Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Quantity vs. Quality

“So how many leads did we get?” This is normally the first question everyone asks when gauging the success of a trade show. Unfortunately, if you are looking to increase trade show sales this is the wrong question. The question should be, “how many leads did we get that are ready to buy something?”

If you are giving away a trip to Hawaii, you will collect a ton of trade show leads. But how many of your 1,000 leads are interested in your company vs. interested in going to Hawaii? Unless you have a good trade show lead qualification process, you may never know.

Regardless of your promotion, it is imperative to qualify the leads onsite. There are a few different ways to accomplish this. One way is using the show provided exhibitor lead retrieval system. Most of the systems out there offer 20 custom qualifiers. For some companies, this is more than enough to determine which leads are good and which are looking for a freebie. If your needs are more robust, you can use third party trade show lead retrieval software. There are a few third party companies out there. Most of them are very reliable and offer just about everything you could want to qualify leads.

Once you qualify the leads you can implement a lead scoring system for lead rating and employ a good trade show lead management program. Then you should be able to answer the more important question of how many good leads you collected at the show.

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