Author: Santosh Ramnani

Here’s what’s new with ScanBizCards Enterprise Edition

We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you.

Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find with the latest update of our ScanBizCards Enterprise Edition for Salesforce, version 1.52:

– Security review passed from Salesforce
– Support of special characters in Account, Lead and Contact record type

Love the app? Rate us! Your feedback keeps the ScanBizCards engine running.

Have a question? Email our priority support desk at enterprise@scanbizcards.zendesk.com

If you’re a ScanBizCards Lite or Premium app user and would like to test drive the ScanBizCards Enterprise Edition for Salesforce, take a free 14 day trial here:

https://www.scanbizcards.com/free-14-day-trial/

Implementing a CRM is an expensive affair and when companies fail to fully utilize it, it severely affects the ROI.

In times such as today where sales and marketing teams are working remotely, the role of a centralized CRM becomes all the more important.

To get the most out of your CRM, you need to get your sales, marketing and customer success teams to optimally utilize it. Here is how you can get your CRM successfully adopted and accepted in your sales organization.

Clarify its Value Proposition

When you introduce a CRM, you need to explain its value and need to all the stakeholders in your organization. Only when they understand its utility will they be keen to use it. It is similar to a sales rep explaining the value and need of your product to a customer – your customer buys your product only when they feel that they will benefit from the purchase. For example, the CRM software is useful for the sales team leaders in tracking performance and sales revenue, but that will not attract the attention of the sales rep. Instead, if you tell them that the CRM will help them to make better decisions, keep an active record of all their leads, and cut their time spent in non-sales activities in half, they will care for it more. Some benefits that you can talk about are:

• • They can capture and manage leads with ease when using a CRM. Sales reps collect leads in various ways – from out in the field, from lead databases, from inbound marketing teams and more. For example, a business card scanner like ScanBizCards can generate business card leads by scanning contact information from business cards and conference badges and export directly to a CRM. So using the CRM would mean that they will have a ready database of all contacts after each event or meeting.
  • They can use the CRM to store all the notes about the leads and thus keep track of all the interactions that they have had with the different prospects.
  • Since the CRM is a storehouse of data, the sales reps can use it to make sales forecasts, manage the funnel, assign leads as more.
  • The CRM will automate many tasks like sending follow-up emails and scheduling reminders.

Make Your Sales Team a Part of the Process

CRM software can be easily trialed. So, when you are planning to implement one in your business, instead of picking one and asking the sales rep to use it, make them a part of the selection process. Most CRMs offer a 30-day trial. You can do an exercise and make different groups, asking each group to try a different CRM for a week or so. Collect their feedback and make a collective decision. This way, when the time comes to choose one that can be implemented, all the reps will be able to help you to make the right choice.

Pick a CRM That Will Help the Reps Get Their Job Done

With lots of choices available in the market, choosing the right CRM for your business is not an easy task. Don’t just pick a CRM because it’s popular, but evalue its features and see how it fulfills your business’ needs across different parameters. Pick one that will add the most value to your reps’ work. While evaluating a CRM, some factors that you should keep in mind are:

• • Choose a CRM that will integrate with other software that your company is already using. This includes software like emails, file-sharing systems, marketing software. For example, ScanBizCards, the best business card scanner app, offers integration with popular CRMs including Salesforce, Constant Contact and many others.
  • It should be easy to use. Your sales reps should not have to spend much time learning it.
  • It should be flexible and customized to meet the sales process specific to your organization
  • It should offer performance analytics. For example, tools for sales forecasting, analyzing call activity, managing deals that are still in the pipeline, email automation and others.

Include it in Your Training

Sales reps have targets to meet and so they always want to make the best use of their time. Learning to use a new CRM software is often seen as a waste of their time. To avoid this, you can:

• • Hold workshops where you make the CRM training a part of sales orientation
  • Implement the CRM at the start of a new quarter when the pressure of meeting targets is not a deterrent
  • For every new hire that you make, include the CRM training in the induction program

Set up the CRM for Them

If you hand over an empty CRM to the sales rep they will be wary to use it. If you want to hook them to a new software, partially set it up for them before handing it over. For example, you can organize contacts and leads into different segments on the basis of geography, the stage that deals are in, and assign the lead owners within the sales team. So, the next time a new contact is entered from an inbound stream or from the field sales team, e.g., scanned business card leads using ScanBizCards, and thereafter uploaded in the CRM, the teams will know which segments to add the leads to. When sales reps get a more coherent picture of what they can achieve with the CRM, they become more open to accepting it.

Keep Asking for Feedback

Always take feedback from the sales reps about their experience using the CRM. After all, they are the ones who are using it everyday. Hence, you need to get their input to know any issues that they might be facing, if there are any aspects that might be confusing and so on. Brainstorm with the team to find solutions and never let the issues turn into major roadblocks.

