The Trade Show Lead Guide

1. Set up a meeting with sales management. 
2. Ask them "What is the definition of a "sales ready" trade show lead?"
3. Create questions that you can record in the booth to qualify attendees.
4. Go back to sales and get their buy in.
5. Tell sales that they will only be receiving qualified leads from the trade shows.
6. Train your booth staff to ask these questions in the booth.
7. Train your booth staff to avoid SELLING in the booth.
8. Create a simple lead management system to collect this info and deliver it to sales.

Marketing says that the sales reps don't follow-up on the trade show leads.  The sales reps say that the leads from the trade shows are unqualified, and their time is better spent on the leads they get from other sources.  Probably, both marketing and sales are right.

I think we can all agree that trade show leads are valuable.  At any trade show, a certain percentage of the leads collected are "Sales Ready".  Unfortunately, most exhibitors never take the time to figure what their sales people think is a "hot" lead.  Most exhibitors assume that since the sales people are in the booth, they will qualify the leads. In the booth, this does not usually happen.  Sales people do what they do best, SELL.  When the badge is swiped, there is often little or no qualifying information collected.

After the show is over, these unqualified leads are handed off to the sales reps who see them as a waste of time.  Some companies actually dump all these leads into the "Sales Database" and then complain when these leads don't turn into sales.

A growing trend for corporate marketing is to employ advanced lead management systems to implement a nurturing program for the leads that are not sales ready.  Trade show leads that are "hot" can be sent directly to sales, but the other 70% to 90% of the leads should be emailed the monthly newsletter, invited to webinars, and informed of your new capabilities until they declare themselves to be ready to buy. If you take the time to develop this nurturing program, you will find that the leads you hand to sales will be much more appreciated than the list of names that is exported out of the show scanner.

Do you use an Internet connection at your trade shows?  If you are paying more than $299, then EventConnect can save you money.  Typically the internet connection that you can rent for a trade show costs between $1000 and $3000.  Event Technologies has put together a package that allows our customers to use the Verizon Broadband Wireless Network to provide internet access in your trade show booth.  This service was originally created to help our customers with their trade show lead retrieval and lead management programs, but is now available for use on it's own.  Most trade show strategies these days are focused around saving money, and here is a product that can save you thousands of dollars. 
The two most asked questions we have heard since releasing this product are:

(1) How is this different than plugging a Verizon or Sprint Modem into my computer?
The Answer: Our system allows you to network (wireless or wired) four (4) computers in your booth.  In addition, we include a Wilson Electronics antenna that improves your signal strength and the speed of the service.

(2) Are we allowed to use a service for internet access that is not provided by the trade show.

The Answer: Yes.  100%.  The show can't stop you from accessing the internet on your phone, or with a wireless modem on your computer, and this is no different.  Here is one of the many laws that guarantee that you can not be told how to access the internet at your trade shows: Telecommunications Act of 1996: 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 explicitly prohibits telecommunications carriers from entering into exclusive contracts with commercial building owners or their agents for the provision of interstate telephony and internet services. The FCC ruling explains that exclusive contracts prove detrimental to the consumer, provide an unfair monopoly to the telecommunications carrier, and stifle innovation and choice with respect to communications technologies and providers. Additionally, the Act grants tenants in multiple tenant environments (including temporary leaseholders) the ability to place antennas one meter or less in diameter used to receive or transmit any fixed wireless service.

Additionally, nobody is allowed to block the cell signal at the exhibit hall because it is illegal and punishable by up to a year in prison and/or an $11,000 fine.  Additionally, can you imagine how angry attendees and exhibitors would be if their cell coverage was interfered with.  And lastly, it would be extremely irresponsible of the trade show management to interfere with potential 9-1-1 calls that may need to be placed during the show.
For more information, or to place an order click here.

I talk to a lot of marketing people that are trying to figure out how much money their tradeshows are actually bringing in. A trade show manager that I spoke with the other day, was tasked with figuring out her companies trade shows’ Return on Investment (ROI). If she sent us the leads from her show, could we give her a number? She wanted a “Yes or No” answer. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. It is a tough number to calculate when you’re talking about trade shows, especially if you have a long sales cycle.
 

