As some of our team members head off to Detroit for Automate 2023, we were reflecting on our last trade show experience. In April we had the privilege of being part of a delegation of amazing companies at the Canada Pavillion at Hannover Messe 2023 (#HM23). It was our first time at this massive tradeshow and it definitely won’t be our last! Here are a few takeaways from our time in Germany:
Benchmark Against Your Competitors (Large and Small)
Tradeshows are a great opportunity to scope out your competitors and identify best practices. The number of companies involved in manufacturing innovation is staggering. It’s sometimes difficult to get a strong grasp on the machine vision and automation landscape by visiting websites and following news feeds. While there are thousands of companies marketing their solutions, we learned that many of them are still seeking out opportunities to deploy at scale. Some that are much larger than us are still trying to crack that scalability nut.
While it doesn’t always move as quickly as we would like, we’re proud that our largest manufacturing customers have deployed and are scaling our smart vision solutions. The number of machines and factories and types of applications we’re building smart vision solutions are growing monthly and we’re planning to leverage the contacts made in Hannover to augment that growth!
Show vs.Tell
Clarity and conviction are essential. People passing by your booth or stand need to immediately understand what you have to offer them. A lot of our solutions are net-new. It’s important not to be too clever (smart but not too smart) in the language you use to describe your products and services. Providing a live demo or allowing visitors to interact with your solutions is a much more engaging experience. While we were unable to have physical demos at Hannover, we’ll have our deflectometry demo for high-gloss and reflective parts and a brand new Eigen Product Twin demo at – Automate 2023 and Automatica.
Identify Potential Partners & Deepening Relationships
There’s a reason they are called “strategic” partners. Standing out amongst the thousands of booths and activities at Hannover and other trade shows is a challenge. Finding partners with complementary offerings and co-marketing products and services is massively beneficial. There is nothing like having the opportunity to meet in person to deepen relationships. Those relationships extend beyond the commercial. We participated as part of a country delegation, giving us a presence at the show, and opportunities to meet with key partners and to network with other members of the Canadian delegation.
Show Your Maple Leaf Pride
As a company that works with international manufacturers, our customers and deployments are all over the world. What was abundantly clear in Hannover is that Canadian companies are leaders in smart manufacturing solutions. This was on full display at the Canada Pavillion. From products to passionate people, it was incredible to learn more about what they are doing and connect with them to explore opportunities to grow together.
We’d like to thank our friends at NGen Canada for all the work they did to make Canada Pavillion a success and for hosting events and tours that allowed us to engage with new prospects and partners.
We’d also like to thank them for producing this spotlight video on Eigen. We so appreciate the work you are doing to make the world aware of the smart manufacturing innovation happening right here in Canada.