Pack Your Message Into a Carry-On

The trade show is six weeks out. The booth is booked, the freight deadline is on somebody's calendar, and the message deck runs forty slides.

That deck has the positioning, the three differentiators, the architecture diagram somebody in product insisted on, four logos, and a slide that says why now with a market size on it.

All of it is true. Most of it was argued over. None of it is going.

The Weight Limit Is Not the Enemy

Everybody treats the constraint as the problem.

• Six minutes is not enough.

• The floor is too loud.

• Nobody has time.

The constraint is the only useful thing in the situation.

Forty slides forces nothing. It lets every team keep its favorite paragraph, which is why it is forty.

A carry-on forces the argument nobody wants to have: what is actually coming with us.

That argument is worth having on your own schedule, in a room, with the people who will be standing in the booth. It is worth having badly with a whiteboard six weeks out.

What you do not want is to have it in the aisle, in real time, at four in the afternoon.

What a Checked Bag Costs

There is nothing wrong with the forty slides. There is something wrong with taking them.

A checked bag arrives separately, sometimes late, sometimes not at all, and you cannot get to it when you need it. It is fine for things you will use on Thursday. It is useless for the thing you need at the gate.

• So the deck sits on a laptop nobody opens.

• The one-pager goes in a bag that stays closed.

• The three differentiators get delivered in whatever order the conversation happens to allow, which is to say the wrong one.

And the attendee you spent the money to reach walks away from the booth carrying nothing.

The Overhead Bin

What fits is smaller than anyone wants and it is not a subset of the deck.

It is one problem, stated in their words. One number attached to it. One person that problem happens to. And one thing you want them to do next, which at a show is almost never buy anything.

Four items. That is the bin.

Notice what did not make it.

• The architecture diagram is checked.

• The three differentiators are checked, all three, because an attendee cannot hold three of anything while standing up.

• Why now is checked.

• The logos are checked, and they were never as portable as anyone hoped, since a logo wall tells a visitor you have customers and tells them nothing they can repeat.

Everything checked is fine as long as you know that is what it is.

Send the deck afterward. Print the one-pager. Nobody is arguing against having them. The mistake is believing they are travelling with you.

Pack for the Trip, Not the Destination

Here is the part that catches people who are good at this.

Most message work is built for the destination. It assumes a room, an hour, a sequence, somebody who has agreed to sit down. Everything about it is designed for the moment you have their attention.

A show is not a destination. It is transit.

The whole event is people moving past things, and nothing that requires them to stop moving is going to work.

So the question changes. Not what do we want to tell them. What can they carry while walking.

Do This Six Weeks Out

Take the deck and pull four things out of it. Only four.

Then hand them to the person who will actually be standing at the booth on day two, the one who did not sit in any of the message meetings, and ask them to say it back.

Whatever comes out of their mouth is what you are bringing, regardless of what is on the slides.

If it takes them longer than about ten seconds, check it.

Fix it now, while it is still a whiteboard and a coffee and nobody has paid for freight.

-BZ