Trade Show Leads
Leveraging Your Sales Opportunities

Getting complete information about your trade show leads is essential to effective follow-up and, in turn, securing sales. Your booth team has the important responsibility of qualifying and collecting information about potential buyers who come by your exhibit. Then, they will use the information they obtained to effectively reach out to prospects immediately following the show, when awareness and buying interest is still top-of-mind.

To ensure success, establish a system during your event planning process to gather and qualify leads. Determine what information your representatives need from booth visitors that will allow them to:

Assess or qualify each visitor’s potential to buy your product or service, including relevant data on specific needs, budget requirements and timing for a potential purchase.
Contact prospects after the show through multiple channels including phone, mail, email and personal visits.

You may opt to have your booth representatives track this information manually with a detailed lead sheet.

Or, you may want to consider renting an automated tracking system that electronically captures data by having booth visitors swipe their name tags when they enter your exhibit area.

First, check with your trade show contact to see if the conference name tags will have electronic strips that can be used for this purpose.

If you decide to use technology that tracks tradeshow leads, be sure the system's output provides all the information you require for post-marketing initiatives. It is possible that you may need to pay extra for customizing data reporting to fully utilize the information for effective follow-up with tradeshow leads.

It is important to note that automated lead tracking systems vary so you will want to educate yourself about which equipment and software best meet your specifications. If you can't get what you want from these technology-driven systems, you may opt to track trade show leads manually.

The more information you have about your leads, the more effective your follow-up initiatives will be. You will be able to evaluate the potential of each lead (perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 or based on a rating of low, medium or high) and implement an appropriate follow-up communication strategy for each level of prospect.

With strong lead information in hand, you can focus your efforts and respond effectively to convert prospects into customers. Additionally, timing is essential. The longer you wait to call or contact a strong prospect who visited your booth, the less likely he or she will be to buy.

Always make phone or written contact within one week of the trade show to make the most of your window of opportunity.