The fifth and final element of the Trade Show Engagement Optimisation (TEO) Framework focuses on Your Follow Up.
Arguably the most important element, this element should get you thinking about the first step post-exhibit for your audience to re-engage with you and make you assess the key stages of your follow-up process.
This includes what departments should be held accountable and how your sales cycle aligns with your follow-up process. It’s important, at this stage, to fully understand how you will track your process to ensure you’re approaching the leads in the right way and measuring the conversion rates at each stage.
In this blog, we’ll share with you our 4-step process when it comes to your follow-up, and you’ll learn the steps you should be taking and what you should be avoiding.
Read on to discover more.
Note: If you’ve followed the other four TEO pillars and chosen the right exhibition to attend, you should have a bucket full of hot leads and you are ready to reap the rewards!
1. Organise all your new contacts and potential leads
Whether you’ve gathered data through business cards, interactive exhibition tools, or on post-it notes (this does happen!), it’s important to store all this information in an organised way.
Once back in the office, it’s worth filing the contacts your team has collected and process all the information into an easy-to-read spreadsheet so anyone of your team can collect.
A simple format to follow is:
- Company
- Contact Name
- Role Title
- Enquiry Information/Notes
When collecting the data, it would also be useful to get permission from each of your leads on how they would like to be contacted. By doing this, they will expect your follow up, and it will make them feel more at ease when you contact them. Remember trade shows are all about permission-based marketing.
2. Segmentation is your best friend
The next step in your follow-up is the segmentation of your leads.
Using the same spreadsheet, segmenting your leads into ‘hot’, ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ allows you to create a bespoke follow-up action plan for each segment and allows your sales team to see who they should give priority to first. If you treat all the leads the same, and you have 500 leads to get through, it may take you a few days to get to the hot lead whereas if you segment and prioritize the hot ones first, then you have a better chance to get to close those deals sooner.
3. Assign your Exhibition Lead Manager
Assigning a person from your team to manage the leads is vital and this must be done as soon as you’ve completed step 1 and step 2. This is because you don’t want the risk of losing potential leads and deals to competitors.
In some cases, it could be useful to assign your ‘hot’ leads to a team member who is used to high-pressure situations and has a record of having a quick turnaround when ‘closing the deal’ whilst ‘cold’ leads could be distributed to a team member who could build brand awareness for potential future customers.
4. Tailormade your follow-up plans to each segment
Post exhibition, it’s important to have a standardised letter to send out to all your leads, thanking them for visiting your stand, and that a representative of your team will contact them in due course. We recommend including a timescale too, so your potential leads know when to expect your call, email, or the invite that you promised to your next VIP event.
We recommend ‘hot’ leads should be followed up personally within at least 72 hours of the event to prevent your competitors from getting a head start on you in the race to win the prospect’s business.
Your Booth Staff would have built good rapport with your ‘hot’ leads at the show and uncovered their pain points or aspirations, so this gives you a great starting point to turn a hot lead into a valuable sale.
A framework designed for exhibition success
So, with this blog, we’ve come to end of our TEO framework journey but this isn’t the end.
Over the course of the next couple of months, you’ll be introduced to a whole new world of Trade Show Engagement Optimisation. From new thoughts and eBooks to new websites and interactive presentations.
If you want to be the first to know, get in touch with us here or email us at info@expostars.com.