How to get more ROI from trade shows

Organisations invest heavily to attend trade shows. But the sad reality of even the best of shows is that 80% of the leads are wasted.

Here is how it happens:

The best 20% (who we’ll call prospects) will have current needs of some sort and that will totally absorb your sales team’s time for the next few months. Those prospects will want follow-up meetings which will require the preparation of presentations, proposals, and costings.  And that, in turn, should lead on to negotiating terms, drawing up contracts and signing up and bedding in new customers. And those activities are the life blood of any sales team.

But Pareto’s law means the other 80% (suspects) probably have no immediate need. They only stopped at your stand because of a possible future need, mild interest or curiosity. And because your marketing team did a great job in designing your stand.

They might need your product in six, twelve- or eighteen-months’ time. Or maybe more. Maybe they’re beginning to plan a project way off in the distant future. Or they’re locked into a contract for the next two years. Or they only review their supply chain when they redesign their products.

These are the kind of suspects most sales people don’t have time to deal with. It’s hard enough keeping on top of your hot opportunities, live deals and active pipeline. It takes time to engage these suspects. For a start, suspects are much more reticent to pick the phone up. They are less likely to respond to an email, because, right now, your products are not high on their priority list. 

Your sales team have targets to meet and sales to win, but, in the short-term, these suspects won’t contribute to their sales targets. And the level of tenacity needed to reach this slightly-less-engaged audience is much higher – so you may need to ring six or seven times to reach them, which is just not viable for a beleaguered salesperson.

And that presupposes that you all speak the same language.

If you had the forethought to get all your stand visitors to opt-in while they were there, then they will at least see your newsletter. If it doesn’t get filtered out by their email system, and if they open it.

But realistically, those 80% suspects will be pushed to the bottom of the pile. If they are not followed up promptly and tenaciously there is a good chance that by the time you do speak to them, they won’t remember where they met you, what it was that piqued their interest and why you’re now bothering them.

Resulting in almost all the potential opportunities represented by those 80% suspects going to waste.

The solution is lead qualification and nurturing. If you thoroughly engage with those 80% really promptly, you will uncover a few more immediate opportunities and can start to build a pipeline of future potential for nurturing.

Here are some tips:

·       Assign someone to call and engage with each of the stand visitors.

o   It doesn’t have to be someone from sales. In fact, it is better if it is someone from customer service as these calls should not be positioned as sales calls.

·       The call is to establish rapport and qualify the lead NOT to sell.

·       Be aware that it may take five or even ten attempts to reach each prospect, using a combination of calls and emails.

·       Ask each visitor if they got all their questions answered while they were on the stand and whether there is anything else they need help with.

·       It is worth offering to send literature.  (We know that you probably had a great selection of literature on your stand, and that the visitor may well have grabbed a brochure to take away with them. But when they got back to their hotel room and found they have 86 brochures to fit into their suitcase, 78 of them went in the bin. So, offer to send them literature!)

·       If they have technical questions about your product/service, those are buying signals.

·       Try to establish whose solution they are currently using eg which of your competitors they are currently buying from. Find out how that is working out and what may have prompted them to start to look around.

·       Very gently establish when they might want to take the conversation to the next level and get costs or a demo.

·       Make sure that, if you arrange to send them something, that you do send it, promptly, and then follow up with an email a few days later to check if they have any further questions.

·       If you arrange to give them a call at some point in the future, make absolutely sure that you do.

Those are my tips. The alternative, of course, is to outsource all your lead qualification to experienced business developers, and if that is an option you would like to explore, drop me a line.