CHICAGO — In November 2025, the International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IAEE)® hosted a webinar focused on successful show floor design that helps to improve the exhibitor and attendee experience and the organizer’s bottom line.
“Laying the Foundation for Success: 5 Floor Plan Design Tips to Sell More Booths,” featured insights from Corcoran Expositions’ Dan Corcoran, its Chief Operating Officer, and Kyle Corcoran, its Exhibit Manager.
Trade Show Executive attended the webinar to get insights on successful show floor designs that help drive booth sales, and compiled the following takeaways.
1. Design a Strategic Layout
In looking at your show floor design strategy, the Corcorans advised organizers to ignore the max layout and decorator inventory, and to instead design the floor plan they want that is going to help protect their revenue.
“Do not take that max layout and do what is sometimes referred to as a space draw,” Kyle Corcoran said. “What I mean by that is don’t have your exhibitors come in looking at the max floor plan and carving out their booth space of choice. You need to make it your own.”
They also encouraged organizers to not design their show floor based on priority points to better help them reach their revenue goals.
2. Design to Maximize Efficiency
When it comes to maximizing efficiency, it’s important to maintain as many sightlines from the front to the back of the hall as possible, and good traffic flow by featuring wider aisles from left to right for people to get across the show floor easily.
“There are two types of anchors in the hall; the first are your big exhibitors, and the second is your traffic drivers and activations,” Dan Corcoran said. “So, we’re going to cluster all of our big booths by the front door — without clogging the front door; we still want circulation around them.”
High-demand activations, which can include food areas, education theatres, stages and screens, should be placed around the perimeter of the show to help drive traffic all around the show’s footprint and save the better positions on the floor for sellable booths.
The Corcorans emphasized that “different isn’t always better,” and advised organizers to not rely on trendy layouts, like spoke and wheel designs, because they can make navigation harder for attendees.
3. Design to Inspire Growth
Another topic the webinar covered was designing a show floor to inspire growth — and upselling.
The first step to do for doing this though is to conduct a historical booth inventory analysis to identify what year-over-year trends the show is seeing.
“Once you have that baseline analysis complete, then you want to take those trends and compare them to how the priority points are rolling up and what those exhibiting companies have had in the past in terms of their booth sizes,” Kyle Corcoran said. “While you perform that analysis, you want to consider taking a couple of risks on the floor plan. [For example] maybe this company has a 20 by 20 [booth] last year, but they hinted they’d be interested in upsizing a little bit.”
The speakers suggested that event organizers should focus on the inspired upsizing of certain exhibitors while creating island booth locations near the entrance. That location is important because it serves as an incentive for exhibitors to upsize their booths.
4. Design to Create Demand
The key takeaway from the Corcorans point about designing to create demand centered around “show less, sell more.”
“Our simple, but again tried and true, approach is show less and sell more. What we mean by that is don’t just take whatever crazy budget goals your finance team gave you and roll out a floorplan that reflects that goal. If you were challenged with $100 million for your budget, don’t roll out booth inventory that totals $100 million in sales revenue if you sell everything,” Kyle Corcoran said.
He emphasized that the floor plan does not have to reflect sales goals right away, and instead organizers should actively manage the online floor plan to help control supply and demand.
“Nobody wants to be one of five people at a party; everybody wants to go to a party that’s got action. It’s the same thing with buying a booth. If I’m scrolling a floor plan and I go to buy a booth, and I see that 60% of the floor plan is available, it’s not a hot show. I’m not interested in being there,” Kyle Corcoran said. “And so, it’s up to you as the sales and organizer team to manage that supply so that there is demand in return.”
5. Design to Simplify the Customer Journey
The last major point that the webinar addressed was how to make the booth and exhibit-space purchasing process easier for exhibitors.
Organizers can turn their online floor plans into one-stop shopping opportunities by creating 24/7 access for exhibitors to reserve booths, displaying clear pricing and show information, and including calls to action like “reserve now” and “contact us.”
“Exhibitors should be able to reserve a booth directly from your floor plan without logging in. We do not want them leaving the floor plan to go find a reservation link somewhere or get the prospectus, or contact a salesperson who may be off,” Dan Corcoran said. “We want them to have the opportunity, if they’re ready, to book a booth right there. The number one killer of a deal is time, so we don’t want more time to elapse.”
When it comes to displaying pricing for transparency, the Corcorans warned organizers that one-off discounts with certain exhibitors can cause problems down the road if other exhibitors find out about the discounted rate. They advised that all pricing should be available for every exhibitor to see, and exceptions to those rates should not be made.
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