lead management

ou went to the show, wowed attendees with your impressive exhibit, gathered hundreds of leads, and passed them on to sales. Your work here is done. Or is it? According to an oft-cited industry statistic, 79 percent of leads generated on the show floor go unfulfilled. Essentially, eight out of every 10 leads you painstakingly collect at trade shows might just as well go directly into the trash — along with nearly 80 percent of your program’s value. And in an era of dwindling show attendance, every single lead is worth its weight in gold. You might think it’s not your responsibility to worry about whether or not the sales department does its job, and maybe you’re right. But if your leads go unfulfilled, it’s nearly impossible for them to translate into sales. And even if the sale does come through, if you’re not tracking leads, your program is unlikely to get any credit, making the expense of exhibiting difficult to justify — especially as companies continue to reign in marketing budgets. Bottom line, when the economy goes south, every expenditure that does not directly impact the bottom line is at risk of getting the axe. So if your sales department isn’t making the most of each and every lead you bring back from a show, it’s up to you to get things back on track, or you risk joining the ranks of the unemployed as your program is sliced and diced into exhibit-marketing oblivion. “Ultimately we do get evaluated, rightly or wrongly, based on how good of a job sales does following up on the trade show leads we provide,” says Bob Milam, trade show manager for Kerry Ingredients and Flavours Inc. “If the leads we provide don’t turn into sales, for whatever reason, it negatively impacts management’s perception of our program’s value.” So to help you survive in these trying times, here are 10 ways you, as an exhibit manager, can improve your company’s lead fulfillment. Follow these steps, and you’ll not only lead the way to increased sales, you’ll be equipped to justify your company’s investment and protect your trade show program in the process. 1. Organize a Plan of Attack “Many marketing groups simply pass a disk full of leads from the scanning machine on to the sales team, but there’s no organized plan for following through,” says Mike Mraz of Exhibiting Excellence Inc., a Minneapolis-based independent training and consulting firm. “Sales and marketing need to get together on the issue of lead fulfillment, because there’s no way to pound that hammer unless there’s accountability on the sales side.” Mraz suggests sitting down with your sales manager to determine exactly how and when sales associates will follow up with leads after the show. Will they call or e-mail contacts? Will they fulfill requests for literature via e-mail or postal mail — or will marketing fulfill literature requests? How long after the show will follow-up take place? This information is critical for two reasons. It allows you to be more specific with the promises you make to attendees (e.g. “A sales associate will call you next week to answer your questions and e-mail you the information you requested”), and it creates a set of expectations you can use to hold sales accountable. For example, if the sales department agrees to follow up on leads via e-mail within two weeks after the show, you can easily and objectively determine whether or not that expectation was met — and hold delinquent or under-performing reps accountable. 2. Define Your Target Audience A lead is little more than a business card if it doesn’t provide information about the prospect, including his or her needs, buying influence, budget, and time frame. This information, usually obtained through a series of qualifying questions, is what helps you and your sales department learn about your prospects, customize communications, and prioritize follow-up. To help ensure that your sales department will actually follow up on the leads you provide, the qualification criteria must meet their expectations. According to Ruth Stevens, author of “Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote, and Profit,” the criteria used to define a qualified lead should be developed with direct input from the sales department. Once you know how your sales department defines a qualified lead, you’ll know exactly what information you need to obtain from attendees in order to qualify them. Mraz agrees, calling the sales team “an incredibly vital component” in the process of developing qualifying questions. He suggests working with sales to identify the five to seven bits of data that are most important for salespeople to know, then crafting qualifying questions to help obtain that information from trade show attendees.