The obvious idea is to set up a lead management program that will reference the accounting database and match that against the leads that were collected at the trade shows. Before you run off to your accounting department, let’s think about how effective this reporting will be. What if your sales cycle is 6 months to 2 years, which is often the case. Analysis of the trade show leads may not be complete until 2 years after the event. Along the way, you will be generating a running tally that makes your show lead management look ineffective. And when you finally collect all the trade show sales data, 2 years later, is this information useful?
 

A different, more immediate, way of reporting on your shows is available if you are accurately qualifying your leads, and generating a lead rating for each lead. Immediately after the show, you should know the quality, or lead rating of each lead collected. Based on this lead scoring, you will know which leads should turn into trade show sales, that is, if the sales reps do their job with the trade show follow up. 
 

The next step after the trade show lead capture and lead rating, is to assign a percentage to each group of leads based on the chance a deal will close. This number doesn’t have to be perfect, just an educated guess (you can fine tune this as you go). If you know a deal will close, assign it 100%, hot leads may be 75%, warm leads 30%, and cold 0%. Then you take the average size of a deal for your company (in dollars), and multiply it with these percentages and the number of leads for each rating group. This will allow you to generate an estimated dollar figure that will tell you how effective your trade show sales effort was.  
 

This will take some effort, but it will be worth it the next time you have a meeting to talk about budget. Not to mention that you will have the info needed to focus the attention back onto sales if management is asking what happened with the tradeshow leads, because at the very least, you will have a list of tradeshow leads that should have turned into sales.

Three (3) of the many lead retrieval devices that an exhibitor may encounter at a tradeshow

We get a lot of calls from people asking if we have a replacement for the lead retrieval scanner they rent at the shows.  Usually the goal is to reduce the cost of this rental at every show.  I definitely understand this because $350 is a hefty charge for 3 to 5 day rental of a simple electronic device.  Unfortunately, there is no direct replacement for the lead retrieval box that will work at every show.  
Obviously you can find software products that can read all the trade show badges, but that is going to be a little more expensive than $350 per trade show.   More like $1000 per show to rent a lead retrieval software system that is customized and managed by a company like ours, or between $2500 and $8500 to buy one and manage it yourself. 
So what can you do if you want to get better leads for your sales people and don't want to spend thousands improving the system.  There is no easy answer to this question.  Without an internal or external person to drive the trade show lead capture and follow-up process, you are not going to get the results that you want.  
However, one idea is to use the show's rental lead collection box and program it with a BANT lead form.  BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.  With the right knowledge (which can be found on this blog), you can parse this answers into a lead form on the back end.  For example, if you qualified a prospect with "Has Budget", "Decision Maker", "Have a sales rep call", and "1 Month", you can fill in the questions. 
Now that you have the questions and answers, you can assign a lead rating system (info can also be found in this blog), and then deliver only the "sales ready" leads to your sales people.  And if you are thinking, "it doesn't matter because sales doesn't follow-up anyways" then you need to get them involved.  Ask them what they want, and deliver it to them. 
That said, in my opinion, there is not enough importance put on the lead collection/qualification and processing of the leads after the trade show.  At a trade show where a company might spend 20K or more with the goal of collecting some sales ready leads, why is $350 too much when it is the only direct expenditure associated with the show that is helping to collect and qualify the trade show leads.

I was recently reminded that there is a "secret" to a successful trade show lead management program.  Last week, one of our customers exhibited at the ASHP 2009 show in Las Vegas.  At this show, they had a huge booth, and typically collect between 300 and 400 leads.  They are a multinational corporation, and just like every other exhibitor, they expect to collect a certain number of hot trade show leads, and to have those leads turn into sales after the event.

Dealing with the large amount of data that was generated at this show reminded me how such a simple goal can be very difficult to execute.  As you can read about in the other blog entries, we have strategies for trade show lead collection and trade show lead management, so I won't go into that here.  What I will say, (here is the secret) is that without someone to push the leads through the process after the show, you are not going to get the results you expect.

