Dear Stephen,
I'm so excited about attending #NeoCon and #DesignDays in Chicago. Every year around this time, you usually do a NeoCon-related column on tips for attending and working the show. What are your tips for 2025? Tell me, I'm ready to hear.
Signed,
Best Foot Forward
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Dear Best Foot,
This year I have only one solid tip for everyone attending NeoCon — salespeople to manufacturers, dealers, specifiers, even architects, designers, and end-users... If you are in the halls of the Mart or walking around Fulton Market, this tip is a must for you. It's very simple: DO NOT walk around the halls of the #MerchandiseMart, or anywhere, even the streets of #FultonMarket, with your phone in hand, staring down at your screen!
After being at #Salone, and more recently #ICFF and the HD show, all I observed everywhere I looked was people walking the halls reading their phones and physically running into one another — both attendees and salespeople.
And if you're a salesperson working the show, what's worse than looking down at your screen in the hallway? Walking around your company's showroom doing the same thing! When a customer or designer comes in to see you and say "hello" and they see you looking down at the screen (they think it's rude to interrupt someone who might be reading something)... well, guess what — you just lost a customer!
Everyone knows that you need to use your smartphone during the trade show, and I am not saying it's not an important tool, but walking around in public staring down at your screen in a busy hallway? You look like an idiot. Standing at an elevator with the doors open waiting for you to get on but you're staring down at your screen? You look like an idiot.Waiting in line at the food court and you're staring at the screen? You look like an idiot.
Don't worry — you're not going to miss an important message from your boss or colleague notifying you that your customer is in the showroom (that's what vibration and ringers are for)... at which point, you have my permission to look at your screen.
Let me extend this advice to one other scenario that bugs the heck out of me. If you're in a meeting — with your colleagues, your customers, or your boss — and you are looking at your smartphone, you might as well wear a sign around your neck saying, "Whatever is on my phone is more important than you and what you are saying." That's how rude it is. So, please, just put the phone away so you are not tempted to look at it.
This is our industry's biggest trade show and everyone's "on," meaning on stage. Even the customers, architects, designers, all the way to the dealer salespeople... You want to make your best impression. Who doesn't want that? You are adults, not kids. You're at the biggest event for our industry. Try and look like the pro that you are. Face forward, so when someone looks at you, they see you, not your hairline because you are looking down at your screen.
I'm already expecting to walk elbow first down the halls, so watch out if you run into me.
Signed,
Stephen