Set an Example

If your reps find that people at the managerial level are also using the CRM, they will warm up to the idea easily. Don’t let them feel that a new thing is being forced onto them. In fact, if you, at the senior management level, also use it, you would be in the position to answer their queries better. This will ensure a smoother operation of the software.

Incentivize the Implementation

Even after a company wide implementation, you might find that not all of your reps are not updating the CRM to manage leads and closed deals. To avoid this, incentivize its implementation during the initial roll-out stages. You could use incentives like:

• • Higher commission rates for those who log all of their deals in the CRM
  • Create contests based on data that can be obtained only from the CRM so they are gamified to use the CRM
  • Applauding those who have used the CRM most productively at the year-end by giving, say, certificates or cash vouchers or gift hampers

There was a time when employees were not receptive when computers were introduced into the workplace. They thought it would make their work more complex. With time, however, they found out how computers simplified their work. Decades later, it is the same story when it comes to sales reps and the implementing CRM software.

If you follow the above tips, you can surely overcome this reluctance and help your sales teams stay productive and close more deals.

The history of business cards goes long back to the times when the Chinese used cards to tell people of their intended visit, and merchants from Europe used it to advertise their goods. Even today, though many aspects of a business have gone digital, the business card is here to stay and will remain popular in 2020. Read on to know why.

Business Cards Look Professional

When you meet a prospect for the first time, it is always considered professional to give them your business card because:

• • If you share your contact info verbally, it is most likely to be forgotten
  • Writing contact details on a napkin, or on a sticky note, looks clumsy and unprofessional
  • People may not be able save all of your details on their phone correctly (email, office address, website, cell)
  • A business card is an extension of your brand’s image. So, a high quality card will create a great first impression about you.

A good business card makes you look professional, and ensures you leave a physical record of your contact info with your prospects.

You Can Easily Save or Export Contacts by Scanning Cards

Business card data can easily be converted to digital format by scanning the business card. If you use a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards, you can do it swiftly and accurately. So during meetings or events, when a prospect hands over their card to you, you can easily scan their contact information and save it on your phone’s address book, or export to a .CSV file or to a CRM system.

Exchanging Business Cards Does Not Need Internet Connectivity

Imagine a scenario where you are at a convention and internet connectivity is lost or your phone runs out of battery. In fact, often, there’s little mobile internet connectivity at events. So how, then, do you share contact information? While writing contact info down on a paper form is an option, it comes across as clumsy, and there might be errors of interpretation due to noise, crowd, time rush or bad handwriting. Hence, business cards are super useful because you don’t have to depend on technology and contact information can be easily exchanged physically.

Exchange of Information is Quick

If you’re at an event, you will have hundreds if not thousands of people coming to your booth. All these prospects will also have visited many other booths. Time is of essence in such scenarios, and so if people have their business cards with them, the exchange of information is quick. In fact, if your prospect is in a hurry and has no time to chat, you can always request them to leave their card with you and you would have still captured a potential lead for follow-up without even having a full conversation. All you need to do thereafter is use a business card reader app like ScanBizCards, to safely store the leads to your database of contacts.

Business Cards Help in Brand Recall

Business cards reflect your brand’s identity. Hence, design your card such that it reflects your brand’s value proposition and also highlights the logo of your organization. When you have a card that is unique:

• • Your prospects will remember your brand positively
  • If your business card stands out from the rest, they might even pass it on to others in his network, thus generating more referral leads for you

Take time and give thought to the fonts, colors, and design that you use. Some of the trends that will dominate business cards in 2020 are:

• • Heavy cardstock, as it makes cards look premium and hence, build a strong brand image
  • Minimalisric with only the most important information, as congested cards confuse customers
  • Unique designs that stand out from other cards. For example, if you operate in the hospitality industry, premium colors, typeface and paper would make you stand out
  • Textured cards as this lends an element of style
  • Puns or quotes, if you’re in the social media entertainment space, can make your card eye-catchy and the audience thus remembers your better
  • Larger typeface, as it draws immediate attention

Business Cards Help Overcome the Language Barrier

There will be times when you meet someone who does not speak your language and you are unable to understand their language. In such cases, a business card would at least help you to exchange contacts without a language barrier. This is where a business card scanner app comes to use. For example, like ScanBizCards, the best business card scanner app for this purpose, can scan cards in 22 different languages other than English.

Handy and Perfect to Store

If you write your contact details at the back of your collateral, like pamphlets and brochures, it will get difficult for the prospect to store it and your contact might get lost or discarded. On the other hand, a business card easily fits into a wallet or a pocket. Hence, if you hand over your business card, it’s less likely to get lost. This means there is a greater probability that our prospect will get in touch with you in the future.

