Trade shows have the ability to give lasting and meaningful impression to its exhibitors. By allowing potential clients to experience and interact with your company, your staff can connect with potential buyers and become educated about your brand.
Although trade shows create energy and excitement, information travels rapidly and your leads have short attention spans with high expectations. You don’t want potential clients to forget about your business shortly after event day or have them lose interest. Meet with your sales team and know how to follow up on quality leads.
Send Requested Materials
Immediately send leads from your trade show to your team overnight. Have them send requested materials such as literature or samples to prospects within 24 hours. This fast response will ensure potential clients you have not forgotten them and allowed for your company to get ahead of the competition. It is never a bad idea to resend materials from a trade show in case clients misplaced them.
Follow Up
Contacting your leads by phone or email is ideal when following up with a potential client and starting to build that buyer-seller relationship. This action can confirm if a client is serious about your services and is easier to connect with potential clients right away. Leads are more likely to buy when your company is readily available.
Consideration Stage
During the consideration stage leads are interested in your brand as a potential solution to their problem while considering other solutions. Prospects are in control of the conversation, meaning sales should not expect to close at the consideration stage. Identify why the prospect is interested in your brand and the other solutions they are considering. Make your client feel valued and build trust by helping the prospect understand their options and how each might affect their final decision.
Be prepared for questions! Your sales team should be prepared to discuss company information as an inbound marketer. It’s their job to not only know the lead contact information, but relevant product information and have competitive responses ready.
Your sales team should ask potential clients how they think your business could help them. It is not important to clients what you think is valuable about your product or brand, but what they think is important. Your prospects will always view your company differently than you. If your sales team concentrates on what they think the client wants to hear, they will not be adding value to their conversation.
To help prospects achieve a desired outcome, focus on what is valuable to them. Center your conversation on how you can work together to achieve that outcome and both their company and your sales team will benefit.
Pass Along Information
The most valuable information you can pass along to potential clients is information that will help the prospect’s problem in the context of your brand. This will help your sales team prepare to discuss solutions based on the prospect’s needs, fears and objections in the context of your competition. Do not talk about product or service features that aren’t valuable to the client. Your team does not want to waste the valuable time they have talking with the prospect.
Complete Critical Evaluation
Track your leads to the sale. Did the qualified prospects buy, if so, how much? Use this to demonstrate the trade show’s ROI. When evaluating, look at what went well and what didn’t during the entire lead process. Critique each aspect and give special attention to feedback pertaining to lead quality. This information will help maximize the effectiveness of future trade show efforts.
