visit, and then email them about those. This takes approximately 20 percent of additional effort, and will increase your results by 2,000 percent.

If you’re attending the show, trying to drum up business:

• Don’t pitch. Don’t explain your services. Help. Assist. Add value. Make people think “if he can help this much in 60 seconds, imagine what can he do for me if we work together!”
• Prepare 60 seconds of value (or information, or insights) for the specific person and company you are about to talk to. Do this slightly in advance, before every person you talk with. This will create the results you’re looking for.
• Create an expectation of the what the next contact between you will be. That’s your goal…the next step. If you schedule it, or determine it, for five or fifty people (or whatever your number is) you will have had a successful show.