If you want to ensure you don’t lose your business card leads – which isn’t uncommon – use a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards.

Business Cards Are An Inexpensive Branding Strategy

Consider making your business card a part of your branding strategy. This is because your business card not only has your contact information, it also carries your company’s logo and brand image. Hence, giving your business card to people helps to build your brand’s image and helps them to remember you. As printing business cards is not as expensive as organizing an event or advertising online or offline, it will be easy on your budget as well.

Business Cards Are Here To Stay

Networking and building your professional relationships is key to the growth of your business. When it comes to doing this, technology plays a big role in augmenting your efforts, but traditional tools like business cards are here to stay and will continue to be popular in 2020 and beyond. After all, they are convenient to use, make you look professional, and build on your brand’s image at little cost.

There is a lot that prompt and regular follow-ups can achieve. A timely follow-up can lead to closing deals and forging new relationships that otherwise may never have been pursued. Yet, most don’t like to do follow-ups, or simply aren’t able to. The resistance is because some find it boring and some find it terrifying. This is where sales teams and individual reps need to be taught and be told the importance of follow-ups.

Reasons Why Follow-up is Important

Emails Get Lost

If you think you will come across as being pushy when you follow-up with your leads, then think again. In fact, the truth is that many times the email that you send:

• • Gets lost amidst other important mails
  • Goes unanswered due to paucity of time
  • Goes into the spam folder
  • Is forgotten about because the prospect was busy traveling or managing other important deadlines

Researches show that it takes 8-10 nudges across channels, in a B2B scenario, to get a prospect’s response. This is where your follow-up matters. It shows your prospects how interested you are in continuing a dialogue, and also reminds them of your brand. If you are a good orator, it is likely that a single follow-up might even help you close a new deal if they need a solution urgently, and yours fits in. Whether the outcome is an immediate sale, or a promising prospect, it’s certainly worth the time and effort.

Prospects Like to be Nurtured to See Value

It is not enough to just collect the contact information of leads from various events. You need to be in touch with them and make them feel appreciated.

• • Sometimes a prospect will remember about your product and yet not purchase it. Studies have revealed that usually, an individual needs to hear from the vendor at least seven times before he decides to buy the product. So, if you send an email only once, it will not give you a new client. Consistent follow-ups, without appearing to be too clingy or even trying to over-sale the product, is what will help you to get the deal.
  • Even if they don’t purchase your product, if you make them feel valuable, there is always the chance that they will come to your brand when they want to buy the product. You can do this by offering them discounts with your follow-up emails or even by sending them small souvenirs for attending your event

Helps to Improve Before the Next Event

Follow-ups are a brilliant way of finding out what the attendees felt about your event and how you can improve for the next one. Getting feedback, however, is not an easy task. Most want to enjoy an event but not send a revert on it. Here are some ways you can get a response from the attendees.

• • Send clear and focused questions – multiple choice questions work well as they are the easiest to answer. Avoid asking questions where they need to write a lot. With online chatting being a popular mode of communication, you can also send your feedback questions over chat. For this, you can have chatbots who will do the work for you.
  • If your event had an issue, accept it and ask them questions on it. For example, if there was a technical glitch, ask the attendees how they feel you can avoid it the next time. Getting frank and asking for pointed feedback makes the participants feel that their opinions are important.
  • Gives incentives for participating in the survey. For example, you can give free coupons or give one lucky winner a couple’s dinner.

Gives a Chance to Thank Everyone

If people did not show up for the event that you were hosting or attending, then your event would not be a success. It is thus the guests who purchased the tickets and came to the show that resulted in the success. Hence, you need to reach out to them and thank them – follow-up is not always about sealing a deal. You can do this by following some of these tips:

• • Once you have got your prospects’ contact information, you should follow-up right after the event. If you used ScanBizCards, the best business card scanner app, to scan the contact information from all business cards, and uploaded your leads into the CRM, now is the time to send everyone in your contact list a thank-you email. To this email, you can add information about any forthcoming event or even a link to a page where you upload all photos of the event.
  • For speakers, sponsors, and vendors, make the thank-you a little more personal by sending them a gift.
  • Reach out to all, in general, on social media. If you are using Twitter, then use a hashtag that will start trending once attendees start responding and retweeting.

Keeps the Buzz Alive After the Event

No host would like people to stop talking about the event soon after it is over. The longer the buzz stays – the more publicity for the brand he will be generating. The more you follow-up with people online, the more they will share their impressions about the event as well. This will get more people talking about the show. You can also thank the guests and hold online contests to keep the buzz alive. If you notice some attendees sharing positive feedback online, you can reach out to them and ask them to give formal feedback. All this will help you build on the audience for your next event.