Most companies that we talk to have trouble with all facets of the trade show lead generation and management process, and this is mainly due to a lack of planning and follow through.  Bottomline is that if nobody is put in charge of this process, then the leads are not going to turn into sales on their own.

Last week, we exhibited at a show, and were faced with the task of qualifying and following up on the tradeshow leads.  We should be really good at this considering that we facilitate this process for many other companies.  Like many of our customers, we were busy before the show, and didn't spend a ton of time planning for how we would deal with the leads at this show.  However, this didn't stop us from collecting well qualified leads, and following up with a "thank you" email, and a phone call within 4 days of the show.

At this particular show, the leads were on a magstripe badge, and we decided to use a handheld scanner instead of a laptop due to space considerations.  I was there, so I know that we qualified everyone we talked to.  We asked them the usual questions and we used this info to rate the leads.  Even with only 68 leads, our sales people had to take a week out of their already busy schedule to follow-up on these leads. 

Exhibiting at this show reminded me that it is not a simple task to turn trade show leads into sales.  It takes a little planning, and someone that wants to make it happen.  I wanted to write a blog that talked about how even with all our experience, we did something wrong, but it was a small show with 68 leads, and we already made 2 sales.   

 

I've noticed lately that trade shows are including less and less contact information on the attendee badges.  Most shows in the corporate sector are listening to their outspoken attendees and removing email addresses and phone numbers from the attendee badge.  For other reasons, I can only guess at, contact info has become less complete, leaving out zip codes, and even company names at some shows. 

At the show, companies that scan the badge with trade show lead retrieval system typically will have no way to add this info to the data file. This lack of contact info is often not noticed during the trade show lead generation process. 

The main effect of this is during the trade show follow up process, this missing information is noticed by sales, and often causes them to think the lead is cold.  Why wouldn't sales just use Google to find the phone number, or email address?  The answer to this is that a lead that has a name and address with no qualifying information is exactly the same as a cold call.  Obviously I'm making the assumption that the leads aren't qualified, but I see a lot of leads that are collected by the show system, and 99% of them contain no qualifying info, if you don't customize the qualifying questions.

How can you avoid this problem at your shows?  Using lead retrieval software that allows you to add contact info would be a good start.  But either way, you need to find out how much info will be on the badge before the show starts.  Notify your staff that the HOT leads should be asked for email and phone number information, and while they are at it, add qualifying info for the HOT leads. 

One last idea is to contact the show and ask them to start including the info you need to justify exhibiting at their show.

Every trade show you exhibit at seems to have a different trade show lead collection system.  How are you supposed to bring any consistency to the leads if the capabilities of the trade show lead scanner and demographic information you collect at each show is different?  This is a good quesiton and the honest answer is without some extra effort, you can't. 
 

One way to avoid this problem altogether is to buy your own lead collection software system that you can use at all of your shows.  However, these systems are expensive and require an equal amount of effort to maintain and setup at each event. So if you don't have the man power and money to manage one of these systems, or the budget to hire someone to do it for you, then you are left with the only other option: the trade show lead retrieval system.
 

The good news is that it can be done with some preparation and a bit of effort.  Using the custom qualifying option available at most of the shows and assigning one of your staff to follow through with the sales lead distribution and determining which leads sales should look at and which are not worth their time, will greatly increase your trade show ROI.
 

Of course you can hire a vendor like Event Technologies (shameless plug) to manage this process for you for a fraction of what you are spending to exhibit.  If you have the man power, please read our White Paper on how to get a handle on this process.  In addition, continue reading through the blog for other ideas that will improve your trade show sales efforts.

There are 10,000 business to business trade shows [1] held annually in the US and Canada that are tracked by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR). The 1,500,000 plus exhibiting companies at these events in 2007 rented over 1.5 million Net Square Feet (NSF) of exhibit space and spent an average of $216 [2] for every attendee with whom they had a face to face conversation in their booth. All of this activity and money, $15 billion in the USA in 2007, generates literally millions of trade show leads, which according to CEIR, upwards of 80% are never followed-up – Ever!
 