3. Appoint a Lead Sheriff You can’t keep a promise you don’t remember making. That’s why Milam laid down the law in his company’s exhibit at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) show. Concerned that his trade show strategy wasn’t hitting its intended target, Milam hired three students to stand in the aisles surrounding Kerry’s exhibit at the IFT show and conduct exit interviews with attendees. The students watched for prospects who interacted with Kerry’s booth staff. Then, as those prospects left the exhibit, the students stopped them and asked questions about the company’s marketing message. But what Milam discovered from his informal research approach had nothing to do with his overall strategy or the company’s marketing message. One of the last questions students asked was simply, “Did booth staff make a promise to follow up with you after the show?” Based on the exit surveys, 850 attendees reported being promised some sort of follow-up action. But when Milam counted the leads with actual recorded promises, there were less than 150. “What we discovered was that no one was writing anything down. They weren’t recording 80 percent of the promises they were making to attendees, so those promises were never being fulfilled. That was the real reason we weren’t seeing as many show-related sales as our management wanted — not because the show was bad or our strategy was flawed,” Milam says. To alleviate the problem, Milam designated one of the company’s administrative assistants as the exhibit’s Lead Sheriff. It was her responsibility to observe interactions in the exhibit. Then, as each interaction wrapped up, she approached the staff member to make sure the lead got recorded, along with any promises made, immediately following the conversation. The Lead Sheriff helped Milam increase the number of recorded promises from 150 to more than 700 in a single year. 4. Establish a Scoring System To help prioritize leads, Stevens advocates working with sales to develop a scoring system, assigning weight to each of your qualifying questions. That way individual leads can be analyzed and given point totals that indicate how well they align with sales’ predetermined criteria. For example, if your criteria is based primarily on budget and buying power, a lead from a decision-maker with a large budget would receive a higher score than a lead from someone without the authority or means to purchase your product. This scoring process helps prioritize the most potentially valuable leads, along with those that are most likely to convert to a sale. Such prioritization means that even if sales doesn’t follow up on every single lead you generate, at least they’re more likely to follow up with the prospects most likely to make a purchase. Milam takes a slightly different approach to categorizing his company’s leads. If the attendee’s company isn’t a potential client, the lead is not recorded. If the company is a potential client, but the attendee isn’t a decision-maker, Milam tries to obtain and record the decision-maker’s contact information. If the attendee is a decision-maker and represents a potential client, the lead is categorized as hot or cold (both of which he passes on to sales). Hot leads represent decision-makers who are currently looking for something Kerry provides. Cold leads represent decision-makers who are not currently looking or lack the budget or approval to buy at this time. Like Stevens’ approach, Milam’s system helps sales prioritize leads in hopes that if some fall through the cracks, at least they’ll be the ones that weren’t as likely to convert to a sale. Vibeke Arentz, who leads marketing for Innotas, a San Francisco-based software firm, suggests scoring each lead and passing only the highest-scoring leads on to the sales department. “By working with sales to develop the definition of a qualified lead, and then keeping your commitment to send sales only leads that they define as qualified, based on your scoring system, you will not only help them sell,” Arentz says, “you will also build a stronger relationship with them in the process.” 5. E-mail Your Attendees According to Ivan Lazarev, president of Bethesda, MD-based event-marketing technology and services company ITN International Inc., there are four steps to effective lead management: capture, qualify, follow-up, and distribute. “Most people skip follow-up. They do the capture step, and are getting better and better at the qualification step, but they skip the follow-up step because they confuse follow-up with distribution,” Lazarev says. “The follow-up step is simply making sure the attendee knows that you have registered his or her request. It’s the ‘Thank you for visiting our exhibit’ e-mail, and it should be done before the lead is even distributed to sales.” But what impact does this follow-up step actually have on lead fulfillment? Well, in a sense it instantly and automatically increases fulfillment rates to 100 percent, meaning that each prospect is receiving at least that auto-generated, post-show interaction with your company. But Lazarev says, at least anecdotally, that the follow-up step can also increase the likelihood of converting a trade show lead into a sale. “Is it a science? Do we have hard numbers? No. But the big macroeconomic analysis indicates that following up within a week of the show is better than following up within six weeks. And the likelihood of actually making a sale is far greater than if you never followed up at all,” Lazarev says. According to Lazarev, each of your follow-up e-mails should thank the attendee for visiting the exhibit, set a basic expectation (e.g. “Someone will be in touch shortly to discuss our conversation at the XYZ show”), and include a link to a Web site where attendees can get additional information about your company and/or its products and services. 