

What it’s like to be a ‘booth babe’ at cybersecurity’s biggest conference - ryutin
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/post/heres-what-its-like-to-be-a-booth-babe-at-cybersecuritys-biggest-conference/2014/02/27/67cd0884-a013-11e3-878c-65222df220eb_blog.html

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toolz
I don't get it. There's nothing wrong with using your physical assets to draw
in conversation and make a sale. If someone labels you as a 'booth babe', then
great! You've done well to have one of your assets recognized to get the job
done. If you don't want to have that certain asset acknowledged, don't feature
it.

To make myself clear, I don't think there is anything wrong with physical
attraction. We're all adults and we all understand physical attraction gets
peoples attention. Why do we have to pretend, then, that it's some sort of
derogatory title when you're acknowledged for taking care of your body and
wearing sexy clothing?

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MichaelGG
Ideally we wouldn't need this kind of stuff, people would have some perfectly
logical approach to evaluating all the vendors, and use their attention
correctly. Perhaps it's a game theory problem; if we were guaranteed no one
else would use sex appeal, nor would we. The problem then is that big flashy
booths are far, far, more expensive then hiring even a half-dozen very
attractive people.

But really, it goes deeper than that. A lot tradeshows are a vacation for the
attendees, so if throw a fun party for everyone, you'll have a lot of
potential customers hanging out with you. This is important if you're in a
competitive service business where your competitors are nominally offering the
exact same service. Everyone says their datacenter won't go offline, that
they'll have proper service, etc. Getting to know your vendor/customer goes a
long way in keeping that business relationship when shit hits the fan, as it
inevitably will.

As far as the sales info on the floor, of course you need real full-time
staff. The temporary staff is just to get people's attention, let them know
more or less what we offer, and keep them enqueued while a one of our sales
people gets over to them. But for commodity services, everyone already knows
pretty much what we're offering. This probably doesn't hold true for truly
novel software products that really are different from competitors.

Anyways, if the gender balance changed, and attractive young women weren't
enough to get a party going with our customers, we'd come up with something
else. But parties seem to be a fairly common denominator, so I doubt that'll
change any time soon.

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hoopism
Pretty superficial... the article I mean.

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trebor
By the time I've gotten to talk to someone at the booth, the last thing I want
to find is that the person is a model (a "booth babe" if you will). My
questions are technical and typically involve the nitty-gritty details of a
project. I really appreciate whenever I meet someone who's an involved with
the actual product.

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MichaelGG
Do you find that you're actually being prevented to talking to a real sales
person or engineer at shows? Usually the models are there to keep the queue,
since it's rather cheap to hire attractive and outgoing people to do just
that. It's probably just a reflection that sending FTEs to shows is expensive,
so there might only be a few of actual employees there. But the models should
be helping you get to one of the FTEs as soon as possible - that's pretty much
why they're hired.

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IgorPartola
On some level this short article provides the answer: as more women attend the
conferences, there will be fewer cases of "booth babes" being hired, and the
ones that will be will have to be proper sales people. Then again, there is a
big difference between the RSA conference and, say, a video game convention.

