William Toll - Marketing Professional in Boston

Parallels Summit 2012 – The App Economy Comes to Web Hosting

William Toll — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:46:21 +0000

This post was originally published on theWHIR on February 21st 2012 http://www.thewhir.com/blog/parallels-summit-2012-the-app-economy-comes-to-web-hosting

The Yottaa team has just returned from the Parallels Cloud Summit 2012. Parallels is one of the leading platforms that web hosting providers build their businesses on. Whether it’s a small hoster with a single server running Parallels Plesk Panel, or it’s a large provider with thousands of servers and millions of active websites running Parallels Automation, Parallels’ has a tremendous ecosystem.

Backstory

At the summit I experienced a new level of excitement in an industry that I’ve been a part of for more than a decade.

I have been incredibly fortunate to have led marketing and product efforts at some of the biggest hosting providers in the world. At each provider I was part of a team that truly “got it.” So as I listened to presenters from Parallels, Tucows, SoftLayer, Gartner and beyond convey succinctly what we all know: hosting was cloud before the word cloud existed, and the industry has always been focused on the cross-sell and upsell.

Back in the 1990’s the second largest hosting provider in the world was ValueWeb (now Hostway), co-founded by John Enright (now at HostMySite). I was lucky to start my career in the Web hosting industry working for John. We were pioneers. We were the first hosting company that had a fully integrated and automated provisioning for an E-Commerce account. New customers could signup online – and we automatically provisioned their domains, website space, DNS, FTP accounts, email accounts, databases, Miva Merchant shopping cart software, SSL certificates, and merchant accounts. Customers could be online and selling their products within minutes. We never stopped adding complementary services like Constant Contact email marketing services, blogging software, website templates, photo gallery software – even online marketing and web design professional services.

At scale these services created a passionate customer base that was successful on the Web. With high ARPUs (average revenue per user), low churn, and customer service excellence, the Affinity brands of ValueWeb and Gate.com, were leading the industry. With our comprehensive integrated suite of applications, hundreds of thousands of businesses built successful, revenue-generating web presences.

Now every host can win in the “App Economy”

Apps and add-on services have always been the keystone of the industry. At every hosting conference I’ve been to, analysts from 451 Research, Gartner, Microsoft and others have pleaded with hosts to expand their offerings. For years these pleas fell on deaf ears. Most hosts continued to focus on “power, ping, and pipe.” Millions of dollars of add-on revenue was left on the table as SMBs acquired these applications and services through other channels.

Sure, back then the world was not ready for apps and marketplaces, until Apple launched the iTunes app store alongside the iPhone. Sure, this was also before the transition from desktop and client-server software to SaaS. This was also before the growth in APIs, SOA and mashups opened the door for frictionless innovation in apps and their distribution.

But now that market infrastructure is in place, it’s time for hosters to take what ValueWeb did back in the 1990’s and extend it to millions of hosting customers around the world. Parallels APS (application packaging standard) has for the first time truly made that easy and lucrative. This is exactly what we needed in hosting today, and a fresh team at Parallels is enabling it.

Now the fun starts. It’s time for hosters to package up, bundle and cross-sell services like backup, SEO, social media services, website acceleration and CDN services, hosted PBX, mobile enablement, hosted desktops and more. As telcos enter the space, MSPs expand their offerings, and SMBs move from traditional on-premise solutions, hosting providers and their resellers only stand to grow their revenues and deepen their customer relationships.

The team here at Yottaa is extremely excited to be a part of the hosting industry and the Parallels ecosystem. 2012 will be a year of growth for hosters in the Parallels ecosystem and we’ll all see greater revenues and deeper customer relationships.

Oh, and we can’t wait for many of you to come to our home town, Boston, in July for HostingCon 2012. You are all going to get to meet some of the great startups, ISVs and infrastructure companies from the Boston area.

Part II Parallels Cloud Summit 2012 What I Want to Learn and Chat About

William Toll — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:14:27 +0000

This post was originally published on theWHIR: http://www.thewhir.com/blog/part-ii-parallels-summit-2012-what-i-want-to-learn-and-chat-about

Last week I published Part I of my goals for my participation at the Parallels Cloud Summit next week in Orlando. It’s always a great event and this year promises to be the best yet, in terms of keynotes and the quality of the attendees. The Web Hosting ecosystem is attracting a large amount of attention during the transition to cloud. Last week I covered the Shared, VPS and Dedicated Hosting spaces. This week it’s Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and E-commerce.

