Never underestimate the power of trade show displays to impress potential customers and to get them on your mailing list. For a lot of these people, your trade show booth is going to be their first impression of your company, and if you wow ’em, they’re going to be receptive to a sales call.
However, it’s important to remember that your average trade show attendee is going to see dozens of trade show booths and hundreds of people. To have the best success at converting them after the show, you need to make yourself memorable to them, and convince them afterwards that you remember them just as well.
So, here are a few pointers on lead management at your trade show displays.
At the Trade Show
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Ensure your staff are friendly and focused. Your people make as much of an impression on visitors as your slideshows, banner stands, and brand new iPad kiosks. Your staff should strive to make a memorable impression on everyone who stops by.
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Give your staff their own business cards. If a staff member makes a strong connection with a visitor, they should have cards on hand to give out, even if they’re not regularly a part of sales. That personal connection will mean more in creating a sale later than all of the followup emails you could possibly send.
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Keep notes on leads during the show. It’s relatively easy in this age of smartphones and tablets to set up a staff member whose main duty is making notes on your leads. Having information about what a person talked about or was interested in will be invaluable for your sales team.
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Give out thumbdrives with interactive content. Don’t just put a bunch of AVI or PPT files on your thumbdrives.It’s worth the extra money to have someone put together an interface and turn it into an interactive experience. Also, when you do this, you can put calls to action into the content that will lead people to your website, hopefully to sign up for further promotions.
After the Trade Show
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Follow up immediately. We hammer on this because it’s important: do NOT let those contacts go more than a day or two without hearing from you, or they’ll forget about you.
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Contact them in the way they most want to be contacted. This is why it helps to take notes. Try to figure out what a lead’s preferred method of communication is, and make that your first attempt at contacting them. If they say they’re always on Facebook, contact them that way.
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Personalize your follow ups. Try to avoid sending boilerplate emails if you can help it. Use the information you gathered to try to make the message as personalized as possible. If you remember that they are the one who chatted with you about the White Sox for ten minutes during the show, that will impress them.
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Embrace social media. Don’t just hand out your address and phone number. Invite people to follow you on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Swap account names with people as they arrive, and add them to your own social media networks. This can be a great way to grow your social media presence as well, and keep you in contact with them in a less intrusive way than phone calls or email.
Remember, your trade show displays are there to get you new leads and customers. Focus on your leads, learn all that you can about them, and use that information to make sure they remember you, and not all the other trade show displays they visited that day.
For more check out our article on how to convert leads or how to follow up on leads.