Exhibitors Lose Out

I've noticed lately that trade shows are including less and less contact information on the attendee badges. Shows in the corporate sector are listening to their outspoken attendees and removing email addresses and phone numbers from the attendee badge. For other reasons, I can only guess at, contact info has become less complete, leaving out zip codes, and even company names at some shows.

At the show, companies that scan the badge with trade show lead retrieval system typically will have no way to add this info to the data file. This lack of contact info is often not noticed during the trade show lead generation process.

The main effect of this is during the trade show follow up process, this missing information is noticed by sales, and often causes them to think the lead is cold. Why wouldn't sales just use Google to find the phone number, or email address? The answer to this is that a lead that has a name and address with no qualifying information is exactly the same as a cold call. Obviously I'm making the assumption that the leads aren't qualified, but I see a lot of leads that are collected by the show system, and 99% of them contain no qualifying info, if you don't customize the qualifying questions.

How can you avoid this problem at your shows? Using lead retrieval software that allows you to add contact info would be a good start. But either way, you need to find out how much info will be on the badge before the show starts. Notify your staff that the HOT leads should be asked for email and phone number information, and while they are at it, add qualifying info for the HOT leads. One last idea is to contact the show and ask them to start including the info you need to justify exhibiting at their show.