Cloud IaaS

The market for Public, Private, Hybrid IaaS solutions are growing and scaling rapidly. Yes, Amazon has massive lift in their wings, but Hosting.com, SoftLayer, GoGrid, Rackspace, SingleHop, BlueLock, iNetU, etc. are all growing just fine. Again, 2012 will be a year of services. Services that make the cloud and the applications hosted on it, more integrated, more secure and more useful. Companies that focus on services are killing it. For example, I think about the success that FireHost is having with their cloud and the security services they offer like log management and two-factor authentication. The market for Cloud Computing in the SMB will continue to grow rapidly for a few years. It will also remain somewhat fragmented. This McKinsey article sums up the fragmentation nicely.

Cloud – PaaS

PaaS platforms are undoubtedly maturing at a rapid pace. While they are to date rather removed from the traditional “Web Hosting” ecosystem, I suspect that will change a lot in 2012. We have one our ecosystem’s own, Microsoft, gaining some momentum and broadening the appeal of Azure. Other leaders in PaaS including, Jelastic’s Java platform, VMware’s cloud foundry, AppHarbor, Salesforce.com’s Heroku should all be watched closely by hosting providers. At the Parallels event, I am interested in learning about hosters that are embracing the PaaS offerings and building products that incorporate PaaS features or integrate directly with platforms like Azure. There is a big opportunity to partner with these rapidly growing and developer friendly platforms.

Cloud – SaaS

Email and collaboration solutions paved the way for SaaS as some of the earliest offerings. Countless offerings have been built on the Parallels platform. In 2012 we are now in an age where multiple SaaS applications are being integrated. If you are Salesforce.com and need to integrate a new SaaS app, you can simply buy another SaaS app provider. If you are a SaaS company with a point solution, 2012 will be an opportunity to add features or integrate with other SaaS applications.

2012 will provide plenty of examples of one SaaS app integrating with another. Companies like Backupify exemplify this trend and are built on it—but what about the hosting ecosystem of SaaS application providers? I think applications from companies like MyHosting.com, Apptix, AppRiver, VARDynamics and Fpweb.net could be a spring board into other applications and business processes. Sure, email archiving and security have been a part of these offerings for years, but in 2012 we will see more CRM platforms and BI tools become integrated. As I observe HubSpot, Marketo, ZenDesk, and the dozens of other SaaS apps that are taking the SMB space by storm, I wonder: will these offerings join the hosting and Parallels ecosystems?

I am excited to hear that Parallels will be announcing additional applications at the Summit this year and will be sharing their vision for where APS (Application Packaging Standard) is going. There are so many great SaaS applications beyond email, collaboration, website building and marketing automation. Examples include MailChimp, UserVoice, Get Satisfaction. One area of great interest to me, and of great confusion for most SMBs is how to leverage SaaS solutions for Social Media. There are numerous Facebook page builders, Facebook app builders, Social Media management tools and reporting tools available. I can imagine a hoster adding services to their portfolio of offerings like GaggleAMP or Sprout Social.

E-commerce:

E-commerce is exploding. This last holiday season set records almost every day from Black Friday to the last day of shipping before the holiday. We have gone from having a handful of shopping cart platforms like Miva, Pinnacle Cart, ShopSite and Magento to having a growing list of rapidly growing full service e-commerce offerings from companies like Volusion, Shopify, ProStores and BigCommerce. E-commerce hosting is where all the worlds collide: hosting, shopping cart applications, security services, 3^rd party-add on applications and more. After this holiday season, I would be interested in hearing from hosters that are seeing growth in their e-commerce offerings.

In Summary:

I am very much looking forward to the Parallels Summit and the opportunity to continue these conversations with fellow attendees. I’ll be at the event with the Yottaa team, and we are eager to meet our existing hosting partners like Jess Coburn, CEO of the Windows Cloud Hosting company, Applied Innovations as well as new potential partners.

What about you? What do you want to learn and chat about at Parallels Summit? Comment below to tweet @utollwi. I would love to hear your thoughts.

