Getting Your Sales Reps to Follow-up on the Trade Show Leads

If the sales people are not following up on the trade show leads, is there anything that the marketing department can do?

Yes. The bottom line that sales people will call on a lead that they think will turn into a sale. Trade shows obviously generate sales ready leads, but they also generate a large quantity of leads that are not buyers yet. Marketing's job is to consistently deliver only the leads that have a significant probability of being ready to buy.

In this economy, it is no longer OK to take the lead file from the trade show lead capture system and hand all the leads to the sales people. And if you are dumping lead lists from your trade shows into the sales database, and expecting the sales reps to figure out which ones are good, then you are destine for failure.

The other lead generation systems your company uses do not dump hundreds of unqualified leads on the sales reps like your trade shows do. Therefore, unless your sales people have nothing else to do, you can't expect them to spend time cold calling from a list of people that visited your trade show booth.

I think we can assume that your trade shows generate "sales ready" leads, but which ones are they? If we also assume that only 10%-20% of the leads from your trade show lead generation efforts are ready to buy something, then at a show where you collect 100 leads, only 10-20 of those leads are worth a follow up effort. Of these 10-20 leads, maybe 5-10 will buy something from your company if your sales reps call the lead within a few days of the show.

If you buy into this theory, then it is time to get the sales people invested in the solution:

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.

So what about the other 80% of the trade show leads, the ones that are not ready to buy yet. I would advise that you create a nurturing program if you don't have one already. A marketing database that you periodically contact with invitations to your events, and Interesting information about your industry and new products etc will help to nurture these leads until they are ready to buy. As these leads declare themselves as ready to buy, you hand them to sales.

This isn't an easy thing to do, so outsourcing this process may be a good option for you. However, if you don't think you can do this because you don't have time, remember if you are not implementing a system to increase the sales from your shows, you're going to lose sales to your competitor that is doing this.