Find the Right Target Audience

It is likely that you collected a huge number of leads during the event. With a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards, getting all contact information to the database becomes a simple task for you. With the first critical step done, what comes after that is key to winning more business. Once you start your follow-ups and start receiving responses, you will be able to figure out who your ICP or ‘ideal customer profile’ is.

Profiling such people from the list is important because then, in your next event, you will be able to get the right target audience for yourself.

Tips to Make the Maximum Impact with Follow-ups

Follow-Up should be Timely

After you have generated all your leads and have a ready file with their details, you cannot waste time before you send them the follow-up mail. If they are important leads the email needs to be sent within a day and for the rest within 48 hours. After the first follow-up email has been sent, you need to strategize when you will be next reaching out to them. For this, timing is the key as else all your emails will get ignored, will go into spam, or will lead to irritation when they begin to overcrowd their inbox. Remember that both consistency and regularity are the keys here.

Plan Your Follow-up In Advance

You cannot sit and wonder how you will follow-up after your event is over. Follow-ups need to be planned and strategized ahead of the event. It is an important part of any event marketing plan. If you keep it for the last minute you will do a sloppy job and lose all your prospects. Here are some of the things that you need to prepare from before:

• • The email that you will send to your contacts
  • The schedule of your follow-ups
  • The material that you will be sharing post your first follow-up
  • How you will try to reach out to those who don’t respond to your emails even after you have tried 5-6 times

Follow-Ups Need to Have Good Content

You cannot send follow-up emails that only request the prospects to buy your product! Each of your follow-up emails must have good content in them. Remember to add your photo, your company’s logo, and some important photos from the event in the introductory email.

Here are some more ideas of what your follow-up emails can contain:

• • Links to blog posts that you have published on your website
  • An analysis of the emerging trends of the market that you operate in
  • Fun pictures of various events you are holding in office or pictures from events
  • Offers, discounts, and freebies that they can avail of
  • General advisory if any issue is affecting your geographical region
  • About the new features that have been added to your product or news if you are soon going to be launching a new product

Use Different Mediums to Follow-Up

Follow-ups need not always be via emails.

• You can send them SMS or make phone calls.
• Nowadays groups are also being created on Whatsapp to keep in touch with leads.
• You can organize for an after-party a few weeks after the event to celebrate your success and invite all the important leads that you generated on the event day.

You need to experiment with different mediums and keep a note of which method is working best with which contact.

Follow-ups need Segmentation

Every contact on your list should not be sent the same follow-up email.

• • Go through the list that you generated using the free business card scanner app, ScanBizCards, and segment them based on different parameters like age, professions, geography, and others. In a B2B scenario, use key attributes such as firmographics, technographics and intent data to do your segmentation. Once they have been divided into different groups, send separate emails to these groups. This will make your message more relevant and will engage the guests.
  • When the emails are being sent to important leads, make them more personal. Refer to the notes that you took for this purpose. The business card reader app, ScanBizCards, lets you add personal notes for each contact. If required, do some more research on them before sending such emails.

Final Thoughts

The ultimate goal of a post event or meeting follow-up is to turn a prospect into a customer and increase the sales and the revenue of your business. This becomes possible only when then the lead begins to trust you and feels appreciated. Hence the need for regular, consistent, and genuine follow-ups. Try the aforementioned tips and you should be able to get your prospect to sign on the dotted line soon.

Sales is not only about results but also about the way results are achieved. The right way to do it is by being assertive, patient, persistent, and knowledgeable. Everyone does not always possess these skills naturally – mastery in them is often acquired over time. Hence, the best sales team is one that acts as an educational institute – the leader is the teacher and the coach who hones and develops these skills across their team members. Read on to know the top 10 must-have skills that a sales and marketing professional must possess or develop.

1. Know Your Product Well

As a sales professional, you should be able to explain in detail all of your product’s features, its value proposition, and how customers will benefit from using it.

• • • To be successful in your profession, you must have an effective sales pitch ready that you can use whenever you are meeting a prospective client for the first time. For this deep product knowledge is of utmost importance.

      TIP: Know about the coolest features of your product – those that differentiate your product from your competitor’s. This will help you grab the attention of leads – be that at a trade show or even when you are making a call.

    • As you meet more leads, keep a track of all questions that are usually asked. Have answers ready for all these. This will come handy when you are speaking to prospective customers.
    • You need to speak clearly, keep your thoughts clear, be able to explain in simple language, and talk of only those features that will benefit the lead.
    • You should be able to show-off demos of your product attractively to potential customers. This is an art that you must learn – you need to know how much to say about the product before addressing queries from the visitors.
    • If you are the leader of a team, always remember to make the new reps go through a product training workshop.