#ParallelsCloud Summit – What I Want To Discuss and Learn

William Toll — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:13:12 +0000

This post was originally published on theWHIR http://www.thewhir.com/blog/parallels-summit-2012-what-i-want-to-learn-and-chat-about-part-i

Wow! another year has passed and the hosting industry is not just surviving in the face of the Cloud, but finding its firm foundation at the center of it.
Shared, VPS, Dedicated and Cloud – all of these hosting markets are in transition, and many of the hosting providers that are leading the charge will be at the Parallels Summit.

Shared Web Hosting

Let’s start with Shared hosting, a market I’ve been passionate about since my employment at great companines like ValueWeb – Affinity, (aka HostWay), NaviSite and Verio. Shared hosting has been and always will be the bread and butter (read: the profit center) for the big hosts. Even large enterprise hosting providers realize this, as evidenced by last year’s re-birth of HostMySite by Hosting.com.

Beyond the continuation of the Endurance International roll-up strategy and the Vistaprint acquisition of Webs.com, what makes me most excited about the shared space are apps. We are in an app economy. Almost any “How to start your small business” article says to “get a website and start a blog,” and many of these articles mention WordPress, Drupal and others. With Parallels Plesk Panel and Parallels Business Automation making it simpler to role out niche application-based hosting plans, why are so many hosts reluctant to follow this strategy?

The real key for shared hosts is to leverage their strategic position with small businesses to help those customers not just have a website or a blog, but have a successful one. Today’s “content marketing” and social media marketing strategies are all about driving visitors to websites with valuable, shareable content. That means getting the buyers to your site, getting them to learn from your site, and getting them to interact with your site. In other words, getting them to trust your company enough to buy not just hosting, but the whole suite of services.

If I were a shared hosting business leader today, here’s what I would ask my team: “what are we doing to make our customers successful”? What additional services can we offer that will not just increase revenue and decrease churn, but genuinely make our customers successful?” Have you seen the current TV commercials for Web.com, Network Solutions, and Intuit, the message is all about the apps and services, it’s not just web hosting. Several vendors can help shared hosters help their customers be more successful. Examples include Mobile website enablement services from Unity Mobile or website acceleration services from Yottaa, my employer, spring to mind.

VPS + Dedicated

Having worked at a large enterprise managed hosting provider (NaviSite) where the average customer spent thousands of dollars per month (and some hundreds of thousands) I am closely following the slowing of growth in “un-managed hosting.” Unmanaged dedicated and VPS plans had their place in a pre-cloud world and are still great foundations for other businesses, like hosting companies. But we have to admit that the majority of today’s new applications and new startups are architected for, and deployed on, public clouds of the IaaS and PaaS types. I want to learn from and talk with dedicated hosting providers and their plans for new revenue streams and customer retention.

In part II I’ll share my thoughts on what I want to learn at the Parallels Summit 2012 in regards to Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and Ecommerce hosting segments. In the meantime, leave some comments below on what you want to learn and talk about at the Parallels Summit 2012!

Accelerating Ecommerce Revenue With Social Media

William Toll — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:34:29 +0000

I was invited to speak at a seminar for ecommerce site owners which focused on the customer being an asset. I gave two talks, one about ecommerce and website speed, with a Yottaa focus and the other about how to leverage social media to accelerate ecommerce revenue.

My social media talk focused on a survey of ecommerce websites and their use of Social Media tools to drive referrals and engagement with buyers. Using Amazon as a benchmark the talk reviewed several websites in Denmark. The presentation also left attendees with a strategy and process for moving forward with social media by listening, engaging and inspiring their ecommerce website visitors.

Based on feedback during the day long seminar, I believe there is a lot of interest in harnesses the power of Social Media to drive customer engagement and revenue, however there is no doubt a lack of knowledge on how to proceed. SaaS-IT has some great programs that can help companies in Europe move forward with a program for growth.

http://np.netpublicator.com/?id=n76801379

Event Website: Your Customer, Your Asset - Seminar on how to ensure that customers act as anticipated or complete the purchase when they interact with you online.

Date: November 28, 2011

Location: Copenhagen Denmark – Auditorium Edvard Thomsens Vej 10, St. 2300 Copenhagen S

Sponsor: DIBS Payment Services – the Nordics leading provider of payment services.

