Generating leads in five steps

Are you trying to generate as many leads as possible? Generating leads at an exhibition requires thorough preparation. The following five steps will help you achieve an optimal result. The first step is to determine your end goal. How many leads do you think you can get at this exhibition? Estimate the number of visitors and how many of those could be interesting prospects. Take a look at your figures (these should have been recorded) from previous exhibition participations and try to do better each time round. What information do you want to collect at a minimum? Opt to obtain relevant data; you don’t really require all of someone’s contact details. When it comes to trade fairs, it’s probably more interesting to find out what someone’s requirements are or when they are planning a new investment. For follow-up purposes, any made commitments should always be noted down on a form containing a blank ‘follow-up’ field. Determine how you plan to collect the desired information. How many staff members will you require in order to adequately address all your visitors? Get extra help if you think that the number of visitors will be too great for your team to handle. Employ specialists, or set up an action/activity, to enable the rapid identification of interesting prospects. Use badge scanners to quickly register contact details and input additional questions/notes. Get hold of an integrated system. Check with the exhibition organiser which kind of visitor data is available and if you can link that to your own registration/data system. Verify whether you will be able to import all the collected data to your own crm-database. Both data sources will enable you to efficiently capture and process lead data. Predetermine how leads will be followed up on. Leads are perishable; the longer you don’t do anything with them, the less value they will have. Therefore, it is important that you establish how (and who) you are going to deal with generated leads right after the exhibition.