ABITE - exhibition, attended for competitor anaysis

Last Saturday I went to the ABITE exhibition in Jeff's Shed. Originally, Dave and I were supposed to go together, but he had work that needed to be done, so I went on my own.
In some ways I'm happy about that, as I'm not sure that I can see $40 worth of value in visiting, but certainly I got $20 worth.
This is not to say that other people would not have got full value from their ticket - it was simply that, for us at this point in beginning our business, there probably wasn't full value.

Most of the reason for going was to see how many competitors were there and what they are currently offering. However, for what should be fairly obvious reasons, I didn't really want to advertise to them that we are starting up in the same area... This meant that I tried to check out what the stand was about before talking to them. This worked most of the time, except for once towards the end when I didn't check out all of the signage before talking to the guy - which means one competitor knows who we are...

In reality, as I expected, there aren't many companies with offerings to the same market that we are targeting, which is good. There is some competition at the next level up, but that's ok - we may never enter that market and if we do, that's well in the future. Basically, attending the exhibition only added one new competitor to the list of competition that I was already aware of.

The $20 value (or more) that I got from the visit was in one conversation. A telemarketing/prospecting company that I got chatting to (or at least, I chatted to the Managing Director of the company...) - he is very enthusiastic about the idea of adding value to our software by supplying discounted prospect details at the same time as installing the software, where our two businesses share the profit on the transaction - which sounds very reasonable. He was also describing a process for determining the value of customers which may well be incorporated into the software later as well. So that was a really positive outcome - and worth the headache I had by the time I left!

Of course, I also collected some information about companies that we may need to use in the future, although again, most of that will be at least 12 months from now, all going to plan.

I also obtained details of a couple of businesses that we may be able to partner with to sell our product as well, so that was good too.

Unfortunately, I missed the start of the talk on using Twitter and Facebook to help with your business, so missed the part that I would really have liked to hear, which was about Twitter. However, I think that the basic information I wanted to hear was probably not included, given the assumptions that were made when they were talking about Facebook, so I probably didn't really miss what I needed... oh well - the internet has the information, I just need the time to do the research!

So all in all, it was a worthwhile afternoon, but I'm probably glad we didn't both go - if your business is on its feet, this is a good exhibition, but we are too new to get full value from the exhibitors.