2. Have a Great Memory

Salespeople need to remember a lot of information about product details, the projected ROI, other statistical data. If he has a sharp memory he will be able to share this with prospects without faltering. The more easily he can remember, the more confidence he will have to speak with prospects. Memory power is hence a very strong weapon to have to close deals.

3. Be Assertive

A successful sales rep is one who is assertive.

• • Whether you’re in a one-to-one meeting, a meetup or a trade show, you cannot sit behind a table and come across as being disinterested and timid. Open up to your prospects and push the table against the booth wall and be ready for the visitors.
  • In a group event or trade show setting, you should introduce yourself to anybody who comes to or near your booth and, without getting aggressive, gets across some words to them and gets their contact details. Business card scanning apps like ScanBizCards, the best business card scanner app, will help you here. It quickly scans contacts from a business card or a badge and uploads it into your phone’s address book, or into the CRM.
  • When the interactions are offline, the need to make an impact on your prospects becomes even more imminent as you’re making up for eye contact with your email or phone-skills. For example, you need to personalize communications when, say, you are writing emails, reaching out to connections through LinkedIn mail, and posting direct social media messages.

4. Be Able to Work as a Team

Sales is not about being a one-man army. Hence, a must-have skill to do well in this field is to be able to collaborate with others and work together. So, if you want to do well as a sales rep you need to work as a team.

5. Be a Good Orator

Keep the Tone Right

When you are speaking to your leads on the phone, you need to pay attention to your tone, the pitch, and the speed at which you speak. In sales, how you speak carries as much importance as what you are saying does. When you speak, keep in mind that you have to:

• • Speak clearly and not mumble
  • Not whisper and talk
  • Not speak in a monotone

A sales rep who is good at their job mirrors the tone of the client. For example, If the client is casual and friendly, then the same tone should be maintained instead of getting serious and formal.

Be a Little Dramatic

A good speaker is one who can add some drama to the sales pitch without making it appear false. For example:

• • Studies have revealed that while using statistics, the impact is more when whole numbers are not used. So, saying ‘the product usage has risen by 53.7%’ will have more effect than saying ‘the product usage has risen by 50%’.
  • Add an emotional story to your sales talk. For example, you can speak about how the product helped your family and you, or how your journey with the organization has been.

Build a Rapport

A good sales rep puts in the effort to build a rapport with their leads. This can be done by:

• • Asking insightful questions and taking down notes
  • Researching to find out more about them
  • Making calls or meeting them outside work to talk about other subjects like, say their hobbies, global events, and more

6. Be a Good Listener

Listen to the Person

‘The more a sales rep talks, the more easily he will crack a deal with a lead’ – this is a myth. Talking a lot and not listening to your prospects will not help you to crack the deal. A great sales rep is one who is an active listener. This means that they listen to their lead, and then ask intelligent follow-up questions. You will not be able to empathize with your lead if you are busy thinking about what you will say when your lead is speaking.

Be Prepared to Handle Objections

There might be visitors who will have a lot of queries and even objections to your product’s features. During such time, instead of hearing them out, if you cut them short, you will come across as a rude individual. This would lead to the loss of opportunities to make conversions. Being a good rep means to sincerely understand the prospect’s problem, seek more information from them, and then to offer a solution in the most polite fashion.

7. Be Goal-Oriented

An excellent sales rep is one who is not scared of achieving targets and gets a kick out of setting and reaching goals. So, if you like setting yourself a goal that seems incredible to others and works hard till you attain it, then you are definitely going to make it big in this field.

8. Be Persistent

Keep in Touch

Not all the leads that you generate will become your customers. However, you need to be persistent with the non-conversions without becoming a pest. Keep in touch with them via, say, newsletters.

Thank a Customer

You should never forget to thank your customer even if he buys your product for only one time.

• • This courtesy will go a long way in building your brand’s image.
  • When a customer feels appreciated, they will speak good about your product to others in their network.
  • Years later, when you change your job, you can still reach out to them and maybe a new association will get forged.

Always Be Closing!

You will come across prospects who will keep trying to push the closing date. You need to, however, fix a timeline and compel your prospect to sign on the dotted line to close the deal. This is where your art of mixing the right combination of pressure and value being offered by the product will come into play. If needed, you can offer them some good deals, discounts, or even freebies (without overstepping your budget).

9. Be Proactive

Being proactive helps to drive up sales. Some of the ways you can do this are by:

• • Being prompt with your follow-ups. The more you delay in following up with your leads, the lesser the chances of conversions happening. So that you waste little time, keep a follow-up email drafted from before. A business card scanner app like ScanBizCards will help because it would have already generated the contact database for you.
  • Preventing objections. For this, you should study the most basic objections that prospects usually raise and have answers ready for them. For this, having in-depth knowledge about your product and its USPs becomes extremely important.

