Training Booth Staffers For Your Trade Show Trivia Games

Trade show trivia games pull more visitors into your booth, encourage them to stay longer, and teach them about your company and products.

But you can get even better results when you train booth staffers to fully leverage your trivia game in their visitor interactions.

Your training depends on what kind of trivia game you offer in your booth.  We have 5 different versions of trivia, so I will walk you through how to adapt your training for each style of our trivia games. If you use another kind of trivia game, you can use these ideas as inspiration.

Training booth staffers for “Three Strikes and You’re Out” trade show trivia games

It makes sense to start with our “three strikes” version of trivia.  Not only because it’s our most popular version, but also because this style game gives your staffers the greatest opportunity to engage visitors.

With the “three strikes” version, players are not under a time constraint, and can play until they get three questions wrong. So, players like to take time deliberating before answering.

This gives your booth staffers the perfect opportunity to slide up next to them and offer assistance. As your booth staffers help players survive longer, visitors will be grateful, and you’ll have conversations started.  It’s golden.

And you can encourage visitors to play again, if they want a higher score. (You set up the game with more questions they can answer in one game, so they will see mostly new questions.) They spend even more time getting to know your company and staff.

To make it work best, train your booth staffers:

• The answers to the all the trivia questions
• To stay close by without encroaching players until the right moment to engage
• How to walk up next to struggling players and gently engage them (they look worried or show disgust when getting a question wrong)
• How the game works if the players need any instruction
• How to guide the conversation after game play to convert the player to a lead

You also want to train your staffers to engage people passing by your booth in the aisle.  They can ask, “Would you like to win a (name of prize) by playing our fun (your name of the trivia game).”

Training booth staffers for Timed Quiz and Two-Minute Drill versions of trade show trivia games

If your company decides on a timed quiz style game, it’s because you want to get players through the game faster. This version leaves little time for interaction with helpful booth staffers.

But with the game play going faster, your staffers will need even more talent in attracting people from out of the aisle and into the booth.  So, arm staffers with multiple engaging statements, such as:

• “Want to win a (big fun prize)? Test your knowledge against our trivia game!”
• “Are you smart enough to score higher than your friends on our (industry name) trivia game?”
• “Can you score high enough on our trivia game to get on our leaderboard?”

Staffers can try out different engaging questions to find what works best with your audience or that they feel most comfortable saying.

Also train your staffers to keep alert to when players finish, to engage them with questions like, “how did you do?” or “what questions surprised you?” or “what did you learn that interested you?” Then guide the conversation towards a potential lead.

We offer two different timed trivia games, including a “two-minute drill” version where attendees answer as many questions as they can in two minutes, and get even more points for answering multiple questions in a row. Or, they can get more points for answering questions faster.

Training your booth staffers for Game Show trade show trivia games

In the game show version, a group of 8 to 10 players compete against each other simultaneously, guided by a game host. In this trivia game style, there is no helping the players by your booth staffers.

Most importantly, you need a talented person to be the game show host.  Your host energetically reads questions aloud, congratulates players who score well, and overall directs game play.  You can train someone on your staff, but usually our clients hire a professional for this important role.

All your available booth staffers should be ready when the game ends, because you’ll have multiple players finishing simultaneously.  If you depend on survey questions in the trivia game to do all the lead capture, then fine, let them go. But if you want to take the conversation further after the game, your staffers need to gracefully engage players when they finish, and guide the dialog to find out if you have a qualified lead.

Training your booth staffers for the simple Quiz version of our trade show trivia games

This is the easiest of our trivia games.  Each player is given the exact same questions, in the exact same order.  You can set different point values for questions.

Your staffers can have the discretion to give hints or no hints to players, depending on what your goals are.  Are you looking to develop relationships? Then hint away!  Or, your goal may be to measure knowledge and thus find potential talent to hire, or qualified buyers.  If so, you would want players to not get any hints. Just alert your staffers of what you want them to do, and give them guidance on how to do it.

Trained booth staff increases your qualified trade show lead counts

This matters for all game styles: prep your staff to record qualified leads after the game play is done.  Make sure your staffers know how and where to record their lead interaction so your field sales person can ably follow up.

Our trivia games are a great trade show booth activity that get attendees into your booth. Be sure to train your booth staffers to convert game players into leads with the tips in this article.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic, keep attendees engaged longer, and capture leads with our fun interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads.