3 Ways to Capture Leads at a Tradeshow Exhibit
Today I’ve been thinking about how we are capturing lead information at this week’s GPU Technology Conference. We’ve captured an abnormally large number of leads at this year’s show in our exhibit, not counting leads from other non-exhibiting hours activities.
Of course, exhibit traffic has to do with things that draw people to your booth in the first place: a great product, a great fit with the attendees, branding, flashy demos, open and inviting staff, network effects, etc. But today I’ve been thinking about those things that make a big difference in moving a booth visitor from an aloof guarded stance to being interested and engaged and willing to part with their contact information. Here are my thoughts on three different approaches to capturing leads at tradeshow exhibits:
- Business Card Collection Only – this is when you simply try to get business cards out of people that pass by. If they don’t have a business card, you’re out of luck. This is the minimal effort approach and is what over half of all companies do.
- Lead Retrieval Badge Swipers – these are the expensive gadgets ($300-500) you can rent that enable you to scan attendee’s badges that visit your booth. The big benefit is the quality of information that is captured; it includes the same information that was provided by the attendees to register for the event. So email addresses are valid and digitized already. This year, we have a team member dedicated to swiping the badges of booth attendees. This is highly preferable to having everyone swiping badges, because the appointed badge swiper can be a detached 3rd-party to all the conversations, and attendees don’t feel that the team member with whom they are having a meaningful discussion is not just in it for the badge swipe.
- On-the-fly Emails – this year I’ve experimented with sending emails on-the-fly from my smartphone to the people with whom I’m having conversations. I engage with them in the writing of the email too. I say, “Let me send you this XYZ useful thing. What is your email address? OK, here is the XYZ… Pressing send. Done!” It’s so simple. It’ll save massive time on the follow-ups. It shows the attendees that I want to be useful to them. It puts concrete definition to the things that we discussed. The only downside is the added time it can take to send the email.
What tips do you have for capturing lead information in a tradeshow exhibit?
Related articles
- Going Back to Basics: Tradeshow Must-Haves
- How to succeed with your Trade Show Booth
- Connect with Pain, Not with Overviews
- Are Tradeshows Worth the Investment?
- Trade Show Training Wheels: Part Two Preparing For Participating In Shows
- Nightly Syncs at Tradeshows
- Metrics To Evaluate Your Tradeshow Success
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
kp
We built an iPhone app that integrates with Pardot that really helps with any leads generated through face-to-face interaction (especially tradeshows). You fill our 4 fields (First, Last, Email, & what you want to say). It stores it directly in Pardot and SFDC, sends the email, and tags them to a “networking” segmentation list so we can measure overall face-to-face leads. You can also go more granular tag it to the specific event you’re attending for ROI calculations.
kp
Posted that one from the wrong Twitter account… 🙂
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
That’s hardcore! We’ll be doing a lot of manual SFDC imports this week from the stuff collected last week.