Back in Pasadena with a kitty by my side and a puppy snuggled on Adam’s shoulder, I have a few moments for some reflection on the show. What’s funny is that instead of trying to block the last week (and the months leading up to it) out of my head, my primary focus has been on writing down everything that I liked or noticed needed improvement for next year. For 2008, my number one goal is proper planning through the entire year - last year, CES wasn’t my baby until we were about six months out…and wrapping up a re-brand in late October doesn’t exactly make it easy to have everything ready to go far in advance.

A couple of things I was particularly pleased with…

Incorporating good SWAG into the demo: our trinkets were earbuds, which aren’t the cheapest items to buy in bulk - especially since we made sure that they were decent ones, rather than cheating our booth visitors (and ourselves) with a lower quality version. People were more apt to take them, even if only to use the case for their fancy $100 earbuds at home (great! that’s where our logo is!). The earbuds were a trigger, to remember what it is that they saw at our booth. And we had far fewer cases of people walking up, avoiding eye contact, grabbing something off our counter, and walking away (the technical term for such individuals being “lookieloos”).

Less paperwork is more: each of our four products had a one sheet description, tailored to what kind of business the prospect is in. This means there is less for the booth staff to manage, less for the prospect to stuff in their bag, and less printing costs. I’m very happy with this direction/foundatino - but next year I think we can take it a little bit further with even less paper and more refined hand out options.

This week, my focus is on followup and careful analysis of our performance, presence, and the results. It’s not enough to just be there - CES may run over four days, but really maximizing those days requires a year long commitment.