Trade Show... What a week!

For the past 4 days I have been manning a trade show stand at Taiwan Health, in the World Trade Centre in Taipei.

This was to launch the Zoono range of products that my new company is introducing to Taiwan. Zoono is an antimicrobial coating based on breakthrough technology. (long term germ killing protection for hands, surfaces, textiles and more.)

I have spent the past 3 weeks in Taiwan preparing for this trade show, plus a lot of time before that back in Australia. Any hopes I had of perhaps being able to operate the business in English have been quickly abandoned.

Whilst there is some English in Taiwan on things like road signs, train time tables etc, for dealing business to business or business to consumer - if you want to get the message across it has to be in Chinese. You also need a Chinese brand - not a western brand.

For someone that cannot yet speak Chinese this presents some challenges. For now I am creating the marketing messages in English, then getting them translated to Chinese.

Another challenge that I face is with my CRM system. Do I get everything entered in both English and Chinese or just Chinese? I don't know the best strategy for this yet. With my accounting I have outsourced this to a large company that is part of an international chain of accountants. I have done this because: I hate accounting, I don't want to spend my time doing this kind of thing, and they will provide accounting reports in both English and Chinese.

I know I am paying a premium over a local Chinese accountant, but communication is much simpler. Also I was able to haggle and save a few dollars anyway.

The justification that I had given myself for attending the trade show was that I figured it would be a way for us to meet a lot of prospective customers in a very short period of time and gauge the market reaction to our product. I am happy to report that the trade show has accomplished that in spades !!

In 4 days we have handed out about 1,000 flyers on our product offering. We met hundreds of people and have around 70 good leads to follow up on. The very first prospect that I spoke with within 15 minutes of the trade show opening was a guy that is a major distributor to around 2000 pharmacies. It was a great omen.

Taiwan has a lot of trade shows. This one was focused on Health. At the same time this was running there were 2 other trade shows running in the same building.. Seniors Care (SenCare) and Hospitality.

We are booked in for another trade show next month which focuses on Biotech. Hopefully that will be a success too.

The people that visited our stand generally liked what they saw and heard about our product. One thing to note is that they are very keen to see independent proof on any claims made.

I made a lot of new friends during the trade show. The Taiwanese people are very friendly and enjoy a good laugh. The interactions of people from neighbouring stands was very friendly. People from each of the stands would take drinks or snacks and offer them people working on the neighbouring stands. One other observation I have is that it seems accepted practice to eat your lunch while on the trade show stand. This is not something that would happen commonly in Australia.

For the 4 days I was handing out brochures and welcoming people to our stand in Chinese. The Taiwanese seem to like and appreciate you having a go - even if your Chinese is not very good.

The show would have been of no value to me if I did not have my two amazing staff members helping. Clare and Lynne were amazing. Full of energy, always smiling and always doing their best to communicate our message to everyone that came by our stand.

A number of owners of other stands came to me and commented "where did you get such great staff?" A number of them also gave very "non subtle" hints that they would love to have Claire and Lynne come and work for them.

I have to say I am just very lucky that I got such great people on the team, and I think it has something to do with karma.

Now the work begins... following up all these prospects!