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Are You Following Up Your Exhibition Leads Effectively?
Posted on: Monday, 02 July 2018)The main reason that most businesses go to an exhibition is to generate leads and network, but what good is this lead generation when you aren’t following up?
Following up leads (especially hot leads) is crucial to making your exhibition a success for your business and the only way to actually turn your leads into customers.
It may seem a little overwhelming coming back with loads of business cards and contact information – it doesn’t have to be. If you have a good follow up system in place, you’ll be flying after your next exhibition.
Sort Your Business Cards
Leaving the show with hundreds of individual business cards is great but just giving these to your sales team will not be time efficient.
Instead, get one team member to input all of the contact details from the business cards into a spreadsheet for all of the sales team to work from and use in their follow up procedure.
Remember to add in any notes that were made at the show into the spreadsheet – this extra information may be really helpful when talking to them.
Once you have your complete spreadsheet, it’s a good idea to segment this further into hot, cold and warm leads. This way you now have a list of hot leads to hit the phones with right away, whereas you might put the cold and warm leads into your marketing automation system for the expo.
Automate Your Marketing
Automated marketing is the easiest way to follow up on your exhibition leads.
Setting up automated marketing allows you to write and schedule emails to be sent out to your marketing list on a specified schedule. This process will be extremely helpful for following up warm and cold leads in the beginning so you can focus your energy on directly contacting hot leads.
Once the leads have received all of your marketing emails, they will be very aware of your business and services so when you go to phone them, they will be further along the decision making process.
In your automated emails, you should start with an email saying how nice it was to meet them at the expo and if you can, include a picture of you at your stand to jog their memory.
After this initial email think about sending case studies, information on your services and really try and sell your business to them by solving their problems.
Keep It Personal
Personalising your follow up is key to getting and keeping your prospect's attention. If your email is very generic and not addressed to their first or last name, they won’t be as interested.
Research your prospects as much as you can, find out about their business. If you can, work out what potential issues they may have and how your services will solve these.
Your time will be much more efficiently spent phoning them when you already know services may suit their business the best.
Ensure you know exactly who you need to talk to and preferably find out if they are the decision maker - if they aren’t, who is?
Once you have your exhibition follow up process in place, it will work effectively for all shows in the future. It is so important to make sure you’re getting the most out of your trade shows by remembering to follow up your leads!