Booth Babes Bad for Business!

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"Booth Babes" are easily one of the most embarrassing things about going to conferences (just do an image search on "booth babe" - you'll see why).

Now Spencer Chen of Frontback has a nice article about this over at TechCrunch involving an A/B split test he did at an SAP show

 He had two booths, one w/ "booth-babes", and one with - literally - grandmothers.  
Professional, knowledgable, and enthusiastic grandmothers, mind you - but most definitely not "booth-babes".

 In his words
The results? They were great. The booth that was staffed with the booth babes generated a third of the foot traffic (as measured by conversations or demos with our reps) and less than half the leads (as measured by a badge swipe or a completed contact form) while the other team had a consistently packed booth that ultimately generated over 550 leads, over triple from the previous year.
He has a whole bunch of reasons for this, but the ones that I agree with whole-heartedly were
3. Business and product execs don’t talk to booth babes. If you’re a legit executive at a trade show, you already have an agenda to get some shit done. Afterall, that’s why we spend the money that we do to exhibit at these events…everyone that we would love to talk to is there. If you’re an exec, you’re looking for your peer at the booth and are not bothering with the booth babes.
4. Low-quality leads. Back to point No. 1, the ones that the booth babes had no trouble attracting were often low-level, overconfident IT nubs — the guys that were already always first at the hosted bars and whose highlight for the quarter was being authorized to travel for the event. They had neither the authority nor the budget that made them ideal prospects for our sales teams. All these guys do is lower your conversion from lead to opp and lower your ROI on the show.
The picture below pretty much says everything about the last point - while the Domer might actually be a secret-billionaire, he probably isn't :-)

The bottom line - strive for some professionalism, and ditch the "booth-babes"

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