Lead Retrieval Scanners Set Exhibitors up for Failure

It is commonly believed that 80% of tradeshow leads receive no follow-up.  This often quoted statistic was created by CEIR (Center for Exhibition Industry Research) a while back and I think it still holds true today.  Most bloggers that talk about tradeshow lead follow-up will quote this to back their argument for going through a series of steps to improve your company's lead follow-up.  However, I don't think this addresses the real problem.  The truth is the rental tradeshow lead retrieval systems are a major reason why most exhibitors don't do a good job on their tradeshow lead follow-up.  These systems allow the exhibitor to create a list of "prospects" by scanning the attendees barcode, but gives them very limited ability to designate what each person wanted.  

The average booth rep has a conversation with an attendee, scans their badge, and then moves onto the next attendee.  This is where the problem lies.  These systems don't make it easy to qualify the leads, and if it's not easy, the booth rep isn't going to do it.  After the show you end up with a list of people that came by your booth and no info about what they wanted.  With more and more shows giving the exhibitors incomplete info (missing phone # and email addresses), because their attendees don't want to be bothered by a bunch of sales calls and emails, you can get an almost worthless list of names after paying thousands to exhibit.

Why doesn't show management see this glaring issue and fix it?  They want their exhibitors to be successful which is why they are providing this service in the first place.  I think this problem has never been addressed because show management doesn’t know about it.  Their exhibitors are scanning thousands of names with absolutely no qualifying info, but they don't talk to the sales people that get the leads after the show.  From their point of view, the leads system works perfectly.  And most marketing people that I talk to seem to be happy with these systems, so maybe there isn't a problem at all.

I don't think the companies that provide these services are to blame. They are providing a service that show organizers need. Tradeshow managers don't complain enough about them to bring about a change, and for the most part, I think everyone that uses these systems is happy. The only person that isn't happy is the sales person that gets the list of unqualified leads after the show. Eventually she stops following up on the leads because her time is better spent on her other qualified prospects. And the tradeshow lead follow-up problem goes away until CEIR does another survey.

Business Cards are a Big Problem

We've recently acquired a few new customers that are using our FulfillLit system in their booths.  The main goal is to get a better handle on the tradeshow leads, improve follow-up and so on.  One of these companies has 10 shows that have badges where we can use the scanners, and another 30 where they collect business cards.  This presents a huge problem to anyone that wants to implement an automated system for lead collection and follow-up.

Collecting business cards at tradeshows is easy.  The booth rep talks to a prospect, and at the end of the conversation, she gets a business card.  The card is put into a fish bowl with the rest of the leads, often with little or no qualification info.  The show ends, the booth rep puts all of the cards in a FedEx Envelope and sends them back to the trade show manager.  Now what?  A business card scanner (www.cardscan.com) can get the information into a spreadsheet, but what about all the conversations that you had in the booth.  The booth rep knows that there were a handful of good leads that need to be contacted. Illegible notes on the backs of the cards is a technique that is often used, but that info is typically lost in the translation to electronic format.

So what do you do?  We have a couple different ideas to deal with this issue.  The first has to do with the show management company.  A quick conversation with the company that manages your show might get them thinking about the options they could employ to provide a lead collection system to their exhibitors .  We have recently teamed up with a company that provides lead collection systems that work on the exhibitor's smart phone without any sort of scanner.  The product is called eShowLeads (www.eshowleads.com).  It's a cost effective system ($40 per exhibitor) for providing lead collection to tradeshow exhibitors. However, as an exhibitor, are you going to be able to convince some of your show management companies to employ a system like this?  Probably not, but if you start the conversation, maybe they will look into it and you'll see it at the show next year. 

Our second solution is to employ a business card scanner in the booth.  We combine this with our iPad FulfillLit system and essentially scan business cards into the iPads.  This allows the leads to be qualified and literature to be distributed to the prospect immediately.  You might be thinking that there is no way to scan a business card directly into an iPad, and you might be right.  Our approach is different, it uses a laptop with a scanner attached.  Business cards are scanned into the computer and put into our online database where the iPads can see the data and the leads can be qualified.  This might be overkill for a 10x10 booth with one person, but for bigger booths where you end up with 100+ business cards, this solution allows you to get the qualifying info that you need to execute an intelligent follow-up program.

Visit us at EXHIBITOR 2012 - Booth #1763

For those that don't know, EXHIBITOR 2012 (www.exhibitorshow.com) is the main industry trade show for people that are involved with exhibiting at and organizing trade shows.  A trade show for trade show exhibitors.  We (Event Technologies) exhibit at this show every year.  And we always make a bunch of good connections and almost always walk away with a few new customers.  If you work in this industry, you should attend this show.  It is a great networking and educational opportunity for trade show managers and vendors alike.

