Maximizing Trade Show ROI

Are you a Powerball player? With Powerball, the odds of winning are approximately 1 / 175,000,000. You can go out and buy 1000 unique tickets, your odds of winning are about 1000 / 175,000,000. Nice odds, huh?  Just buying a ticket is no guarantee of success. So how does this apply to us and trade shows and Trade Show ROI? At Larson & Associates, we often hear Companies complain that after exhibiting at trade shows that the ROI was not worth the effort or investment. The first question I ask is, “How many appointments with prospects did you have set up before the show?” Usually, the answer is none. Yep, ZERO, zilch, nada. They pay for a booth, their salespeople, inventory etc. and sit, waiting for the clients to roll in, just hoping that all these wonderful prospects with a need will drop by the booth during the show. Betting that the old “Build it and they will come” principle can work magic, whether or not they are familiar with your company beforehand, is just plain stupid. You are spending thousands of dollars to get lucky. Just like shooting for that Powerball, you might improve your odds a little but if you’re not committed and truly engaged with a working strategy beforehand then dumb luck is all you have. Not sure what the odds of success are with that, but I will bet that they’re not good. When our skilled strategists at Larson & Associates ask these same  companies what sales goals have they set for themselves during the show, the response is a mixture of “What are we supposed to be measuring?” and “We were more focused on our booth design and collateral.” Again they spent thousands of dollars without a plan. What follows is an outline of a pre-trade show strategy that we here at Larson & Associates have designed and developed after many trade shows and demonstrations. Strategies which have resulted in our completely booking all open time slots for sales appointments (averaging 38 appointments over a 3 day show). These appointments are invaluable in the acquisition of highly qualified leads for both team members where they are able to sit down and discuss strategy.   The key to any strategy is being prepared, knowing what to expect and how to react, planning for outcomes and positioning yourself in the best possible place to benefit and succeed. Here is what we do…   1. Make a wish list (12 weeks before show) Go through the conference exhibitor list and highlight the companies that you would like to connect with at the show, regardless of whether you know someone there or not. Select companies that you think are a good fit to work with (yes power partners), that match your target audience, or that you simply want to understand better. 2. Research (10 weeks out) For each wish list company, identify a contact from that company to reach out to for an appointment. First look within your CRM to see if you have any existing contracts with that company. If not, an option may be to peruse professional sites such as LinkedIn, although they are making it so you might need to have the premium account to do any real research as prospecting tool. Find companies that match your target by searching the company name and looking for employees with the correct job titles. You’re probably thinking, great, but how do I get their email and phone number?   First, see if you have any mutual connections with the lead that you can ask to make an introduction. If there are no mutual connections, you can always find general phone numbers listed on the company website.  For email, you can look in a few places – the company’s contact page, career page, or news page/press releases – to uncover if not the contact’s exact email address, then the common email format used by the company. (For example, if marketing director Joe Smith’s email is listed as joe.smith@abccompanyinc.com, then you can pretty safely assume that product manager Mary Thomas’s email will bemary.thomas@abccompanyinc.com.) Research requires you to invest a bit of time (if you don’t have the time Larson & Associates have people dedicated to doing research just like this) for finding contact information. But it will pay off greatly. Fact is, 78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers, while it is a tool to help, Social Media will never be a replacement for Salesmanship. It’s not (note to self, write a paper on what Social Media is good for) LinkedIn, specifically, is responsible for more than 80% of a business’ social media leads.   3. Email outreach (beginning 7 weeks out) Here is where we start to hit on the entire show attendance list. Today 80% of leads take 20-40 “touches” to close if started from scratch, less if at a targeted industry trade show. There is no guarantee that you will reach your lead with every email, so repetition and careful timing are important.  Here are a few tips for emailing leads pre-show: Timing: The best times to email are weekdays from 9:30-11:00 a.m. That lets them clean out the night time senders. Keep on track: and on target, for the upcoming show. Talk about your product or service, and why you should get together. This may require research beforehand about their strengths and areas of opportunity. Follow the data: Prioritize your follow-up emails using data from the previous email. With most emailing systems like the one we use, you can view open rates, click-through rates, and site revisits. This has made our sales process much more data-driven, strategic and very cost effective. Track your opens: Keep a record of how many times you reach out to a lead. Some leads may have more touches because of their responsiveness, so it’s important to manage multiple sales cycles as organized a manner as possible. 4. Cold calling (beginning 6 weeks out) Cold calling can be intimidating for salespeople. In 2007, it took 3.7 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. Today it takes 8. Now there’s much more opportunity to practice this skill! Here are a few tips for cold calling leads pre-show: Refer to your emails: Beginning your sales outreach with email is a great tactic because you can use the email as a talking point in your call. The lead will have at least some awareness of your company or product ahead of time, which can help move the discussion forward. Say what you need to say: Be direct in telling the lead why you are calling. It’s important for them to know what you’d like to meet about. The last thing you want to do is waist any ones time. Have a plan B: You can’t win every time, but you don’t have to just throw your hands up and go. If they are not interested in having an appointment at the show, let them know you will be walking around and might just stop by their booth to say hello. If they are not attending the show at all, ask if there’s someone else from their company attending to meet with. 5. Setting appointments (ongoing as you reach leads) Depending on how long you will be at the show and how sales people are attending, you can determine how many appointments per day you can schedule Here are a few tips for pre-show appointment setting: Make scheduling easy: If you think a lead is interested in your company, whether they have responded to you or not, list three time slots to meet with them and suggest a location. This skips a few steps in the back-and-forth of scheduling. Consider time zones: Make sure to note the correct time zone (the one the show is in) on your calendar invitation to avoid double booking by mistake. 6. Send out postcard mailer 2 weeks out) You want to put something in their hands and have it with a coupon for a special show gift if they come in with the card. To get better booth traffic you need to give them an incentive. Send out a mailer.   There is no real magic in making a trade show successful. What it does take is hard work and planning, lots of planning, and commitment to strategy and the will to succeed. Without a doubt, the strategizing and the hard work can be very time-consuming. Time is not always an easy commodity to come by with business to run and obligations to meet you have to make the most and invest your resources wisely. Luck alone will always guarantee you a lousy ROI. Indeed planning and strategizing can be accomplished ‘in-house’ but for the times or projects when this is just simply not an option, remember Larson & Associates, we are here to help! Larson & Associates 847-991-1294 or just email me athoward@larsonassociates.ws

