One of the most important and crucial trade show ideas in order to guarantee success at your next trade show is the effective gathering and qualifying of sales leads. Although, different companies go to trade shows and similar events for slightly different reasons, almost every company has as one of its goals the acquisition of sales leads in order to maximize the ROI of an exhibiting experience. In this effort, there are right ways to do things and wrong ways to do things.
Let’s talk about the right way to handle leads at your next trade show. You can use your imagination to figure out the wrong way (hint: it’s the opposite of these tips). As we’ve said, focusing on sales leads is one of the best trade show ideas for ensuring that you maximize your ROI for a particular show or event. Since, your business depends on maximizing your profit and growth that makes them a very important area to focus on.
And focusing on sales leads at your trade show booths, means that you should have a dedicated sales team if it is at all logistically possible. There’s a reason that we have a high division of labor in this country. It makes for more efficient workers in specialized roles. So, taking a tip from that basic economic truth, we can see that having a team that specializes in sales lead generation allows you to more effectively undertake this task.
So, how do you most effectively handle leads at a trade show? Well, aside from having a rockstar sales team, you should make sure that you have an effective system for handling these leads. That means that lead information should always be recorded and categorized based on how qualified or ‘hot’ a lead is. There are many ways to handle this qualification, but training your sales staff to put them in a simple hierarchy based on how ‘hot’ a lead is (a simple A, B, C or red, green, blue) often is sufficient.
Once, you have this system in place you just need to make sure that sales personnel are effective at approaching, engaging and selling your company’s products and services. We can take advice from Wayne Gretzky on this. He said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. In other words, approach everyone and treat them like a VIP. This way you won’t miss a potential lead that could generate significant revenue for your company in the future.
Altogether, lead generation is one of the most important trade show ideas to focus on. So, make sure that you put your resources into this critical area and you will see the difference in your ROI and your bottom line.