Last week I conducted a webinar for the exhibitors of PRSM ( Professional Retail Store Maintenance Association) in preparation for their upcoming Orlando show April 18 – 20. Post show lead follow up was a discussion point in the presentation. After the webinar I talked with one of the participants, Bob Micunek Director of Marketing & Sales for Springwise Facility Management. He shared with me the structured process they use for trade show lead follow up and I wanted to pass it along to you. Here is his great material:
We just returned from the SPECS (Store Planning Equipment and Construction Seminars) annual event in Orlando, FL at the Gaylord Palms Resort. In addition to some of the things that you recommended like getting the salespeople involved on the front end with invitations to visit your booth, here are a few other things we do to increase our chances of developing a revenue stream from each and every contact at a trade show:
- Stay the day after the trade show ends and do a complete debrief of every person that we met face-to-face whether it was in the booth, at breakfast, lunch, dinner or cocktail parties. We assign a lead salesperson to follow-up with each person. We do have geographic sales regions but for this exercise we make it the responsibility of the person that had direct contact with the prospect in the booth or had the best connection with the prospect.
- Send written thank you cards to every person we meet face-to-face 48 hours after the show closes.
- Send a thank you email to every person we meet face-to-face within in one week of the show closing in addition to the written thank you note. The more specific you can be in the note, the better it is received since it increases your credibility with the prospect. Generic mass emails don’t work nearly as well . . . it’s the personal touch that gets the responses.
- On a side note, I always try to mention a positive experience that I had at their store/restaurant/company. It tells the prospect that you are also a consumer of their goods or service.
- Send “Sorry we missed you at SPECS” to the people in attendance a the trade show but didn’t meet face-to-face. It’s amazing how many of these messages are forwarded to the appropriate people in the organization if the prospect in attendance was not the decision-maker for our services. A tool that we use is Jigsaw to compile email addresses of attendees since most trade shows won’t send this information on the master attendee list. This is a lot of extra effort but well worth the time.
- Track communication with each and every attendee at the show. This takes a lot of extra effort but is the only way to measure true ROI of each trade show. Senior Sales Management needs to mandate this otherwise the follow-up won’t happen.
Bob’s last comment about have Senior Management involved is critical for this process to work.
I appreciate what Springwise Facility Maintenance is doing – it is the correct path to ensure 100% lead follow up. Every exhibitor should discuss a plan like this within their company.
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