6. Determine Cost Per Lead Without a clear understanding of the investment involved in generating trade show leads, it’s hard for your sales reps to see them as more than names and basic contact information. To overcome this hurdle, Mraz advocates analyzing the total investment that each individual lead represents and then passing this information on to your salespeople at the same time leads are distributed. “It’s important for sales to know how much it costs to generate these leads,” says Mraz, who claims that understanding the size of the investment inspires accountability and stimulates sales to follow up. Determining your cost per lead is simple: If lead generation is your sole objective at a trade show, take the total cost of exhibiting at that show and divide that figure by the number of leads you collected. That gives you the total cost your company spent to obtain each individual lead. “If I spend $10,000 to exhibit at a show and I generate 100 sales leads, there is a $100 cost per lead. If I give you five leads to follow up on, that’s $500 of our marketing investment, not just five pieces of paper,” Mraz says. “If you don’t follow up on those leads, it’s the same as taking the company’s digital camera and running it over with your car. You’ve destroyed that asset.” If you went to the show with multiple goals (generate leads, build brand awareness, launch new products, attract media attention, etc.), assign each goal a percentage representative of its portion of your total objectives at the show. For example, if lead generation and brand awareness are your program’s objectives, and are equally important to your company, they each make up 50 percent of your overall objectives. If your primary goal is lead generation, with secondary goals of generating media exposure and launching a new product, lead generation may represent 60 percent of your total objectives, while the other 40 percent is split between your other two goals. In that case, take 60 percent of the total cost of exhibiting and divide it by the number of leads generated. This process will give you an accurate measure of how much your company invested to generate each sales lead.

7. Help Sales Avoid the Cold Call “Our salespeople hate to make cold calls when following up on trade show leads,” says Kimberly Meyers, director of channel marketing at XMPie Inc., a leading provider of dynamic-publishing software. “So to help our salespeople avoid the dreaded cold call and give them a good reason to pick up the phone, we have implemented a variety of show follow-up programs over the years.” For example, when XMPie sales reps followed up on leads gathered at a print-industry show in Chicago, they invited prospects to a Webinar on the power of variable-print technology. According to Meyers, the tactic gave sales associates an initial talking point that helped get the conversation rolling. In other words, rather than diving head first into a sales pitch, reps extended an invitation to the Webinar before segueing into follow-up sales discussions. If a Webinar isn’t appropriate, consider sending a direct mailer after the show, but before the follow-up call from sales. A few years ago, Winntech, a Kansas City, MO-based retail, fixture, and merchandising design firm, sent each of the 200 qualified prospects it met with at the GlobalShop show a direct mailer that contained a fresh orange. The mailer also contained an accordion-fold card with pictures of Winntech’s design projects and a thank-you note with the firm’s contact information. The orange tied to the theme of its exhibit, which featured 1,174 fresh oranges hanging from an overhead truss. Winntech’s sales team contacted each prospect within 24 hours of the mailers’ expected delivery time. The creative post-show promotion provided the perfect icebreaker for sales associates during their follow-up calls, as they were able to open conversations with, “Hey, did you get the orange I sent you?” 8. Keep an Eye On Your Leads “If companies are serious about their trade show marketing investment, they have to hold the follow-up team accountable — almost at gun point,” says Mraz, who encourages exhibit managers to keep tabs on which salespeople are notoriously lazy when it comes to following up on trade show leads. “If I’m giving you 10 leads, and you don’t follow up on them, I’m not going to give you any more. I’m going to give them to people who are following up on them and turning them into sales.” Arentz suggests