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Making Trade Show Leads Fit
October 27, 2008
Can the square pegs of your trade show leads fit into the round processing holes of your CRM system?
By Fred Tremblay
Thousands of companies spend significant dollars each year exhibiting at trade shows and other events in an effort to collect qualified sales leads. These same companies have also built or purchased extremely sophisticated CRM systems to manage their sales efforts, including lead management and follow-up. In spite of this, the trade show industry's Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) annually claims that upwards of 80% of trade show leads are not followed-up. Why?
Different Leads, Different Measures
Reasons for this vary by organization and industry but by far and away the major contributor to the problem is the fact that trade show leads are different from those generated by the Internet, direct mail and media advertising and far more difficult to handle. If you think you can simply take trade show leads from the exhibition booth and drop them into your CRM system for distribution to sales reps, you are in for a big surprise! Trade show leads are square pegs—they do not easily fit into the round processing holes of your CRM system.
The lead data coming from a trade show is more complex, contains more errors and is in a different format than any of the other lead data generated by web-based, e-mail or direct mail campaigns. Each show employs a different system for collecting /storing lead data. These include everything from business cards with scribbled notes to encrypted attendee badges requiring special scanners to read the demographic data.
At the end of the show, the leads are commonly made available to the exhibitor on USB memory sticks, files downloadable from the show's Web site or in paper form as collected in the booth. In addition, every show organizer uses a different scheme and format for storing the lead data. It is the exhibitor's responsibility to put the show data into a form usable by their internal systems. Simply put, there is nothing simple about processing trade show leads.
If a company exhibits at 15 shows, they have a good chance of seeing 15 different, yet equally challenging, formats and many IT organizations are not staffed or motivated to effectively handle all the data. In addition, a large percentage of the leads collected are simply information requests that should be categorized as "low priority" during the post show follow-up campaign and definitely should not be entered into the CRM database.
Make It Fit
Everyone knows that to get the most out of your trade show investment you must get to the "hot" prospects before your competition. Sounds simple, but more often than not, delays of several days to several weeks are incurred in getting the leads to the sales department and responding to attendee requests. Since all of your competitors emerge from a trade show with the same list of leads, processing delays and the inability to prioritize those leads will result in someone else getting first crack at the high priority opportunities.
Successful organizations simply do not give their competitors a head start in closing sales. Therefore, to maximize the ROI from their trade show investment, exhibitors must ensure they avoid processing delays by implementing leads processing systems that can react immediately to the complex challenges of this data and ultimately convert the "square" format of the trade show leads into a "round" format recognizable by their CRM and follow-up systems. In addition, the systems must be able to prioritize the leads so that only those that are "sales ready" are put into the sales process.
For many successful organizations this takes the form of a flexible "rapid response" subsystem that sits between the trade show and the normal CRM system.
The key features of this subsystem should include the following:
1. Data clean-up, elimination of duplicate records and reformatting to one usable by in-house systems
2. Lead rating, scoring based on sales, marketing rules for A, B, C etc. leads
3. Attendee e-mail response with text and URL links based on the priority of the lead as rated
4. Distribution of A leads to sales and CRM, and B leads to marketing for nurturing
This process is in a constant state of flux due to changing rules on what defines a "sales ready" lead and format changes for the trade show data. In depth understanding of both the trade show data and the nuances of the CRM system is necessary to effectively manage this process. Also required are dedicated resources to manage and modify the function.
In many cases, outsourcing this processing to a firm that specializes in this arena will make more economic sense than chasing the ever changing technological whims of the trade show industry.
Fred Tremblay is President and CEO of TPC Software (www.leads-processing.com)
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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