Sales Success at Trade Shows

Seth Godin had a great post today on trade shows selling/marketing.  While Seth talked about creating buzz, it’s important to stress another point about exhibiting at trade shows.  Most companies don’t have realistic goals for trade show appearances, while others have the wrong goal for their trade show events.  While creating buzz is invaluable, a sales driven organization can accumulate a tremendous number of leads at shows.  The problem most companies make though, is in getting cards from everyone.  This causes salespeople to be unable to differentiate good leads from bad and hot leads from cool ones.  As a result, they spend a lot of time following up on people who wanted free gifts rather than prospects who had legitimate interest.  The glut of follow up calls and lack of differentiation can cause salespeople to inadvertently not get back to hot leads for weeks, late enough for them not to be leads at all anymore.  And that’s when salespeople follow up at all.  For many salespeople, following up on trade show leads just isn’t in their repertoire because their companies aren’t clear about why they’re at the show and what they expect their salespeople to do.

Job One: Identify good prospects (quality leads)
Job Two: Get permission to call
Job Three: Find out how to get through when following up
Job Four: Follow Up

There are a number of other things that contribute to successful trade shows and having a theme that makes you memorable helps not only to create buzz, but to jog the prospect’s memory when your salespeople make the follow up call.

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