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.