10. Be Ready to Learn, Unlearn and Re-learn

You will be a good sales and marketing rep only if you are willing to learn, unlearn, and re-learn. The world of sales is always evolving with tools, technology, and customer demography changing all the time. In such a situation if you refuse to let go of outdated practices you will be beaten by the competition. To be successful at sales, you must be willing to embrace change and do things in new ways. For example, in today’s age, a sales and marketing rep must know and stay updated on the latest software, platforms, and more.

Do you have these traits in you? If you do, then be sure that you can become an excellent sales and marketing professional. However, always remember that the best in sales is one who never stops learning and improving themselves.

We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you.

Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find with the latest update of our ScanBizCards Lite and Premium apps for iOS, version 9.3:

– You can now connect your ScanBizCards app with Hubspot & Outlook, and export your contacts directly

– We’ve fixed minor issues to improve the user experience

Love the app? Rate us! Your feedback keeps the ScanBizCards engine running.

Have a question? Tap ‘Help’ under settings on your ScanBizCards app or visit support.scanbizcards.com

Download or update the ScanBizCards Lite or Premium app here:

 

Trade shows offer a great platform for organizations to showcase their products to new prospects, interact with existing customers, and understand their competitors’ products and tactics, ultimately helping grow their client base and improve the brand’s visibility and reputation in the market. Clearly, events are worth the investment. However, to succeed, you need a formidable event marketing plan on what to do and what not to do!

Read on as we discuss five simple dos and don’ts for trade show exhibitors to create maximum impact.

1. Staff at the Booth: Choose the Best

DO choose your best staff when deciding on who would be manning the booth. Make sure:

• • They’re able to clearly articulate your brand or product’s value proposition and present your products and services accurately
  • They are aware of the company’s goals, the objective of participating in the show, and know who are the VIPs at the event are
  • They are well versed about your product so that they can answer any questions on it – technical, functional and so on
  • They have the right tools, for instance, a business card scanner app on their phones so that no leads or contacts ever fall through the cracks, integrations with CRMs or email marketing systems to manage your leads and run your email campaigns and so on.
  • They look good. Here are a few clever tips:
    1. Give them an official attire or an attire that reflects your brand’s identity with your company’s logo and colors
    2. Ask them to wear comfortable shoes as there will be a lot of walking around the show that will happen
    3. Give them branded badges

DON’T show up unprepared – whether that’s having untrained reps manning your booth or not carrying your brand merchandise, products, and demos. Having staff at the booth looking nervous or just rambling away to the attendees instead of listening to what they really want is not going to help. Simple tips: ask your reps to avoid bad habits like picking their nose or standing with droopy shoulders, looking disinterested and so on! Improper staff attitude should also be avoided at all costs. For example, make sure that they don’t:

• • Badmouth competitors
  • Talk amongst teams instead of focusing on visitors, else many will pass by your booth and you will lose leads
  • Keep sitting at the back of the booth and engage in personal calls or surf the internet
  • Appear grumpy – no one likes to talk to a grumpy fellow!

2. About the Organizers: Find Out All Important Information

DO make sure that when you are participating in a particular trade show, you reach out to the event organizers and know as much about the event as is possible. Some of the questions that you can ask are:

• • What’s the expected turnaround or footfall – do their events attract a lot of customers?
  • Is the venue of the event easily accessible?
  • How many vendors have confirmed their participation?
  • How are they planning to promote the event?
  • What are the guidelines and requirements that an exhibitor needs to fulfill to participate in the show?

DON’T disregard the placement of your booth at the event. For this, you cannot forget to find out from the organizers about the layout of the event. This will help you choose your booth location at a space that is likely to attract the most customers. For this, reach out to them well in advance as the best spots get booked quite early.

3. Attendees: Engage them in Conversations

DO make sure that those visiting your booth are engaged in good conversation about your product and business.

• • Ask insightful questions – find out your prospects’ needs and discuss the product’s attributes and how it can help them
  • Always make sure to get their contact information – there are business card scanner apps like ScanBizCards to help you do that with ease. The business card scanner app will help you to quickly scan and save contacts from business cards or conference badges into your phone’s address book, or export to a CRM.
  • Plan your demos in such a way that you can address a large crowd and no potential lead gets left out if you demo to a large audience. For this, you can use display monitors, projection screens, or large TV screen computers for your demos.
  • It is beneficial to remember what you said to each visitor as this will help you to add the personal touch when you are sending the follow-up emails. Hence, keep a notepad handy so that you can jot down important pointers with their names. In fact, ScanBizCards lets you add personal notes and even send intro emails, vCards and your photo to your new; ly added contacts. Since the business card reader app would have already created an exhaustive database of contacts for you, all you need to do after the event is to follow up and close.