This year we are going to be in booth #1763, so if you're at the show, please come by and see us.  I believe that we get some free day passes for the exhibit hall to give out to prospects.  If you are going to be in Las Vegas (March 5-7) and want to visit the exhibit hall, please call us, and we will get you a free pass.  You can find our # on our website.  www.event-techs.com

FulfillLit - Intelligent Literature Fulfillment from your Booth

Are you looking for a way to save money at your trade shows? What if you didn't have to spend the money to print and ship collateral to each show?

AND you were able to send requested information while you were talking to each prospect.

Event Technologies Trade Show FulfillLit can save you money, and deliver requested collateral to each prospect immediately, while they are still standing in your booth.

Emailing requested information to your prospects, from your booth, is as easy as 1-2-3.
1. All you need is an internet connection and a browser.
2. From the browser, you enter your prospects email address, check off the desired literature.
3. An email will be generated and immediately sent to your prospect with links to the PDFs they requested.

It doesn't have to end here. After the show, the system generates a thank you email to each prospect. The email has a link to a webpage that houses all of the show's literature. They can download or view each document. Additional emails can be sent, after a few days, to those prospects that haven't accessed your literature page to make sure each prospect has access and knows they are important.

By the time sales starts to call the prospects, each one will have been sent specific information and thanked for visiting the booth.

Increase Show Revenue without Increasing your Budget

Most trade show planning covers the booth, staffing, and other details involved with the actual event.  Lead collection is typically an afterthought because every show offers a lead collection system that scans the show badge and saves the information on a memory stick.  Typically the leads are sent to sales in an excel file, and it's up to sales to execute a post trade show follow-up effort to cultivate the leads and turn them into sales.  Is this how it should be?

Most of the leads coming out of trade shows are not ready to buy despite what you hear from many vendors and industry publications.  These leads need to be qualified onsite, and a rating has to be added to every lead if you want your sales reps to have success.  Without qualifying info, if the sales department calls the leads at all, they may end up missing the few leads that are ready to buy because all the leads look alike.  After doing this for a number of shows, our experience is that the sales reps are not quite as excited to take time away from the qualified leads they get from other sources to pursue the trade show leads.

Investing in a computer based software system to qualify your leads will cost you 5% to 10% of your show budget depending on the size of the show.  If cost is an issue, why not use the qualifiers built into the show box.  We do this with a number of our customers, and use a simple application on the backend to put the info into a manageable format that allows us to rate the leads with a scoring system.  From there, sales ready leads can be sent to the reps, and you can put the rest into your nurturing program, and send out an email with requested info to get the process started in the right direction.

Importing Trade Show Leads into your CRM System

The trade show lead scanner is the easiest way to collect trade show leads. If you're using the trade show lead retrieval system, the data you get after the show is rarely in the right format you need to put it into your CRM system. So what do you have to do with the trade show leads to get them formatted correctly?

Here are a few trade show strategies for reformatting your trade show lead data:

1. Combine the leads: If you are using multiple lead systems, you need to get all those leads into one excel file. This is fairly straight forward. The best way to do this is to highlight the leads from one spreadsheet and copy them into the other sheet. As you go, make sure the leads are lining up correctly.

2. Converting a .txt file: Many of the lead retrieval system companies give you a memory stick with the lead data in a .txt file. To convert this file into an Excel file is a fairly simple process. Excel has a wizard built just for this. To start the wizard, open Excel, and then Open a file. When the menu pops up to find the file, you won't see your text file until you select "all files" from the menu on the bottom right. Once you've selected your text file, simply go through the wizard, by picking the proper delimiter, which is usually a comma. Make sure to convert all the phone/fax numbers to "text" on page 3 of the wizard, or else your phone numbers will be converted to scientific notation.

3. All CAPS: Most of the trade show lead systems give you the leads in all CAPS. This is easy to fix by using the function in excel that allows you to re-case text. The function is called "PROPER". It's best to skip the company name because you will end up with IBM as Ibm, or SAP as Sap.

4. Combining the Qualifiers into a useable format: This process is going to be different for every show that you do. Using the find and replace, and concatenate features in excel should help you to piece this information back together.

It's possible that you will see a different trade show lead format at every show you participate in. There is no standard way to reformat these leads. Each one needs to be handled differently. Hopefully some of the above techniques will help you to get the trade show lead information into a useable format.

A Different Lead System at Every Trade 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 rental trade show lead retrieval system.

The good news is that you can create an effective follow up system with some preparation and a bit of effort. Using the custom qualifying option available at most of the shows to allow the onsite reps to categorize each lead with a few simple quesitons, you can leave the show a list of qualified leads.  The next step is to assign one of your staff to follow through with the sales lead distribution to the reps and to determine which leads the sales reps should look at and which are not worth their time.  You will find that this will greatly increase your trade show ROI.

Of course if you don't have time to think about this because your staff is already short handed, 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.