Organizer: SaaS-IT – An established SaaS Consultancy that helps ISVs, Service Providers and the IT channel leverage the new SaaS and Cloud ecosystem. My good friends Anders Trolle-Shultz and Vagn Kohler are the principles of SaaS-IT and my contacts for this event.

Accelerating Ecommerce Revenue with Social Media: Slideshare

Social media and ecommerce william toll – final

View more presentations from William Toll

Photos:

William Toll, VP, Marketing at Yottaa

Photo by: Flemming Eiberg http://www.linkedin.com/in/flemmingeiberg

Attendees at Your Customer, Your Asset Seminar in Copenhagen Denmark Nov 28 2011

Photo by: William Toll

Stop Online Piracy Act: What You Need to Know [INFOGRAPHIC]

William Toll — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:18:43 +0000

Stop Online Piracy Act: What You Need to Know [INFOGRAPHIC]. - Mashable

Sign The Petition at SaveHosting.org

Event: Your Customer – Your Asset

William Toll — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 18:45:26 +0000

I am excited to announce an event for B2B and B2C professionals “Your Customer – Your Asset“. It will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark on Monday November 28th, 2011. The focus is ensuring customers complete their intent to purchase online.

I will be presenting two sessions:

Understanding How Ecommerce Revenue and Website Speed Correlate
Accelerating Ecommerce Revenue with Social Media

Social Media and the empowerment it bestows to the consumer is bringing disruption across every industry – in countries across the world. Ecommerce retailers the world over are rapidly adopting social commerce techniques to leverage employees, partners and customers to share stories, recommendations and interact with influencers.

In these two sessions I will show how ecommerce websites that leverage the power of social networks to drive word of mouth can drive higher conversions, average order sizes and customer satisfaction. I’ll also show how adding social components to a website and shopping cart do not have to make the website slower. Faster websites have higher conversions, average order sizes and are more likely to be shared and generate repeat visits.

More information on the event can be found in this brochure:

The sponsors and speakers at the event include:

DIBS Payment Services

SaaS-iT – SaaS Consultancy

Yottaa – Website Performance Services

Convince Interactive – Digital Marketing Bureau

iHedge – Software Analysis Firm

Mimecast – Email Management Services

More Information About The Event Can Be Found On This LinkedIN Event Page:

http://events.linkedin.com/Customer-Asset/pub/842630

Google+ & Your Employees, Time to Dive In

William Toll — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:49:37 +0000

We knew this would happen. Google is now indexing and ranking Google+ content higher. This makes sense, and it’s the reason Google has been on a “quality” push for months. With the Panda update Google “took out the trash”. With “Ripples” Google helps users understand how and why their content is shared. The “+” button is rapidly becoming a strong signal for quality and “we” are being “trained” to use it.

The only real equivalent to what Google is doing is LinkedIN. I see it this way – on Twitter, we socialize and freely share. For most of us a Tweet lasts 3-5 minutes in the stream. Twitter has a place in the community. On LinkedIN, we share the “best” stuff, most likely to be of interest to our “business” network. At the moment, nothing is more powerful than your content being shared on LinkedIN. I often meet people who still don’t know about one of the most powerful tools on the Web: LinkedIN’s Status Update search. Did you know, you can easily search all mentions of your brand, your content or your keywords. I use this tool to build a profile of the people that are sharing our content. I can see their job titles, company name, company size, company location and much more. (Yes, you can see people outside your network!) Nothing is more helpful today to gather this insight. Best of all it’s free and anyone can do it. Here is a screenshot that shows you a search I did recently for Yottaa.

LinkedIN Status Update Search Results for Website Speed

So what does a content marketer do to leverage the growing importance of Google+? First, don’t wait for “Business Google+ Pages and Accounts.” Waiting will only delay your success in the new era of “Fresh” Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Encourage your key employees to get a Google+ profile and account. Teach them how to leverage Google+ to follow and share their passions. Teach them how to add their other profiles and develop interesting profiles. Encourage them to start reading and sharing content from your industry’s media, thought leaders and beyond. Help them build and share circles of industry leaders and media. (Don’t forget to teach them best practices for sharing and using the social Web, nothing is worse than an employee shouting a sales message). When you are ready, roll out a program to help employees share company content on Google+. Likewise, encourage them to “+1″ and comment on references to your brand, where appropriate. One of the best tools for this in the Twitter world is GaggleAMP, if you have not checked them out you should. I have not found a similar tool to GaggleAMP for Google+, however I am sure one is coming and GaggleAMP may well add Google+ in the future.

