Did you get the ROI you wanted from that tradeshow?

So, here is the scenario. You have just finished a seminar, trade show or some sort of event. You have a stack of names. Sales picks out the hot ones and calls them. Your telesales places a call out to the others. Maybe telesales calls them twice. After that they sit. Six months later, sales complains show was worthless. The conversion rate from lead to pipeline to revenue stinks. If you have a series of these the marketing budget gets cut and spent hiring more sales personnel. Sound familiar?

The core problem lies in the lack of a systematic process in managing leads. Lead generation activities (tradeshows, seminars, webinars, web advertising), are seen as an event with singular follow-up. What the good sales people know is it takes at least 6 touches to turn a response into a lead. (Note: I refuse to call a response a lead until it hits the pipeline with a defined opportunity. If you have to call it something else, call it a suspect.) Most marketing plans follow an event with one outbound call and one email. This is not enough. They also treat all responses the same. This does not take into account that customers are all in different buying patterns. Some are gathering information, others are anticipating a project, another has a project, but their budget is cut. Then there are the 1% that actually has a budget and plan. The key is to have a marketing plan that ties into their buying process. How do you do this?

Develop a scoring process for responses and define your marketing based on the score. Look at past sales engagements. What behaviors indicated increased interest, then engagement and resulted in a sale. This requires you to plan beyond the initial contact after the event. Let’s say after a tradeshow you always follow-up with an email to offer a whitepaper.

Customer one: downloads the whitepaper, and tells you (in the information they filled out), the decision is 18 months from now. What now? How do you keep this alive for the next 18 months?

Customer two: does not download the whitepaper, but they went to your website and viewed a YouTube video. They tell you the project is within 6 months. What now?

Customer three: does nothing

Depending on your marketing cycle, each of these may have a different score and have different contact strategies. You will need a marketing prospect data base that keeps score and captures activity data for each customer. For instance:

Customer one: Add them to the email newsletter and schedule for seminar invites. Have telesales call to find out what information they might need over the next 18 months. Plan to touch them on a quarterly basis both with email and a call. The goal is to keep your name in front of them, so when they are ready you have the opportunity to engage.

Customer two: This account should be engaged. Have telesales call and email, using the rule of 6, until contact is made. The goal is to qualify the opportunity and determine the decision maker and process.

Customer three: Since you know nothing, place them on your outbound marketing list, if they have the bandwidth. Have telesales call out one or two times to qualify. If no contact is made, add them into your regular campaigns until there is a response and exchange of information. The goal is to get another response so you can determine what stage the customer is in.

By having a thought out strategy for the stages of market development will result in better marketing results and happy sales.