Business Cards are a Big Problem

We've recently acquired a few new customers that are using our FulfillLit system in their booths.  The main goal is to get a better handle on the tradeshow leads, improve follow-up and so on.  One of these companies has 10 shows that have badges where we can use the scanners, and another 30 where they collect business cards.  This presents a huge problem to anyone that wants to implement an automated system for lead collection and follow-up.

Collecting business cards at tradeshows is easy.  The booth rep talks to a prospect, and at the end of the conversation, she gets a business card.  The card is put into a fish bowl with the rest of the leads, often with little or no qualification info.  The show ends, the booth rep puts all of the cards in a FedEx Envelope and sends them back to the trade show manager.  Now what?  A business card scanner (www.cardscan.com) can get the information into a spreadsheet, but what about all the conversations that you had in the booth.  The booth rep knows that there were a handful of good leads that need to be contacted. Illegible notes on the backs of the cards is a technique that is often used, but that info is typically lost in the translation to electronic format.

So what do you do?  We have a couple different ideas to deal with this issue.  The first has to do with the show management company.  A quick conversation with the company that manages your show might get them thinking about the options they could employ to provide a lead collection system to their exhibitors .  We have recently teamed up with a company that provides lead collection systems that work on the exhibitor's smart phone without any sort of scanner.  The product is called eShowLeads (www.eshowleads.com).  It's a cost effective system ($40 per exhibitor) for providing lead collection to tradeshow exhibitors. However, as an exhibitor, are you going to be able to convince some of your show management companies to employ a system like this?  Probably not, but if you start the conversation, maybe they will look into it and you'll see it at the show next year. 

Our second solution is to employ a business card scanner in the booth.  We combine this with our iPad FulfillLit system and essentially scan business cards into the iPads.  This allows the leads to be qualified and literature to be distributed to the prospect immediately.  You might be thinking that there is no way to scan a business card directly into an iPad, and you might be right.  Our approach is different, it uses a laptop with a scanner attached.  Business cards are scanned into the computer and put into our online database where the iPads can see the data and the leads can be qualified.  This might be overkill for a 10x10 booth with one person, but for bigger booths where you end up with 100+ business cards, this solution allows you to get the qualifying info that you need to execute an intelligent follow-up program.