Finally, why go through all the effort to leverage Google+? First, it’s about the SERPs, SEO is not dead, it’s just become social! The SERPs are now full of content that has been successfully shared across networks, and increasingly that means Google+. Let’s look at a SERP for the search Web Performance Optimization. It’s important to note that in example one, I am logged into Google, so my results are highly influenced by my social network and activity. Example two, I have a clean browser, with no cookies and history and I am not logged into Google.

Example One: Logged In Google Search Results Page Web Performance Optimization

Example Two: Logged Out Google Search Results Page Web Performance Optimization

As you can see when logged into Google, my results are different, and influenced by my social network. It’s clear to me that as Google expands its reach, gains more users of Gmail, Google Apps and Google+, there will be more “logged in” users. SERPs that have socially influenced results will not only rank higher, but are more visually appealing. Plus, with over 90% of buyers considering recommendations before making a purchase decision, having the validation of others in their social circle sharing or clicking a “+1″ for content, will drive click-thrus and conversions.

What about you? Have you rolled out a plan to help your team have fun on social networks, while providing some value back to your marketing efforts?

Google Reader – An Update on Google’s Update

William Toll — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:44:14 +0000

Google’s update to Google Reader has caused a lot of anger across the content curation world. No doubt Google Reader powered a large portion of the sharing of content across social networks. On 10/31/2011 they broke that and now force users to share their readings on Google +. As of result of these changes there is a petition with 10,000 signatures. There were articles on this change in Forbes, Atlantic Wire, Washington Post, Mashable, TechCrunch, RWW and beyond.

Personally, – I save Google + for the best of the best and when I want to comment. I used Twitter to share a diverse population of RSS feeds – focused on Cloud Computing and Marketing. These are my passions and the passions of my followers.

It amazes me that Google is so callous – deleting users shares, their contacts, their likes from Google Reader. All this, plus the new interface is being widely criticized “too much white space” and multiple navigation areas are being mentioned most often. Although the old interface was ageing it was built for speed. In fact the team that used to work on Google Reader obsessed over ever pixel: Read this post on the Google Reader Blog on how they found 17 more pixels of reading space! - it It definitely makes you wonder how committed/desperate they are to build a social network. Interestingly if you run a sentiment analysis against Twitter for Google Reader it’s almost all negative today.

http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/search?query=%22google%20reader%22

I suspect the number of Tweets (albeit mostly repetitive) will drop today. I also read that other services are experiencing the affects of this change including: Friendfeed, FlipBoard, Twitterfeed, Deliver.it, Buffer etc.

Also, I tried to “export” my Google Reader “Shares” however the JSON download functionality seems to be under heavy load as users desperately to to salvage what they one had.

The good news? Opportunity. There are several startups looking to fill the void that Google has opened. The one that had bubbled to the top is: HiveMinded

More Good news…for those with iPhones – I think I found a replacement!

I think I just found a RSS reader that can handle my 8,400 RSS feeds! No other iOS app has been able to handle the digital hoarding of 8,400+ RSS feeds I have created.

There are sharing options, folders, read/unread indicators…There is even a “night mode” – which enables you to read before bed and not be blinded. I also like the “email full content”, Facebook, Evernote, “Copy” options and Instapaper options as well. Still testing it but so far it looks far better than the mess that Google Created with their Desktop and iOS Google Reader updates!

http://twitter.com/#!/feeddler

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=364873582&mt=8

A screenshot from Feeddler is shown below.

What do you think about all of this? What is your plan to continue to read/share and love the world of information available about your passions?

Feeddler - Google Reader Replacement for iOS

Event Marketing – The Ultimate Toolkit Checklist for Trade Show Booths

William Toll — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 16:45:47 +0000

Preparing for a trade show or expo booth is complicated enough – with coordination between event organizers, creative teams and shipping companies – one thing you don’t want to forget about is the team. With executives, sales teams and partners all expecting a flawless booth and engaged personnel – how can you, as the marketing leader or event coordinator be best prepared?

