Back To Reality
It’s Monday morning and you’re back in the office after last week’s tradeshow. It was a good tradeshow. Your booth had lots of traffic, none of the demos crashed, and everyone seemed genuinely excited about your new software release, which is coming out…um…soon. You were finally able to get rid of that motley collection of trash and trinkets left over from previous tradeshows, so now you can finally order something fun and exciting for the next one – maybe some of those nifty logo bungee rockets.
And of course, you came back with a fishbowl full of business cards and sheaf of leadsheets to deal with – many more leads than you expected, in fact. The thing is, your email and voicemail boxes are full and you’d really like a couple of days off to recover. You’re not the only one. The whole marketing department is fried. You’ve got the tradeshow follow-up blues.
Make The Most Of It
Tradeshows cost way too much not to get the most that you possibly can out of them. How effectively and efficiently you follow up on the leads you’ve collected and convert them into sales will determine the ultimate success of your show. And that will decide whether or not you’ll get the chance to hand out those bungee rockets at the next one.
Everyone knows what you should do now. You should follow up quickly, before the leads grow stale. Some experts say you should contact all your leads within 48 hours of the show. Of course,like you, they also have real jobs that they neglected while they were at the show, so not all of them will be that anxious to hear from you so soon. In any case, the leads are going to start to go bad by the end of that first week back. After two weeks, they’ll be positively moldy.
Before you start working the leads, though, you should sort them to see who’s hot and who’s not. After all, you’re not doing your Sales organization any favors by passing off a bunch of looky-loos to them. Sorting leads after the show can be really frustrating if you didn’t take good notes and you’re low on sleep. That’s why you should have done it each day during the show instead of going to all those evening parties. Maybe next time.
After your leads are sorted, you should decide what’s the best way to follow up with each of them. E-mail? Phone call? Direct mail? Send them another trinket? Product info? A whitepaper? Pass them immediately off to Sales for cultivation? Most likely, you’ll use all of these follow up tactics. But really, how effective are they? The bottom line of tradeshow follow-up is this: how can you grab their attention and hold it to the close?