A significant percentage of trade show leads never make it from the booth to the sales organization because of trade show lead management issues. If and when they do arrive, sales people complain that either the leads are worthless because they have no qualification info, or they arrive so late that they are too cold to warrant any effort. In either case, they usually end up at the bottom of an already large stack of less than productive opportunities and with that goes all that hard work and money.
 

The reasons for undelivered leads or sales getting worthless or late arriving trade show leads vary by organization and industry but by far and away the major contributor to the problem is the fact that trade show leads are different from those generated by the Internet, direct mail and media advertising and far more difficult to handle. If you think you can simply take trade show leads from the exhibition booth and drop them into your CRM system for distribution to sales reps you are in for a big surprise! Trade show leads are square pegs – they do not easily fit into the round processing holes of your CRM system.
 

First is the data completeness – much of it lacks qualification information. It is commonplace for exhibiting companies to rent badge scanning equipment from the show organizer to read the demographic data contained on the attendee admission badges and record some simple, preprogrammed "qualifiers" such as "SEND INFO" or "ADD ME TO YOUR MAILING LIST" to help with trade show follow up. These trade show scanners usually print a paper record of the badge information on which notes about the attendee’s interests can be hand written. Unfortunately, the information collected is rarely adequate to determine which leads are "sales ready" and in most cases it is not formatted for easy analysis. Exhibitors who choose not to ask to have their rented scanners preprogrammed with customized qualification data or simply collect business cards and write the notes on the back face even larger issues going forward.
 

Second is the time factor – trade show leads age very quickly. Everyone knows that to get the most out of your trade show investment you must get to the "hot" prospects before your competition. Since all of your competitors emerge from a trade show with the same list of leads, the sales organization that can focus on the high priority leads immediately will have the first crack at the high priority opportunities. The sales rep going straight for the A leads will beat the rep working alphabetically every time but the trick is identifying who are the A leads.
 

Third is the data quality – it is not very clean. The lead data coming from a trade show is more complex, contains more errors and is in a different format than any of the other lead data generated by web based, email or direct mail campaigns. Each show employs a different lead retrieval system for collecting and storing lead data.
 

At the end of the show the trade show leads are commonly made available to the exhibitor on USB memory sticks or files downloadable from the show’s website. In addition, show organizers use different schemes and formats for storing the lead data. If a company exhibits at 15 shows annually they have a good chance of seeing a dozen different, yet equally challenging formats and many IT organizations are not staffed or motivated to effectively handle the data. Simply put, there is nothing simple about processing trade show leads.

For exhibiting companies trade shows are classic good news, bad news propositions. The good news is that you have the opportunity to set up a branch office in the middle of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers. The bad news is that your competitors have the same opportunity and the prospects will see them all. When the show is over the race for trade show sales is on and as was once said, "… winning isn't everything, It's the only thing!"[3]

[1] Events with 3,000 net square feet of exhibit space and 10 or more exhibiting companies

[2] Exhibit Surveys Inc. – Annual Trade Show TRENDS 2007

[3] Henry Russell ("Red") Sanders – UCLA Football coach 1956
 

Using the show provided exhibitor lead retrieval system can make it challenging to collect qualified trade show leads. However, with a little bit of planning, you can make this system work for you, almost as well as the expensive lead retrieval software systems. The key to improving the exhibitor lead retrieval system is to use the custom qualifiers. In theory, this is as easy as filling out the form provided by the trade show lead retrieval company. However, figuring out what to put on the custom qualifiers sheet isn’t that easy.
 

You could start with a list your products, but if you only have one sales force, this info really doesn’t help your reps. Your sales people would be much happier if you figured out which attendees have a need for your products, and when they are going to make a buying decision. With that in mind, you want to create custom qualifiers that allow you to determine if an attendee is ready to buy. 

Most exhibitor lead retrieval systems allow 20 custom qualifiers, and it is usually inexpensive to add them to your lead retrieval system order. At your next show, use the custom qualifiers. For the sales rep that does the trade show follow up, it will make a world of difference. Once you have this part down, the next step is creating a lead rating system.