Phot right: THIS is NOT a tradeshow LEAD. People who only want swag are not a good lead.
Why won’t YOUR salesforce follow-up? Because they can’t… so they won’t…and don’t. And you should not expect them to or blame them for not following up. Whaaaaaat?
Oh they might contact the people they know or the company names they recognize. But the other 86% of tradeshow booth visitors today are NEW BUSINESS prospects – Source www.CEIR.org.
So how do you suppose or propose they contact the 86%?
Put yourself it their shoes for just a minute and consider the following Reed Business Information Services statistics as barriers to their lead follow-up success.
- The cost of a sales call today is $329.00
- The number of calls to close a sale is 5.2
- The number of sellers seen by buyers in a week is 1.8
So you’re probably thinking, why don’t they just pick up the phone and call the leads?
Again, put yourself in their shoes and consider these statistics regarding phone calls in today’s world of automated answering machines and personal voice mail.
- It requires 3.4 telephone dialing attempts to reach anyone, for anything. (Want to prove it to yourself; try to call me right now at 630-642-6500. You’ll probably get my voice mail and I’ll get yours when I try to call you back.)
- It requires 7.6 telephone dialing attempts to reach and identify a (sales) prospect that has an immediate or near future intention to purchase the product or service they inquired about.
Based on the above statistics 50 tradeshow leads would require…
- $16,450.00 in sales call cost
- 256 sales calls
- More than 28 weeks to “get in” to see the prospects.
Knowing all of that, now, would YOU go through all that effort to follow-up all the leads? Probably not.
So now you may be thinking, if they can’t call on them personally, and they can’t (or won’t) call them on the phone, why not fax them? Because the CanSPAM act prohibits faxing to individuals without prior “written” permission. So fax is out.
OK, how about email? Why can’t the salesforce follow-up the leads via email?
That question is best answered with a rhetorical question. What did YOU do with YOUR email when you turned on your computer this morning, specifically with those in which you didn’t recognize the subject line information or the sender?
If you said, “Delete, delete, delete,” you’re not alone. Because that’s what the recipients of blind email response to tradeshow leads would do, because they wouldn’t recognize the subject line information or the sender. While 86% of them are NEW BUSINESS prospects (remember?)
I hope that by YOU now knowing and considering all of the above, your blame for the salesforce not following up on the tradeshow leads is turning more to empathy. Because it’s no wonder why “Less than 20% of tradeshow leads ever get followed up” and “76% of salespeople view the value of tradeshow leads to be no better than cold calls.” Source – www.CEIR.org.
So what’s the solution to the serious problem of poor lead follow-up after a tradeshow?
Continuing education! The answer to the problem is in continuing YOUR education in the best-practices of tradeshow marketing that includes the lead follow-up solution.
Tradeshow Leads To Sales is a company resource for that education in the form of seminars and webinars that tradeshow organizers host for their exhibitors, and individual exhibitors can contact for one-on-one tutoring.
If you are like most exhibitors, your leads aren’t being followed up and 80% of your selling opportunities are being missed. It’s up to YOU to solve that problem.
Richard Erschik of www.TradeshowLeadsToSales.com is among the highest rated exhibitor educators and trainers in the country. He has been a Roundtable moderator, FastTrak instructor, and featured speaker and presenter at the EXHIBITOR Show in Las Vegas for 18-years. Contact him by phone/text at 630-642-6500 or email at rerschik@richarderschik.com.
