247 exhibitors, 247 happy exhibitors

The Georgia Municipal Association has run the exhibit hall at GA Cities on Map D since 2011, close to the whole life of the platform. Yalonde Tanner manages the show, and the most recent edition was the largest GMA has held: 247 exhibitors.

Scale is usually where trade show management gets expensive in staff time. Tanner's account is the opposite. The bigger the hall got, the more work moved off her desk and onto the floor plan itself, because exhibitors could do for themselves the things that would otherwise have arrived as email.

GMA keeps its interactive floor plan live for roughly ten months of the year, not just the two and a half days everyone is on site. Tanner is emphatic with exhibitors that the show is not a document that goes stale between editions: it is live, and their entry in it is theirs to maintain.

In practice that means exhibitors pull their own badges, update their own company profiles and swap their own logos. One vendor changed theirs two days before doors opened, the kind of last-minute request that, handled by hand, lands on the show manager in the week they have least time for it.

As Tanner puts it, people like to be able to help themselves, and the platform makes it easy for them to do exactly that. She frames it as a chain rather than a saving: she can give exhibitors good service because she gets good service.

Two things come up when Tanner talks about selling booth space. The first is resizing. When an exhibitor wants a 10x20 rather than what is drawn, she can change the dimensions on the floor plan and let them book, instead of going away and coming back.

The second is holds. Map D lets her mark a booth as reserved while a buyer gets budget approved, so the answer to “I need to check before I commit” is a few days on hold rather than a lost sale or an awkward promise. That feature, she says, is what lets her provide excellent customer service because of a product.

Tanner runs a help desk for her own exhibitors, so she is exact about what a good response time means. What matters is not only the fix but the acknowledgement: knowing someone has the problem, even when the answer itself takes an hour.

Her example came from the morning of the interview. A renewal notice arrived from her legal team, she forwarded it, and a two-year contract was back with her and submitted to legal inside the hour, closing something she had expected to spend a day on.

Tanner is candid that longevity is not the same as inertia. She reviews other event management software when it is prudent to, doing her due diligence each time, and has stayed since 2011 anyway, on a mix of the product and the relationship behind it.

Active in IAEE, she points smaller show managers toward Map D, particularly the ones still running their floor plans on paper. Affordable, professional and proactive is how she puts it, and she recommends the platform to others in the industry.