No doubt – preparing for an event is one of the most traditional “project management” intensive activities that the marketing team is asked to do – it ranks up there with a new website rollout or a rebranding effort. And – for many companies it happens multiple times per year. In some cases there can be two or shows running at one time. One secret I learned from Tani Currin of NaviSite was to be prepared for anything. A fully stocked tool kit can make your presence more successful and your team more relaxed.

How many times have you been at a trade show – only to discover you did not have enough power strips (to keep employee devices charged) or post-it-notes to attach notes to business cards. Even worse, when you are in a strange city running out to find supplies can be costly, time consuming and stressful.

I recently helped Yottaa sponsor and exhibit at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. #W2E It was our first big trade show. I thought I would take a photo of the kit I put together and share it’s contents with you.

Event Marketing Toolkit

Lightweight box with wheels. I bought one at OfficeMax that collapses, has a lid, an extendable handle. It’s meant to store legal files but it’s just the right size and color to have in a booth. Plus – it can serve as a little table and/or hide things in.
Power strips – Bring two – you can always string them together to increase the length. The ones that allow the larger wall plugs to be spread apart are even better. Make sure they have a surge suppressor – the power at these events is uneven and can easily zap all of your equipment. Be sure to check the length, I have seen these as shorts as 3′ to as long as 12′.
Tools: Scissors, screwdrivers, pliers – I bought a small 20-piece kit that has it’s own storage container. These tools are great if you need to adjust something and the facilities people are not around (or not looking).
Network Switch – 4 or more ports. These are great for adding extra ports in the booth for employees, demo machines and more. The wireless connections at events are notoriously bad – so anything you can do to ensure a good solid connection for your machines is a good thing. You can also buy a wireless router – and use it as a switch or to provide wireless access – but setting it up and maintaining a good connection can be a challenge for the employees in your booth.
Ethernet cables – colored ones. These can help prevent people from tripping on them or finding them. Get both longer and shorter ones to keep cable clutter down. Be careful when you buy them – don’t buy a “crossover cable”(usually yellow)
Miscellaneous cables – (Update) Courtney Engle reminded me that I always pack some extra cables – VGA adapters for Mac’s, an extra long VGA adapter (in case you need to move the laptop to monitor, USB extenders – in case the keyboard and mouse are higher on the table/kiosk than you planned, an extra MACBook Air ethernet adapter, and an extra USB and iPhone charger – booth staff always seem to forget theirs.
Black Velcro Strips for wire management. You want your booth and wires to look neat. There is nothing worse than seeing a tangle of wires coming out or a laptop or monitor.
Keyboards and Mice. Laptops are great for demos and or driving a display – but you want t make sure your booth visitors are able to see the screen (30″ monitor or laptop) easily and attaching keyboards and wired mice make it easier.
PPT Screensaver and Screenshots- You never know if you will have Internet access. Before you leave create a PPT with product benefits, screenshots and company overview can help tell the story.
Hand Sanitizer – Some of your employees will appreciate it.
Advil & Tylenol – Long days with lots of demos in bad lighting can give anyone a headache.
Mints- Help your team feel confident to speak to booth visitors.
Paper clips
Binder clips (helps hold signage or table throws nice and neat)
Stapler
Scotch tape
Clear Packing Tape (Save time and money by boxing up and securing your own shipping boxes)
Duct Tape
Bungee Cords – One or two different sizes – these are great for moving things between the exhibit hall and your hotel room or transportation.
Paper – letter size for marketing boxes etc.
Post-it-notes – booth staff can write notes on business cards or leave notes to each other. You can also use them to write demo account information down on the back of a monitor or keyboard. (Don’t write a password on it!)
Sharpie pens – wide and fine point.
Dust cloth – the microfiber ones are great for removing dust and fingerprints from screens.
Mailing envelope or two.
A few ziplock bags – great for protecting business cards etc.
Paper towels for emergencies
Pens
Notebooks
Extra company branded shirts- If possible bring one extra per booth staff (in the sizes of the staff)- having these on hand to deal with spills, wrinkles for forgotten shirts can save the day.
Printed Show Guide- Before any trade show make sure you send around a who/what/when/where guide for employees to know where they need to be, where everyone is staying etc. (Always good to also have a printed list of mobile numbers for all booth staff).
Don’t forget – candy bowl, business card drop bowl, acrylic collateral and business card holders etc.

What did I miss? What is in your kit?