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What tips do you give on following up with leads you get from trade shows?
What are some tips you have for creating a structured and effective process for following up with leads generated at trade shows?
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6 Answers
Hi Charlie,
I love this question because I think "leads" generated at trade shows are among the most diverse in terms of quality. Many aren't leads at all - at least not initially. Those folks who just stopped by to grab a free pen or piece of candy probably aren't hot leads you want to send over to your sales team (and in fact may not even be the kind of contact or account you would ever sell to) but with a little cultivation.... some could turn into active buyers down the road. The challenge is separating the active interest from the passive (or non-existent).
Some events allow you to tag leads as you scan them so you can create a list of "hot leads" or active interest that can be treated differently or with more urgency. If that's not an option (and even if it is), a lead management process that includes scoring and nurturing is the best bet.
Instead of having your sales team weed through all the trade show leads, marketing should have a process for objectively measuring lead quality before they get routed to sales. Additionally, most leads (regardless of source ) can benefit from further nurturing to gauge interest and develop profiles before receiving a follow up. If your lead volume is very low, it may not be as much of an issue, but if your company generates a lot of leads from different sources - developing a process for determining when a lead is "sales ready" is the best way to increase rep productivity and conversion. A trade show booth visit in itself may not be demonstrative of buying behavior, but when combined with other activities could represent intent.
All of our trade show leads go through automated lead scoring (to assess prospect fit and assign a score for the booth visit), receive an immediate follow up from marketing (to gauge interest and impact the activity score) and are further profiled before being routed to sales. In this way, we ensure we are only sending leads to our sales team that are both a good fit for our solution (the right title/role, industries, company size, etc.) and are demonstrating active interest in it. This process can be as simple or elaborate as you decide to make it and when combined with lead nurturing will ensure that over time, you convert true prospect interest into hot leads for sales.
I tackled a question about lead scoring yesterday that may provide some good insights for how to best answer questions about lead quality: http://www.focus.com/questions/marketing/what-variables-should-include-my-lea...
Elle
Charlie:
I echo Elle's input above and would encourage you to develop a lead qualification process (as part of your lead management discipline) no matter what the source of the lead/response.
Marketing Sherpa ran a study that showed that 70% of all initial responses are not redy to buy when they first engage with your company. This could include web, tradeshows, etc. With this being the case the best thing you can do is begin to engage them in a dialogue and in the process nurture them until the point they are ready to buy.
This means marketing and sales must collaborate on defining each stage of the qualification process (starting with response through to customer). You will also need to define your routing rules, qualification and scoring model and ensure you have the right content to deliver to them at the various stages.
Combining a solid lead management process (which includes much of what I mentioned above) and enabling it with a robust marketing automation system will help a great deal in accomplishing this.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo
There's some great conversation about emailing trade show contacts at:
http://www.spamresource.com/2010/01/how-tradeshow-email-lists-can-get-you.html
and:
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/al-iverson/0/0/on-business-cards-and-trade-s...
Instead of jotting down your leads' contact info on business cards, have a formal and organized lead form. This form will make it much easier for you and your staff to look at it and easily read the information. Now once you have this information, there are a couple effective ways to follow up: phone calls and thank-you cards. If you decide to call them, make sure to answer any further questions they have about your products or services. If you choose to send thank-you cards, don't forget to include your business card so they can contact you when they are ready to do business!
Some great advice above. I would just add - on a practical note - it really helps to process your leads in 'real time'. If at all possible you want your leads input into your lead nurturing / follow-up system as they come in - and no later than every couple of hours (send each team member off for a few minutes every couple of hours with a laptop to grab a coffee and catch up on input if necessary). Monday morning when everyone gets back to the office facing a pile of business cards is simply too late.
Our trade show lead management process starts a few days before the show, configuring an automated follow-up email into our CRM; and planning further follow-up steps. Leads go into our CRM directly on the stand, creating an email to the visitor; adding them to the marketing database; and creating a follow-up action for a designated salesperson. Come the Monday after the show, we're selling; not doing admin!
In fairness, I should point out we have a small advantage here: because we are attending shows to demo a CRM with built-in Lead Automation, entering leads into the system forms part of our on-stand demo, so we have no extra admin to do at all. I've seen our customers at shows with all kinds of products following our methods, however, so it's not just CRM vendors who can work this way!
Trade show attendees should be driven to a page on the company website that offers something of value that requires them to register. This page should be up before the show as well to encourage people to come visit at the show and take the value offer.
If this is done and that offer is set up in a email marketing system you can then set up an automated follow up that is designed to develop a relationship with that visitor that starts will giving value and later moves them to engage the company further in ways that will lead to business opportunities.
The comment about trade show leads being diverse is correct and the above process will automatically weed through those leads bringing the most valuable to the top.
Since this process can be automated and without human intervention it is very efficient. Visitors who are ready buyers can be the focus of the sales effort as opposed to the many suspects some of whom are totally unqualified.
Internet marketers call this process List Building and unfortunately very few businesses large or small have a good understanding of it or the value it can represent.
For example a correct list building strategy can put thousands of names in your prospect list in the course of weeks or months and then work those leads in the background while you focus on the hottest leads and ready buyers.
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