Trade Shows: National Mine Service Company

The given case typical situation of how trade shows can be used for the Business to Business Market. The case highlights the selling and non selling benefits that are noticed by the upper management and what the upper management think about the trade shows. The case talks about the various ways of promotion during the trade shows, the influence of the trade shows on customer retention and customer acquisition. The case at hand discusses that the traditional image of trade shows should be removed and the company should look beyond the image or reputation building and concentrate more on launching new products and boosting morale of younger executives and also its sole objective.

National Mine Service Company

The National Mine Service Company is U.S based mine equipment seller that is headquartered in Chicago’s McCor-mick place. The company has three major divisions

The Mining Machinery Division (MMD)- consisting a line of underground extraction machinery (Marietta Drum Miner and Boring Miner, Shuttle Cars, Mine Locomotives and Longwall Systems

Distributor Products Division (DPD)- Consisting of mine safety and rescue equipments, Miner’s cap lamps

Hydraulics Division (HD)- Repairing and Manufacturing the hydraulics components

Approximately 90% of the sales were from the U.S coal industry and remaining substantial sales from domestic and foreign countries

Marketing Communications

Marketing communications program consisted of three main activities- Personal Selling, Trade Shows and Advertising/Sales Promotion

Personal Selling

Personal selling was headed by Mr. William Hennessey (VP sales) and dealed in major capital equipment sales such as continuous miners. MMD’s sales force structure is as follows:

4 District Sales Managers

9 Sales Force

MR William Hennessey, VP Sales

Mr. William Carter, MMD’s SM

The salesperson job here was to generate interest at the mine level among mine superintendents, maintenance officers and machine operators.

DPD mostly sold small dollar volume orders. DPD’s Sales structure was as follows

The DPD maintained a broad product line containing 27000 products.

The HD wing used a different sales and service approach called driver-salespeople where they visited mines with pickup trucks to deliver new mine hydraulic machines and pick up hydraulic machines meant for servicing.

Trade Expositions and Corporate Advertising Programs

National mine service company took active participation in annual trade shows and expositions, but majorly concentrated on much important ‘American mining congress international coal show’ which was held once in four years and attracted exhibitors and potential customers worldwide. This trade show exhibited and promoted various mine machineries, coal processing equipment, transporting equipment, supplies or services. This trade fair is not for profit educational activity where selling is prohibited and booth sales personal where allowed information gathering and giving about new advances in technology, machine design and new products. National mine service found this trade show to be a perfect and special place to launch its new product ‘Marietta 2460 Drum miner’. But the problem was the fading interest of upper management towards efficiency and potentials of these trade shows. This perspective needs to be looked by a new angle of profitability and customer awareness. Trade shows facilitated three major marketing communication activities: Personal selling, trade exhibition and advertising/promotions. This trade show NMS spent highly on sales promotions and gifting to existing and potential customers.60% of advertising budget was spent on MMD products. Objective of NMS’s marketing communication was to maintain companies image and gain access to decision influencer’s not available to company’s sales force easily. This trade also witnessed various other promotional methods being adopted, for example- Various advertising inserts and describing the products and other notifications and emails being sent to the

DPD’s sales structure

Ware house Mr. D C Ponzeline

4 District SM

23 Sales representatives and 7 Sales Engineers

Strengths WeaknessAn open source of Education, Promotion Effectiveness is difficult to measure Focused at target customers, prospects generating new leads in terms suppliers

Products are not sold and only demonstrated

Low Cost – Medium of connecting with the prospective clients

Information of the competitors may be manipulated later

A platform to gauge the competitors strategyRead about the customer’s expectation

To further understand the concerns of the top management, the below mentioned figure mentions some of the key points:

Certain key points to understand are

- According to MacVean backing out of the trade shows hampered the image of the company in the eyes of the customer

- At the same time the Trade shows help rebuild the image, gains new prospects and reach to a wider audience

Low attendanceDesired buyer awareness is achievedTrade shows are meant for educational and promotional purposeMr. Mac

Vean

Competitors are available Visibility of people with top management in the buying companiesConvince the current and prospective customerMajor Concern is the - Spent the right amount of money in the event- ie. the accountability is to be maintained

Mr. McElhattan

Comparative Advantage

According to the case, we can identify the core competence of the company. The various product lines that the company has and the specialized sales force that it has allocated to each is one of the key strengths that the company can leverage upon.

Trade shows as a promotional mix has many opportunities that the company can leverage upon. In such a B2B scenario, Trade shows present a right platform for the company to leverage upon the product line that it carries. It would enable the company to display its latest technology to the target audience as well as generate newer reach to the customer. Hence in the customer lifecycle stage, trade shows work at various points- Right from generating awareness to the point of retention. At the same time this promotional tool is also useful for the company to shift up the Product Life Cycle stage of Decline by identifying newer markets and innovating the product. Trade shows can serve the major purpose of the organization to boost the morale of staff members and give opportunity for sales members to rub shoulders with top management.