orking an exhibit at a trade show can sometimes feel like serving food at a diner during rush hour. You’ve got lots of customers to keep track of, each with different needs and special requests, and you’ve often got just a pen and some paper to keep it all straight.

But that’s where the similarities end. The information collected by sales representatives is vastly more complex than the names of entrees. Their hastily written notes need to be legible days after the interaction, and, unless they are pursued in a timely fashion after the show, prospective customers are unlikely to become buyers.

Brad Barnes, global digital marketing leader at G.E. Security Inc., knows all about the pitfalls of the pen-and-paper approach to tracking show leads. Based in Bradeton, FL, his company produces communication and information technologies used in commercial, governmental, and residential security systems.

In the past, Barnes says, G.E. Security’s sales representatives followed a more traditional approach to gathering show leads, including collecting business cards, scribbling notes on them, and entering them, hours or days later, into the company’s lead-retrieval database.

Even if they made it into the company’s database, the handwritten qualifying notes were often not as complete or helpful as they would have been had they been collected in a less haphazard, more systematic way. Booths were often crowded and frenzied, and critical information was lost easily. “Usually the next customer was in line, and a lot of the information from the previous prospect hadn’t been documented before the next interaction began,” Barnes says. Catching up with their paperwork later in the day, sales representatives were forced to rely on their memories about interactions they had five or six customers ago, a strategy that resulted in incomplete and inaccurate reporting.

Furthermore, the cumbersome nature of manually inputting the collected data into the company’s computer system often delayed the first follow-up contact with the customer for up to three weeks.

Barnes’ goal, then, was to find a way to decrease the follow-up time with prospective customers and increase the quality and consistency of the data collected from them.

The Handheld That Feeds You
Barnes soon realized that sometimes revolutionizing the way you do business simply means using what you’ve already got in new ways. Barnes knew that his sales staff was already using personal digital assistants (PDAs) to complete many of their day-to-day tasks, so he decided to incorporate the use of those devices into the lead-collection process at the International Security Conference and Exposition in April 2005.

With PDAs capable of running lead-tracking software that can wirelessly send information to prospects, Barnes realized, you can have it all: lots of time for face-to-face interactions and systematized data collection, speed of follow-up, and customization of the sales message.

Barnes uploaded a mobile version of Prolifiq Software Inc.’s Show and Sell lead-tracking and messaging software onto rented PDAs with Bluetooth-enabled bar-code scanners. That badge-reading capability comes into play at the beginning of every lead-qualifying conversation. Sales representatives scan attendees’ badges, which are already encoded with valuable contact information. This approach assures the information is accurately and legibly recorded. The software itself functions, in part, as a miniature database, allowing the company’s sales representatives to enter information normally found on lead forms — business needs, purchasing timeframe, etc. — into an electronic form. Most of the electronic form, or template, Barnes explains, consists of check boxes the sales representative can quickly and discretely select as they learn about the prospect’s needs. For instance, Barnes’ customers are typically professional alarm dealers or security-system integrators. So using the PDAs, sales associates can indicate whether the prospective customer installs alarms in commercial or residential buildings, and they can check off the kinds of alarm systems the customer uses. All of this can be done quickly as the information surfaces in the conversation.

The electronic form also contains space for the sales representative to enter important information not accounted for by the check boxes that will be useful during subsequent follow-ups, such as a prospect’s special need or request.

“We always leave a text field,” Barnes says. “There are always unique things that come up in an interaction. For instance, the customer may have a big job coming up with TSA (Transportation Security Administration). So the system provides whoever follows up on the lead this additional information. This helps us to prioritize leads.”

Since little typing or writing is required, all of the qualifying information can be collected seamlessly and without interruption as the conversation in the booth progresses. At the conclusion of the conversation, the sales representative enters one last, crucial piece of information into the PDA: the lead’s e-mail address. If an e-mail address is already encoded into the attendee’s badge which was scanned at the beginning of the qualifying conversation, the PDA automatically populates the field with that information. However, since the success of the initial follow-up depends on the accuracy of that address, staff must take a moment to confirm or correct it.

Based on the selections made by the sales representative, the Show and Sell software categorizes the lead and immediately sends the customer a follow-up e-mail containing information relevant to his or her customer profile.

Instead of weighing the e-mail down with pages of information, the Show and Sell program determines which products are most applicable to the customer based on his or her in-booth responses and sends the customer links to personalized PDF files about these products. To bypass firewalls, the PDF files are stored on the company’s server, rather than attached to the e-mail. The e-mail message contains teasers that summarize the content of the different files, along with links to them. The customer can then follow those links to access the information they want to see while skipping the content that doesn’t interest them.

“The messages are professional and designed for the show. The customer can see that we care about their business and that we’re very responsive,” Barnes says.

Sales associates, meanwhile, have very little left to do immediately after their customer interactions. At the end of their shift in the booth, they simply link their handheld devices to one of the company’s in-booth laptop computers and upload the lead data collected during their shift. The data is then imported into the company’s other lead-tracking and management programs for storage and future reference.

Barnes’ innovation enjoyed strong results. One-hundred percent of the leads generated from the show were qualified on the show floor, and lead follow-up time fell from three weeks to three seconds.

Customer interactions were smoother and more comprehensive, and since the sales representatives were already using the wireless devices for other tasks, the transition to using the devices at trade shows was relatively painless. Nonetheless, the company provided troubleshooting resources to minimize any disruptions during the event. “Everyone was comfortable with how the technology works and who they could go to if there were any problems during the day,” Barnes says.

Digital Dividends
Barnes’ solution paid off in other areas as well. Because the e-mail sent to the customers contained links to personalized PDF files stored on the company’s server, sales representatives could track which customers opened their follow-up message, what information he or she accessed, and how often it was accessed. Since individual customers are the only people, besides the salespeople, with the link needed to access the personalized files, file access signals that the customer has seen the follow-up message and indicates what, specifically, they want to know.

The software also creates a summary of all PDF-file access. “We can view customers individually and see what links they clicked on and how many times they opened the files,” Barnes says. Armed with all of this information, sales representatives are one step further along in the qualifying process, compared to where they would be using information gained in a typical lead-qualifying system.

Barnes found that 57 percent of e-mail recipients opened the messages. Total open rates reached 144 percent, revealing that those who opened the e-mail revisited it more than once. By comparison, G.E. Security’s direct-mail campaigns have typically seen 25- to 30-percent unique-open rates, as measured by responses to mailings.

A final benefit is the impression the wireless devices have on customers. “Nobody else uses them,” Barnes notes, which distinguishes G.E. Security’s representatives from other sales personnel on the show floor. And using PDAs on the floor, he says, shows G.E. Security’s confidence in cutting-edge, wireless technology — the same technology used in many of its products.

As gadget-oriented as it seems, Barnes’ innovative solution is ultimately a case study in frugality. Acquiring and implementing the software was a one-time investment of $8,220 — a bargain, considering the gains in the response rates his company will enjoy for years to come. e