Trade shows are often seen as a necessary evil. Sales teams are often obligated to attend in force as the potential for making contact with numerous prospects is huge, but the process of the show: setting up, running the booth, circulating the floor, after-show tear down, and the inevitable follow-ups can be onerous. Often these are not much better than cold calls. Especially if the sales team worked as a group and pooled the results, leaving individual salespeople to contact people they’ve never met or talked with.
However your team handles the follow-up, chances are there are a lot of things you could do to streamline and smooth the process. Here are a few tricks and hints that might help.
The “put your card in and win something” fish bowl is not a very good prospect finder. Chances are, a number of the cards dropped in will be from other trade show booth keepers and most of those dropped in are not likely interested in your product. Treat these as cold calls and nothing more. They deserve a follow-up, of course, since some may be interested, but put them on the back burner to be done after the serious follow-ups are completed.
Spend the show seriously contacting prospects, not just collecting business cards. A dozen likely prospects are far more useful than a hundred random ones. Just because someone spoke with you doesn’t mean they’re interested in your products or have any use for them. Hopefully, you’re spending the time on the show floor speaking with people long enough to learn who they are, what their business is, etc. If it helps, write a few remarks on the back of the cards you collect or record comments into your phone or a recorder after the encounter to keep track of who’s who.
If you can, set a future date to get together on the phone, over lunch, etc. with likely prospects. Make sure to record that and to follow-up with a reminder of the get-together a few days before you meet. Those who will agree to meet with you are the most valuable finds you’ll have at the show.
Following that process during the show will give you an obvious way to categorize prospects afterward for follow-up contacts. Start with the most likely – the ones you spent the most time with and who are obviously most likely to be interested in your product or service. Work your way down the list from there, to the least likely prospects. This does two things: first, it gives you a likely chance of having success right off the bat and, second, it gives you motivation for when you get to the ones who will likely be rejecting you quickly so that you can keep going down that list.
Above all, make the contacts as quickly as you can post-show. Scheduling for the sales team should include the pre-show setup, the show itself, and then at least as long as the show lasted in days afterward for the follow-up. So if the show is one long day of 12 hours, there should be at least twelve hours planned for follow-up after it’s over. Preferably more.
In fact, if you possibly can, make follow-ups the day of the show or the day after. Especially with those you were not able to get a set meeting time and date with. Call, introduce yourself quickly, and reference the conversation you had (this is why notes are a good idea). This jogs their memory and if you do it quickly enough, they won’t have forgotten you in the flurry of the show.
Making the show into more than just a grind is not easy, but a trade show can become a gold mine of opportunity if utilized correctly and if the follow-up is immediate and meaningful.