What To Say To Stop People At A Trade Show Booth: An Actor’s Guide

This is the summary based on The FEEL Podcast with Steve Multer.

The loudest thing on a trade show floor isn't the music or the crowd noise. It's the collective ego of the exhibitors — everyone broadcasting their own story, their own history, their own feature list, all at once.

When you lead with your company's background or your product's specs, you're quietly asking the attendee to do the work. You're handing them your story and asking them to go find the relevance in it themselves.

They won't. And that's not rudeness — it's basic human wiring. Malter puts it plainly: the only thing the person you're speaking with cares about, whether the engagement is professional or personal, is the thing that is of value to them.

That single sentence is the entire foundation. Not a slogan. A hard rule about attention. It's up to us, within our roles, to figure out our guest well enough to create value for them, rather than telling our own story to create value for ourselves.

So the failure of the generic broadcast isn't really about word choice. It's a failure of alignment. Your opening sentence and the listener's actual interest are pointing in opposite directions.

And that alignment isn't just a scripting problem — it's the whole reason how to staff and run a trade show booth that drives ROI starts with focus, not features. The words your team says are only the surface. What's underneath is who those words are actually serving.

A salesperson broadcasts to a generic audience, saying the exact same thing no matter who's standing there. An actor connects one-to-one, reading the person in front of them and adjusting in real time. When your first line is about you, the scene is already lost.

The fix is a change of aim. Your first sentence has to work like a mirror, reflecting their interest or their pressure back at them before you say a single word about yourself. Check this — that's the difference between noise and a genuine stop, and it costs you nothing but a change in focus.

The Actor's Framework: How to Hook People Walking Past Your Booth

Malter's move from stage to trade show floor wasn't about picking up sales tricks. It was about transferring what performing already taught him — presence, credibility, the ability to own a role — into the three-second window of the stop.

He's said he could talk for ten minutes about the skills that being on a stage or in front of a camera hands you without you realizing it. A few of them matter more than the rest for exhibitor success.

The core of it is this: when you speak for an organization, you are technically taking on a role. That's not a euphemism for faking it. It's the actor's discipline of stepping fully into a character and owning both the role and the content you're delivering.

Do that well, and something strange happens — people start treating you as the authority. Malter gets asked constantly, sometimes by executives inside the very company he's representing, "I've never met you before. What do you do for our company?"

The reason they ask is that he carries a certain quantity of credibility. He owned the role, so the room assumed he belonged in it.

Eye Contact and the Lack of Fear

In acting, nerves are contagious. If the performer is anxious, the audience gets anxious. The trade show floor works identically. If you're hesitant, hovering, half-creeping toward an attendee, they feel that friction and pull away from it.

The antidote is presence, and presence starts at the eyes. Not a predatory stare — a genuine look-them-in-the-eye connection that signals you actually have something of substance to offer.

Malter names it directly: connect with the audience, look people in the eye, and speak with a certain amount of authority and a lack of fear or nerves. That last part does the heavy lifting.

When you speak without fear, you project credibility, and credibility is what makes a busy stranger's feet stop moving. Notice how little this has to do with the script? The stop happens in your body before it happens in your words.

Owning the Role of the Expert

Standing in your booth with authority means dropping the self-image of the person just handing out brochures and stepping into the role of credible expert instead. It's the same instinct that let Malter answer a skeptical executive without flinching — he owned the role, so the question answered itself.

This is where intentional practice separates a strong booth cast from a nervous one. Owning the role isn't arrogance and it isn't a costume. It's clarity about why you're there and what you can hand the guest. When your staff carries that, the whole booth reads differently to everyone walking past.

Struggling to turn your booth staff into a high-performing cast? Mike Gunawan works with exhibitors to refine booth presence into real lead generation. Book a consultation to audit your current strategy.

How to Tailor Your Booth Message to Different Visitors

One of the most common exhibitor mistakes is treating everyone walking the aisle as a single, uniform audience. Malter is blunt about why that fails: we like to talk to people as if it's a generic crowd, telling ourselves we can say the exact same thing no matter who we're speaking with.

It's simply not the case. We have to tailor the message to the person we're talking with in that moment — it's the only way to create success.

And it all depends on the persona. A single exhibitor might be targeting several different personas, and the same line that lands with one will bounce off another.

This is where the actor's read-the-room instinct becomes a practical strategy rather than a nice idea. You're not delivering a monologue. You're adjusting the scene to your scene partner.

The good news: you don't need a ten-minute discovery call to figure out who you're talking to. You read a few cues, or you ask one value-first question that puts the focus squarely on the listener. Instead of "Can I help you?" — a line that invites a reflexive "just looking" — you offer something that reflects a challenge they might actually be carrying, and you let their reaction tell you where to go next.

That's the whole engagement loop in miniature: read the person, mirror their value, adjust in real time. It's the difference between a script you push and a conversation you build, and it never once required you to memorize a perfect line. It required you to pay attention.

Before your next show, run every opening line you've got through one quiet test — whose value is this serving, theirs or mine? If the honest answer is mine, it isn't a hook. It's noise wearing a smile.

From the Stop to the Stage: One-to-One and One-to-Many

The stop is only the opening beat. What you say to interrupt someone's trajectory has to hand off cleanly into whatever comes next — a focused one-to-one conversation, or, when the crowd builds, a one-to-many presentation delivered from the booth like a small stage.

This is exactly where Malter's theater background stops being a fun origin story and becomes the actual engine. He points out that being on a stage or in front of a camera trains you not just for the one-on-one but for the one-to-many, too.

The same presence that stops a single passerby is what holds a gathered group. The pre-show mindset, the in-show delivery, and the post-show follow-through all draw on the same root skill: taking on a role, owning the content, and connecting with real people without fear.

So the question underneath all of it isn't really "what's the magic phrase?" It's whether you're willing to stop narrating your own story and start performing a role that creates value for the guest. That shift is available to any booth staffer — actor training optional.

If you want to sit with the full conversation on the psychology of engagement and where stagecraft meets the trade show floor, listen to the complete talk with Steve Malter on The Feel Podcast. And then ask yourself, before your next show: whose story is your booth actually telling?

Mike Gunawan

Exhibition Strategist

LiveLife

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Frequently Asked Questions

There's no magic phrase — that's the whole point. Malter's answer is to make your first sentence about the guest's value, not your company's story. Ask something that mirrors a challenge they might be carrying, then read their reaction and adjust. The words matter less than the focus behind them, and the stop happens in your presence before it happens in your script.

Because they broadcast to a generic audience instead of connecting one-to-one. The moment your opening serves your own story rather than the listener's value, their internal defense kicks in and they speed up. Malter is blunt that you can't say the same thing to everyone — you have to tailor the message to the person in front of you in that exact moment.

Yes. Malter himself had never set foot in a trade show when he started; he fell into it by accident at 30. The skills that transfer aren't performance tricks — they're taking on a role, owning your content, holding eye contact, and speaking with authority and a lack of fear. Those are learnable through intentional practice, not talent you're born with.