Did you get the ROI you wanted from that tradeshow?

So, here is the scenario. You have just finished a seminar, trade show or some sort of event. You have a stack of names. Sales picks out the hot ones and calls them. Your telesales places a call out to the others. Maybe telesales calls them twice. After that they sit. Six months later, sales complains show was worthless. The conversion rate from lead to pipeline to revenue stinks. If you have a series of these the marketing budget gets cut and spent hiring more sales personnel. Sound familiar?

The core problem lies in the lack of a systematic process in managing leads. Lead generation activities (tradeshows, seminars, webinars, web advertising), are seen as an event with singular follow-up. What the good sales people know is it takes at least 6 touches to turn a response into a lead. (Note: I refuse to call a response a lead until it hits the pipeline with a defined opportunity. If you have to call it something else, call it a suspect.) Most marketing plans follow an event with one outbound call and one email. This is not enough. They also treat all responses the same. This does not take into account that customers are all in different buying patterns. Some are gathering information, others are anticipating a project, another has a project, but their budget is cut. Then there are the 1% that actually has a budget and plan. The key is to have a marketing plan that ties into their buying process. How do you do this? More.