distributing leads using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, then tracking follow-up and creating reports that state how many qualified leads you generated, how many were handed off to sales, how many leads they followed up on, and — if possible — which ones resulted in actual purchases. Milam has developed a similar reporting procedure. The same administrative assistant that served as his Lead Sheriff was later tasked with tracking trade show leads in the CRM database and creating a monthly report. “I think we’re doing a good job with our shows; they are producing business opportunities for us. But people continue to question the value of exhibiting. The criticism falls on us, but the responsibility for success lies elsewhere,” Milam says. “If the value of your program is called into question, and you’ve actually been tracking your leads, you can legitimately pass some of the blame to sales if you have the numbers that prove they’re not following up on the leads your program is producing.” 9. Don’t Abandon Dead Leads What happens to a lead that doesn’t turn into a sale? According to Stevens, many are discarded altogether. But even these so-called dead leads still provide value in the form of potential future sales. “Studies have shown that 45 percent of business inquiries eventually result in a sale,” Stevens says, citing a report by the Marketing Management Journal. “They may not be ready to buy right now, or maybe they don’t currently have the budget to do so, but eventually they’re going to make a purchase. You need to stay in touch with them so that when they are ready to purchase, they buy from your company instead of buying from your competitors.” Referred to as lead nurturing, lead incubation, lead recycling, and lead development, this idea represents a deliberate marketing strategy of repeated communications (via phone, e-mail, and/or postal mail) designed to keep your company top of mind. “Marketing’s job is to deliver qualified leads to sales. If a lead is not qualified yet, that nurturing process belongs in the marketing department,” Stevens says. “Marketing should assess the leads after the show, give the ones that are qualified to sales, and begin nurturing and developing those that are not yet qualified. Once they become qualified leads, pass them on to sales.” While there are no hard-and-fast rules for how or when these communications should take place, Stevens suggests varying the regularity to avoid making them look like auto-generated e-blasts. “E-mail them a case study about how an existing client has used your product or service, call and invite them to a VIP event, send them an announcement about a new product you’re debuting,” recommends Stevens. “Don’t just send a ‘Hi, how are you’ e-mail. Send them useful information to help move them along in the decision-making process.” 10. Commit to Taking Action The aforementioned tips aren’t rocket science, nor do they require an excessive amount of time or effort. And the reality is that unless your sales team is driving show-related sales, the onus is on you to do something about it, or your program is likely to shoulder the blame. “You can keep doing the same thing, but don’t be surprised if you get the same results. Improvement in your organization’s lead qualification and fulfillment is an ongoing process,” says Gary Survis, managing partner of First Trade Show/Go Green Displays. “Especially in today’s tough economic environment, every sales organization wants its sales funnel to have a large prospect pool, since most are experiencing longer sales cycles. So to succeed, you need to put a stake in the sand, set a goal, and make sure your sales department is taking advantage of the leads that your program is bringing to the table.” You can start by establishing and circulating follow-up goals. For example, if you suspect sales is following up on a mere 20 percent of the leads you collect, set a goal of 50-percent follow-up for your next show and implement the tips and techniques that make the most sense for you and your organization. If you reach your goal, pat yourself — and your sales team — on the back. Then raise the bar incrementally at each of your events to keep the ball rolling on the path toward 100-percent fulfillment. If you don’t meet your initial goal, seek internal allies such as sales or marketing directors who might be willing and able to help you crack the whip. Or implement a few different tactics. But do something — anything — other than sitting idly by as your sales department dooms your program and your career to an ill-fated end. After all, you basically have three choices: You can resign yourself to the status quo, you can cross your fingers and pray things get better on their own, or you can make an attempt to improve your company’s follow-through. Even if your solution fails to completely correct the problem, you’re likely to see a slight improvement that will get you and your program moving in the right direction. As the saying goes, you need to lead, follow, or get out of the way. So lead the way toward consistent lead follow-up, and increased sales will hopefully, well, follow your lead. e