How to track leads after a trade show or conference

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You attended a trade show, conference, or other type of event where you came into contact with sales contacts, but what do you do with those leads when you get back to the office? You need a succession strategy and process to ensure these business cards don’t end up on your desk and forgotten.

Here are four key components of a strong trade show or conference succession strategy that can help you increase the return on your event investment.

1. Categorize your leads

Your first goal at the end of a conference or trade show is to determine who you are in contact with and which leads have the potential to lead to a sale. Depending on how you’ve attended a trade show or event, you may have collected business cards and contact information for a wide variety of people, and it’s likely that only a quarter of them are real prospects.

Hence, you need to categorize your leads based on the information you have about each one. This is why it is so important to write notes on the back of business cards whenever you can! Categories can include sales prospects, potential partners, vendors, journalists, industry influencers, competitors, and more.

Another way to categorize leads is based on how you interacted with them during the trade show or conference. For example, suppose you have a booth at a trade show that offers product demos. There are three ways to categorize leads after the show:

• People who saw a real demo at your booth
• People who simply spoke to a team member at your booth but didn’t see a product demo
• People your team hasn’t spoken to, but whose business cards you’ve purchased

Depending on how the people at your booth got in touch with you, you can make an educated guess as to where they are on the buyer’s journey and how you should follow them up, which leads straight to Parts 2 through 4 below.

2. Qualify your prospect leads

With your list of prospect leads in hand, it’s time to measure each prospect’s interest in your product or service so you can determine where they are in your sales pipeline. In other words, further categorize your leads as cold, warm, or hot depending on how willing they are to buy a solution to a problem they are having.

For example, a cold lead is someone who is not yet in the buying cycle or is at a very early stage in the buying cycle, while a warm lead is already actively looking for solutions and a hot lead is ready to make a buying decision.

Also, use your notes from the event and desk research to learn more about each lead so you can determine where they are in the sales pipeline and what powers they have in making purchase decisions. Check each lead’s corporate website, LinkedIn profile, contact and license information in the Cannabiz Media License Database, etc. to get as much information as possible to properly qualify them as a cold, warm, or hot lead.

3. Match leads to the best follow-up strategy

Knowing what phase of the buyer journey prospects are in is the best way to get in touch with them to get them to the next phase. Every lead doesn’t need a call, but some leads desperately need a call sooner rather than later.

For example, hot sales leads should be passed to the correct salesperson for personal follow-up via email or phone. Additionally, the seller should follow and engage with the prospect on social media to build a relationship.

Warm leads should go straight to an email marketing nursing program. This applies to prospects, prospects, and other categories of leads that you might want to develop relationships with in order to achieve future goals.

Cold leads should not be given up if there is a chance they might want or need your products and services in the future. Add them to an email marketing maintenance program that will keep your brand in mind.

Discard leads that aren’t your target audience. That includes your competitors. You don’t want the wrong audience to receive and negatively engage with your marketing email messages. Your negative engagement or lack of engagement could affect the deliverability of all of your email marketing campaigns in the future. Hence, it is important that you remove them from your email list.

4. Send marketing follow-up emails after the event

Within a week of a trade show or conference, it is important to send a series of messages to hot and cold prospects to build the relationship you started at the event (note that hot leads should be contacted one on one, not for mass email marketing follow-up campaigns). I came up with the four Rs for post-event email marketing so you can do this successfully.

Reintroduction

First, you need to re-introduce yourself so that recipients will remember who you are. In this message, you should offer to answer any questions and provide help if you need it. Include a call-to-action asking them to contact you with any questions or help.

Recall

The second message should be sent two or three days after the reintroduction message, reminding recipients of any offers you promoted during the event and / or post-event offers. Make sure you include deadlines for your offers so that the message creates a sense of urgency. The call-to-action should lead to the next logical step in order to take advantage of the offer.

Embed again

A week after sending your reminder message, you can send your Re-Engage message to keep providing useful and helpful information to recipients. This message should educate, inform and connect the dots between what you talked about at the fair and what you offer on your website. Hence, it is very effective to link to blog posts, videos or pictures on your website. Add a call-to-action to contact you with any questions or for more details.

Repeat

Don’t let prospects escape. Research shows that it typically takes five to seven email messages for a lead to reply to a sales rep (assuming they’re at the stage of the buying process where they’re actually considering a product or service like yours). Hence, you need to keep nurturing them with useful, engaging content in order to build a relationship and brand trust. They may not be ready to buy today, but you always want to keep track of when they are ready to buy in the future.

Consider sending thoughtful messages once a week or fortnightly. The call-to-action in these messages can lead to content on your website (blog posts, videos, visualizations, etc.) or to a contact form, depending on the message.

Key takeaways for tracking leads after a trade show

The key to following up leads after a trade show is taking the time to understand who each lead is and where they are in the buying cycle (if they are a prospect). With this information, you can plan a follow-up strategy of phone calls and email marketing that will enable you to make more sales now and in the future.