Let's Do Business, Eastbourne 2010

What an enjoyable day last Thursday was! England had beaten Slovenia the previous day, the weather was superb and we were all in high spirits as we headed to the Winter Gardens to finish setting up for the show.

It was lucky that we got there nice and early; when we arrived we found that all the posters we had put up the previous night had fallen down (thankfully we had taken them out of the frames, otherwise it would have been an expensive mess!). Once we had put the posters back up we were ready for action and just had to wait for the doors to open and the masses to come in.

The first hour or so was fairly slow with not many people about, so we entertained ourselves by watching Batman Begins and Monsters v Aliens in 3D, on the Davis Television Services stand opposite ours (3D TV is awesome!).

The show soon got a lot busier though and we had many visitors to the stand. Most of the visitors hadn't heard of us before so it was good to get our name out to them. It was equally nice to see a good number of our clients, people we know from our networking exploits and people we met at the show last year.

We had plenty of staff at the show, enabling us all to have a good look around the stands. During my trips around the stands, I made the most of the food that was on offer, having copious amounts of sweets from the girls at Chalvington Communications and a very nice Mars flavoured Hot Chocolate from the guys at KSV!

I was very impressed with the effort that everyone had gone to for the show, there were some really good looking and informative stands out there.

I was particularly attracted to the Rossetts Commercials and Watson Associates stands though, thanks to the competitions they had on offer! I had a go at the Mercedes Keepy Uppy challenge and got a respectable 15, I was going to have another go later but decided against it when I saw that the leader was on 64.

I fared much better with the Watson Associates competition though, coming second in the Mario Kart time trial. Unfortunately it was our developer Mike, who beat me, so he has some bragging rights over me now. However, considering that second prize was also a bottle of Champagne, I wasn't complaining!

Of course, we also had a competition of our own. Our “Find Our Balls” competition proved to be very popular. Some people spent a good 5 minutes counting the balls in the poster, whereas the less avid competitors just gave wild guesses! By far the most popular guess was 32 balls, so many people gave this answer. This was very surprising considering the actual answer was 68!

Congratulations to Kate Sage of Candlewick Services and Craig Harwood of Tennyson Suite who got it spot on, and to Tina Mills of Sunshine Video Productions who with 66, gave the third closest guess. They have all won a free email campaign shot and we will be in touch with them very soon to get it started for them.

Here you can see an image of the poster and an image of the balls on their own, there really are 68 there!

Towards the end of the day, as it got a bit quieter and Bruce Wayne had burnt his house down for the 4^th time, we had a quick count up of the leads we had gathered, and were really happy with what we had. In total, we have about 40 leads to follow up on so we're very happy with our work on the day. An instant realisation then, of how important it is for us to attend such shows. We are already looking forward to Let's Do Business, Hastings, see you there!