Know Your Numbers And The Sales Funnel

A friend of mine, Aki Jackson is always asking the question, Do you know your numbers?

In my business, target marketing and telemarketing for lead generation, I deal with 2 kinds of numbers.

The 1^st are what I call the “Magic Numbers” These are the key figures that tell you ahead of time if your business is going to grow or shrink. These could be anything from how many inbound inquires you have, to how many new proposals you put up this week, to how much junk mail your company got. Ok that might be a stretch but some of these magic numbers can be that off the wall.

The other number I am going to talk about here are your ratio numbers. The numbers of sales in your industry and your company that it takes to convert to a sale. How many raw leads does it talk to get a prospect, how many prospects does it talk to get an inquiry, How many inquiries does it talk to get an appointment. How many appointments does it talk to get a quote or proposal and how many quotes does it take to get a sale or project. And last how long or short is your sales cycle?

This brings us to the sales funnel. A sales funnel reveals to you how many prospects you have in each part of your sales cycle, and also details the conversion rates for each stage. This will tell you whether you have enough deals in your funnel to meet your goals, and whether you need to give special attention to certain areas of the sales cycle.

This number differs with each kind of business and each business within a specific industry. So Do you know your ratios?  Do you know your industries base line ratio numbers?

If you had 100 raw leads and started contacting them how many prospects would you get? Figure it out.

If you got 1 out of 20 you would have 5%, 1 out of 15 6.66%. But you need to understand that each of us have different and unique ratio numbers. They are ours and ours alone.

You can only manage what you can measure. If you have just 12 deals in the first stage of the and you KNOW you need 20, then it’s a clear sign that you are in trouble and need to find and add at least 8 more new prospects in order to achieve your numbers

If not there are 4 different things you can do:

1) Get deals from stage one to stage two quicker. Moving projects though the funnel faster.

2) Increase the size of the projects

3) Increase the size of your projects by up-selling
4) Practice and learn the art of salesmanship

 The challenge for most companies is to generate enough good quality sales into the funnel and to keep adding enough leads on a steady basis into the sales pipeline. Telemarketing and teleprospecting, when used in conjunction with other forms of marketing such as Blog, Social Media Marketing (seo)Content, SEO, E-blasts, Website and Analytics can be an effective means of communicating with your target market.

It is essential that you are set-up for success with your telemarketing and teleprospecting activity, by having good quality content on your website (people often visit your website after they have been called), a dedicated landing page to measure the success of your campaign and follow-up materials that can send to people that are interested in receiving more information.

A good quality database is vital to the success of any telemarketing and teleprospecting campaign.  Once you know your ideal client you need to find the correct database based for your target market and decide on what qualifies as a qualification lead. Then carry out the telemarketing and teleprospecting campaign. If required, you need to be make adjustments on the fly in order to ensure the best possible results. These types of campaigns typically generate some sales ready leads but many are marketing qualified leads that are not yet ready to convert and nurturing. So starts the sales process

Larson Notes & Satire:  Easy and hard all in one. So do you know your numbers and ratios?

And for better lead gen in telemarketing, teleprospecting and lead generation call Larson & Associates at 847-991-1294 or email me at howard@larsonassociates.ws .  One call is all it takes to start getting sales leads into your funnel.

Howard Larson

Larson & Associates

Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition

Making good businesses great and great businesses even better

847-991-1294

howard@larsonassociates.ws

http://www.larsonassociates.ws

http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/LarsonAndAssociatesFans

http://www.linkedin.com/in/larsonassociates

https://twitter.com/LarsonAssociate

P.S. We make teleprospecting for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add teleprospecting into your marketing mix call today and find out.