DON’T over-pitch your product’s features, or talk about features that don’t have a use case for them. Listen more while talking to the attendees! Also, be brief while talking about the product so they have clear takeaways. The objective is to whet their appetite and make them understand you know their challenge and have a solution to their problems.

4. Sales Literature: Distribute it Selectively

DO engage with visitors to assess their needs, and then give them literature or demos that are relevant to them. Also:

• • Pay attention to the quality and the design of the brochures. If required, have a professional design them for you. If you are going to be doing them on your own, choose a professional template and check numerous times to make sure that there are no errors.
  • Set up a page on your website that talks about your participation in the trade show. On the day of the show and post the event, have PDFs of your brochure on your event landing page that can be downloaded – in case there are people who don’t want to carry back a lot of literature, let them know that they can download it for free from your website.

TIP: make these online materials form-gated so they can capture lead information.

DON’T make the mistake of printing a lot of sales literature thinking that you will hand them to all those who visit your stall. This is because most of these hand-outs might land up unread in the nearest trash bin.

5. Follow-up after the Event: Be Prompt

DO follow-up with your leads promptly right after the show. You can even keep your follow-up emails or sequences drafted before and send them off soon after the show. Here is where apps like ScanBizCards come handy. It would have already created the contact list for you. So, all you need to do is email all of your prospects

DON’T disregard the non-conversions. Some from the list of leads that you generated are bound to disengage and won’t convert into customers. Don’t cease being in touch with them. Send them newsletters and make calls to them once in a while so that their brand recall about your organization stays high.

Summing up

If you are preparing to exhibit at or participate in a trade show in the near future, this list is surely going to help you. Not only will it prevent any inadvertent lapses on your part but it will also help to improve the effectiveness of your participation.

Exhibiting at a trade show takes time, effort, and money. So naturally, if you are exhibiting at a trade show, you must strive to get the requisite return for all your investment.

Various marketing strategies are involved in making the outcome of a trade show participation an effective one. Some can be more effective than others when done the right way.

Today, we’re going to talk about some tactics that you can use to improve your return on investment (ROI) from events by as much as 3X.

Have an Accurate Marketing Plan

Simply deciding that you want to exhibit at a trade show is not enough. If you want to drive a significant event ROI, start by putting together a proper event marketing plan in place. This would mean how you advertise your participation before the show, what you do during it, and what your after-show follow up practices would be.

Let us understand this a little more in-depth.

Before the Show

If you are exhibiting at a trade show, the people who you cater to – your audience – need to be aware of your product, offering and value prop. This can be done by:

• Making announcements on social media, through emails and newsletters, and or by making phone calls.
• Sometimes, the audience can be attracted further by promising giveaways to those who attend. Just remember that you don’t go overboard with the promises!
• If you have been using business card reader apps then you would also have a list of your clients who use your product often. You can meet them personally and request them to attend the show, explaining why it would help them if they did. In lieu of some gifts, some may even be asked to talk or attend a question-answer session at your booth on the day of the show.
• Another important to-do before the show is to contact the media – reaching out to the press to cover your exhibit and also talk about it before the show is important so as to maximize the footfall. Nowadays, attending radio shows to publicize a forthcoming event is also gaining popularity.

During the Show

Make Your Booth Attractive

Make sure that your booth is set up on time and looks attractive enough to get potential clients to come to your booth. For this, you may even get a design company to set it up for you. You should also connect with the event organizer well in advance so that you get a good space to set up the booth.

Use Your Best Staff at the Booth

All your pre-show preparations will go to waste if you don’t do it right on the day of the show. So, employ the best from your staff, wearing attire with your company’s logo, to man the booth on the day of the show.

Make sure that they all have a business card scanner app on their phone as this will help them to add the contacts into their phones easily. They should also be well versed with what to say, how to demonstrate the products, trained to carry out interactions with people and know what giveaways to give to whom.

Last, but not least, they should not be people who keep drifting away to the beer-booth instead of doing their work! You must remember that ROI depends hugely on those who are working in the front line.

Staff Interactions Outside the Booth

You should also have staff who roam around at the show as this will help in interactions with those who are still just shopping around and not yet decided on which booth to visit. For this, make your staff have their business cards ready.

Technology now has reached the level where business card scanner apps like ScanBizCards can help your field reps or event marketing and sales teams to instantly save contacts from business cards onto the phone’s address book, or even directly to a CRM, just by clicking a photo. This makes collecting more leads and all the accurate contact details you need to do your sales follow-ups so much easier.

Speak at the Event

If the trade show is open to having speakers, then sign up for it. This will portray you, and your organization as a leader in the business. This, in turn, will attract more prospective clients to your exhibit. One genre of ‘story’ that always hits the right chord with people is when you describe your journey – make it an emotional one and customers will remember your talk. After all, people like hearing tales about hard work that led to success.

