As a start to dive into the Leads Champ educational series, it is important to define what being a leads champ means to your organization. In the last segment, we clarified the meaning of a qualified lead. Even though a qualified lead can mean different things to various organizations, the key is to define and measure the success of each event by a direct year over year comparison.
In today’s world and new economy, to be a leads champ means your company achieves the same results or better results from the previous year, while continuing to reduce expenses from the same event. A qualified leads champ should see at least a 10% increase in sales, year over year. I know this strategy will get some interesting reviews from my colleagues, but it is Apple Rock’s belief that you can achieve better results year over year by reducing expenses and spending monies differently.
As a company, know that being active and constantly changing your tactics for each event will generate the best results. The only way to determine which tactics to keep and which ones to toss is by measuring the ROI; having a set expected growth from the investment of a trade show and knowing what success looks like to you and your organization. We believe that being active and constantly changing your tactics, for each event, will generate the best results. If you spend 20% of your marketing budget on a trade show, the goal should be to gather more qualified leads than generated at the last show.
As promised, one secret to closing your event leads is to host a post event, after the initial event, such as an open house, customer appreciation or a private plant tour. These types of tools will help you close more leads, faster. You may event want to give them free accommodations during their visit. If you can’t host an event, offer the potential customer a bounce back coupon or special offer that is only good for 30 day after the trade show.
We will be continuing our series next week. Look for the next article on Becoming a Qualified #LeadsChamp.