You worked for months to make your artworks; pushing long hours in front of the canvas, maybe working a 9 to 5 to fund the whole thing, planing the shows’s logistics and god forbid you even had to buy plane tickets and pack your art so that the luggage throwers don’t picasso it out of existence. But that’s all in the past, now it’s opening day and time for you to finally take it easy, right?

Well, what if we just change the scenario a bit. You spent months to make a cool new doohickey that will help people understand emotions more profoundly and give them the ability to communicate those newly found emotional states to others with ease by just looking at it.

After all the time tinkering and toiling away, you finally make it work and your close friends and colleges like it a lot — you’re on to something for sure! You then apply to be part of a trade show, where other likeminded inventors are showcasing their thing-a-majigs and whacha-ma-callits, that perform quite similar tasks as your own invention.

You arrive at the show a day before opening and after decorating your booth with posters, pamphlets and the like, you can finally relax, congratulate yourself and get yourself a nice big glass of bubbly.

If you’ve ever been part of a trade show, you will surely know that showing up with a nice poster and some flyers won’t generate any sales, let alone produce those valuable contacts that one can get by attending the right event. It doesn’t matter how long it took to make your product. Only after actually setting-up you booth does the real work begin:

You talk to everyone that passes by. Maybe you wear a giant beaver costume or have a live DJ set; the goal is to get people to notice your booth and your product amidst hundreds of others, all trying to stand out. And having a good tactic on how you’re going to do that is paramount.

But why do we not make the same preparations when attending our own exhibition opening (especially if we’re doing a solo show). Like with trade shows, the people who attend exhibition openings are at least vaguely interested in what we made (or thirsty). 

Because, apart from dreaming to sell everything to a foreign collector that unexpectedly showed up in the gallery and fell in love with our work, there is so much we can do at an opening to build our contact base, to strengthen our networks or just test out our conversation and sales skills.

There’s more than enough time for bubbly after the opening — or if your tactic is to get your potential collectors tipsy, the day after the show — when you’ll be toasting not only to a well received exhibition, but a well received cheque with your name on it as well.