davidpoulos.com

Tag: in-person

  • Leaving Gold On The Table

    Leaving Gold On The Table

    For those companies out there who include industry tradeshows in their marketing mix, either on purpose as part of a strategy, or “because all our competitors are there”, you are probably leaving a pile of gold behind when you pack up your boxes to go home.

    Recent studies by independent national organizations show that very few companies do any pre-show marketing to prospects or clients, and that the number of leads actually followed up after the show is in the single digits!

    This type of behavior makes no sense to me, and is creating a case of diminishing returns for the tradeshow industry as a whole and for those who participate in them. If you were to spend millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad for your company, and then disconnected your phones for the month after the ad ran, you’d consider such behavior ludicrous, wasteful to the nth degree. Yet, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you fail to broadcast your presence at an event, when you pay dearly to participate; spend thousands on a complex display and related collateral material; spend endless time in meetings reviewing a hundred different types of tchochkeys and giveaways; take a week’s worth of time from your key sales people, technical people and administrative staff; when you don’t get full benefit from T&E, including travel, meals, hotels, cabs and entertainment; and then don’t follow up some of the most qualified sales leads and partnership opportunities you’ll ever encounter. Absurd, you say? Commonplace, at best, if we’re to believe the data. And that’s just for one major show – scale that up to include 6-10 shows a year, and you’re watching a pot of gold in lost opportunity fly out the window!

    So how to you capitalize on all that opportunity? Five quick fixes that will cut waste, provide more value and prevent lost opportunity:

    5) Train and select your on-site staff with care. Even for a major show, you don’t have to send the whole team. While a big group of people all dressed alike trolling the floor and inhabiting the exhibit does have some value, especially in reinforcing your brand, it’s a costly and inefficient way to do that, and the job can be better handled by fewer better selected candidates. A mixed bag of junior and senior sales staff, one technical person to act as advisor and closer on the BIG sales, and a couple of engaging administrative folks to help clean up the loose ends, steer traffic to the sales group and provide coverage. That’s it. Train them all to be effective in as many different roles as are appropriate, so there is good overlap, but make sure everyone knows how important this show is to the prosperity of the company, and that all leads, no matter how small or remote, could be important, and are to be treated as such.

    4) Set up a lead management system, and use it. That’s not the same thing as renting the capture machine from the show management’s vendor. This is a system within the company for qualifying, funneling and following up on leads gathered at the show. Your existing prospect database is a good start, but it’s probably not built to handle a big influx of leads in a short time, and likely doesn’t have a good qualifying system within it. It should be designed to work quickly, have all the follow-up materials created in advance and be able to customize them to a certain extent for each lead. Nothing is more impressive than having a quick, well-crafted, specific follow-up note waiting for you when you get back to your room for the evening from a vendor you spoke with that afternoon!

    3) Craft an effective pre-show marketing strategy. If you really want to stand out of the crowd, marketing your presence at the show a couple of weeks beforehand is one of the best ways to do it. You can prompt booth visits, make appointments with big clients or promising prospects who are planning to attend, build attendance in your hospitality suite event, pre-qualify leads, and much more with this simple step. Get access to the registration list from the prior year if it’s available and use it repeatedly and effectively. You’ll be amazed at the resulting traffic.

    2) Set goals for the show that make sense, and hold EVERYONE accountable for meeting them. Especially if this is one of many shows you participate in each year, goal-setting will give you some idea of how worthwhile your tradeshow investment is likely to be. It gives you an ROI variable to push back against when making decisions for next year. Make them just barely reachable, and make them finite and quantifiable – “we will contact and follow-up with 25 new prospects not in our current database at this show.” Now, it’s everybody’s responsibility to be familiar with what’s in that prospect database, know who the big fish are, and engage everyone in a productive, helpful way to make that number attainable. It forces a teamwork approach, and keeps down the finger-pointing later if you don’t hit the number.

    1) See the show as a triple opportunity and treat it as such! How many times do you get to be in a room with a huge universe of prospects and customers, prepared, armed and in a selling environment, all in one week, with your best troops in attendance? Not very often, I’ll wager. So make that opportunity count. Follow-up religiously, engage every reasonable visitor, invest in some staff training, make the display work for you, make sure it carries the brand well and is easy to read and understand, make sure your staff understands the goals and the importance of the results to the success of all concerned. Make sure that lead management system is working for you, not just making you more work.

    You’ve invested a significant chunk of budget to participate in these marketing opportunities – its up to you to make the investment pay back. Enjoy.

  • Face-To-Face Works Best

    Face-To-Face Works Best

    If you’re a small business owner or manager, you’ve probably been focused on new customer acquisition for the last year or so, just trying to survive. You’ve probably tried and tested numerous methods of “getting the word out” in your local business community, using supposedly “tried and true” methods, like publication advertising, fliers in public places, trade shows, maybe e-mail campaigns, social media promotions, maybe some direct mail, coupon packs, maybe even radio or other types of mass media. If you’re like most we’ve worked with in this situation, the results from these efforts were mixed at best.

    What most of these types of promotions lack is brand recognition in the local community, and lack of focus, both geographically or psychographically, being off message or appearing in the wrong place to the wrong audience.

    Even in this day and age of technology and social networking, the most effective method we’ve found to initiate and foster working, professional relationships is fact-to-face networking. More information about you and your business, your integrity, your honestly, your competence and capability can be transmitted in a fifteen minute conversation at a business mixer than in a YouTube video, a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn resume, a brochure or direct mailer.

    Professional business networking is a conversation with a point. I’m not talking about those business card pass out fests, where you’re only goal is to gab and grab as many cards as you can and get out. I’m talking about educational, informative, honest conversations in a low-pressure, conducive environment, where real professionals can find out about each others’ businesses, get a sense of their goals, approach and vision, where you can gauge their position in the professional landscape, maybe meet some of their colleagues, watch how the interact with others.

    It’s an art form, and resembles dating in many ways. You’re looking for common ground, common experiences, common approaches or beliefs, that you can use to base an ongoing relationship upon. You’re looking for people to whom you’d trust your business, one you’ve worked hard to build, and you want to be careful with that particular property.

    Of course, there are limitations – you can only be in so many places at once, and you can only meet so many people in a given hour. But it’s not quantity you’re focused on here, it’s quality. There are some numbers involved, but they are less daunting than you might believe. For example, if you go to four events a month, one a week on average, you can probably meet 15-20 people a month. Of those, maybe 50% are worth keeping in touch with or fostering, for various reasons (competitor, never any need for your business, not senior enough to be decision maker yet, etc.). That’s 120 new people a year, each of whom represents a business, a circle of friends, associates, colleagues, family, neighbors and other relatives, who probably total approximately 50. That’s 6000 connections a year, every year, who now have access to you, if you’ve made the right impression on each of the initial contacts – meaning you haven’t talked their ear off, wasted their time, have expressed a sincere interest in their business, asked meaningful questions, haven’t said anything offensive, etc.

    If half of those connections actually investigate further, and elect to do business with you, that’s 3000 new customers a year. With an average order of $50, that’s $150,000 a year off single-transaction new business alone, let alone referrals, repeat business, upsell, and a host of other interactions. All for having a drink and a chat once a week. Not too shabby.

    Face-to-face interactions allow you to be you, and represent your business in a way that no other media or method allows. Making the connections is only half the battle, following up and nurturing those relationships, keeping them fresh and active is another story altogether.

    Go forth and network, and you don’t even need an Internet connection! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”