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.