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.