Attend the After-show Event

Often the event organizer hosts an after-show event. Being at the booth all day might be exhausting but attending these after-shows is important as well as the interactions here are more laid-back and often more productive. You need to train your staff before the event so that they can get the most out of these interactions.

After the Show

So, your event participation went off well. However, all will come to naught if you cannot convert the leads into being your actual clientele. For this, a strong follow up after the show is of extreme importance. The things you should bear in mind with respect to a follow up are:

Be Prompt

Keep your follow up emails ready from before the show. Don’t forget to attach your company’s logo and also a picture of the booth so that they can remember. This way, they can be sent off soon after the event is over.

Maintain a Record

You should keep a record of all the leads generated so that none gets missed. ScanBizCards is one of the best business card scanner apps for you to do this. You must remember to keep updating the status with respect to each new lead or contact so that each individual in the team is aware of the lead’s status.

Categorize the Leads

When you are making a list of your potential clients, label them so that you know which are on the ‘must convert’ list. These are the ones you should contact right away. The others can happen a couple of days later – but not more than that.

Don’t Give Up on the Non-conversions

All your leads won’t become your customers. This doesn’t mean you stop contacts with them. Rather, devise a campaign that will help you to keep in touch with them. This will help them to remember the name of your organization and when they want your product you can be sure that you will be the one they will reach out to first.

Wrap up

Trade shows, while one of the most effective ways to increase sales, is also one of the most expensive ways. Hence, you need to plan your marketing strategy based on these tips so that your ROI will increase manifold.

Arguably, you might think the shift toward digital is making business cards redundant. Perhaps the way people make use of business cards is what’s broken, but with millions printed each year, business cards are clearly still essential for exchanging contact information and capturing B2B leads.

The challenge is, unless you capture contact information instantly, the odds that you might lose it are always going to be high! A survey suggested that more than 80% of the business cards are lost or discarded before they get entered into a CRM or contact database. As such, sales follow-up with potential customers is often delayed or altogether forgotten, resulting in the lost business opportunity.

So what are some ways to avoid this loss and make use of the vital contact info that can otherwise easily fall through the cracks? Let’s find out!

Why do we exchange business cards? 

The primary goal with business cards is growing your network and getting new leads in your contact database. Whether you meet these prospects personally or at a large event or at a conference, your goal is to capture their contact info and make sure they remember you so your sales follow-up is meaningful and you have a higher chance of converting.

Of course, the most logical way to do that is to capture the lead’s contact information from their business card in a way that it’s accessible when you need it. Stacking up cards in your briefcase or wallet for later isn’t the best way to save your business card leads. If you really want to save your leads, you should be saving them where you can access them.

How you save leads from business cards is key

Saving your business card leads digitally, for example using a business card scanner and integrating it with a system that can keep your leads secure and accessible, will ensure more efficient sales follow-up. You can integrate your business card reader with a CRM or email marketing tool to send emails, score your leads, nurture them and so on.

This is where the challenge lies though. Getting business card data and contact information captured accurately, organized and uploaded into a CRM or email marketing software is cumbersome and time-consuming. According to a study, it takes on average 1.5 hours to save and export 50 business cards lead to CRM. It’s a big chore and that’s what makes people reluctant to do this exercise. But if you don’t do it, you run the risk of losing your leads, and potentially, revenue.

How you should NOT save business card leads 

Most teams and small businesses do not have a lot of time at hand to save business card leads due to the lack of tools to do it. And so what happens is that business cards pile up, some leads get lost, and most fail to convert because sales follow is too late.

Teams and business owners try to find ways to clean up their stacks of business cards by trying out various ways to scan and save cards with business card scanners. Some try entering contacts from cards manually into spreadsheets or directly into their CRM or contact database. All these methods are cumbersome and prone to errors. More importantly, it’s a loss of valuable time that should’ve been spent with your sales follow-ups.

So how can you save business card leads the right way?

Well, yes, there’s an app for it!

ScanBizCards is a free to download app available for iOS and Android smartphones. It lets you snap and save contact information from business cards and allows easy export to a variety of CRMs including Salesforce and others. You can also save business card leads on your phone’s address book or export as a CSV file to add to any CRM or email marketing system that you use. To save time, you can also submit your cards for human transcription.

The ScanBizCards app also doubles up as a conference badge scanner, allowing you to scan conference badges without the need to integrate with the event organizer’s back end systems.

Ultimately, the goal is timely sales follow up

Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on setting up and attending meetings, organizing B2B events, exhibiting at conferences and tradeshows and so on. They meet with potential buyers, collect business cards and get their contact information. But if they cannot make use of the contact information gathered, what’s the point in going through all this?

The goal of networking and meeting with new prospects is to capture leads so you can follow-up and close. There are tools out there to help you do that, you just need to execute!