Saturday, August 27, 2011

Qualifying Your Leads at the Trade Show - Quality, not Quantity

By Charles Dugan


If you're planning to exhibit at a trade show, quite likely one of your goals is to procure sales leads while at the show. What you need to keep under consideration when it comes to leads, though, is that you are on the lookout for qualified leads"leads that are very likely to convert into tangible sales.

You do not want to present your sales office with lots of contacts if only a few of those contacts are going to finish up in actual sales. Your ROI drops if the sales dept puts time into calling leads that don't convert. In addition, the sales department may become depressed and stop calling your show leads, which reflects badly on your exhibition and on you.

Rather than bringing your sales dep. the contact information of each person who stopped in your booth at the show, bring them the contact information for the folks that wished to leave with your samples and your displays, especially if these people are actually capable of making of making these sorts of calls for their corporations and organisations. Those are your qualified leads.

Before you left for the show, in your planning you conducted in preparation for the show, you defined your target prospects. You made a decision who you needed to meet at the show, who you wished to lure into your booth, and it is on these visitors that you will target your attention.

When a target prospect enters your booth, you (and your booth staff) must be ready to ask him or her some questions which will further help you assess the quality of the lead. The questions you ask should be aimed at ranking the lead and placing the lead to a category. If you aren't sure what kinds of questions to ask your leads, speak with your sales department. They know what kind of info is most helpful to them when attempting to close a sale. Their input should help you develop your questions.




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