So your event is over. Owing to all the effort you put in, you have impressed your leads with your offers and a lucrative sales pitch.
Now what?
If you think that capturing qualified leads at an event is then you are drastically mistaken.
In fact, you have barely started.
Following your event, you need to devise a solid follow up plan, engage your leads, share your experience on social media channels, and so forth
Today we have rounded up the ultimate checklist for exhibitors to ensure better results post event.
1. Thank your leads as well as your employees.
First and foremost, thank your leads to take the time to visit your event or event booth and showing interest in your product or services. By sending out a detailed thank you message, you are letting your leads know that you are genuinely interested in their input and value them. It also shows how great your customer service is and how stealthily you can assist them in the future.
To make it even more effective, you can even offer a discount coupon along with your thank you newsletter. This will surely give them a nudge in the right direction. Plus adding a personal touch is always a great idea!
While you are thanking your leads, don’t forget your staff members and employees in the midst. Remember that it was their efforts that resulted in this great success at the event. This helps them keep motivated and provide room to further growth.
2.Segment your leads
Once you have generated plenty of leads using various sales productive tools such as business card reading apps, lead-generation forms, and more, you are now likely to have a long list of event qualified leads.
Notice the emphasis on event qualified leads.
Yes, the leads that you generated are not qualified yet…they are still only event qualified. What you have now is a blend of hot, cold, and warm leads.
To push them further down the sales funnel, you need to start with an aggressive follow-up routine. However, depending upon their interests, requirements, and preferences, your sales and marketing team would require different methods and messages to send across.
That’s why it is important to segment the leads into different categories and follow up with each category accordingly. For instance, with warm leads, you need to share your product details and its benefits to take things forward. On the other hand, with cold leads, you still need to give them a nudge by sending out discount coupons and more.
3. Import leads into your CRM
Before you even start with your follow-up strategy, you need to import your leads into your CRM right away. There are clever tools, for example,business card reading apps like ScanBizCards allow you to automatically import all your leads into your CRM without missing out on even a single contact’s details.
This way, you can also keep track of the follow-up messages that you have sent to your leads. Otherwise, you risk sending out similar messages multiple times to the same prospect, which is likely to ruin your chances of getting your lead on-board with you.
4.Follow-up with your leads
Now that you have already segmented your leads and imported them into your CRM tool, this task becomes decidedly easy.
First and foremost, follow-up with your warmest leads, the ones that you think will convert faster than other leads. Also, make sure to follow up sooner rather than later, possibly within 24-hours of your event.
Your follow-up message will decide how your relationship pans out with your prospect. Make sure to personalize each of your follow-up messages and make it relevant to your target audience to get a better return on investment.
5. Calculate your ROI (return on investment)
Engaging your leads is not nearly enough!
To check whether all your efforts are bearing fruit or not, you need to track certain metrics including your ROI (return on investment).
When you see that you are not receiving an intended ROI, then you can evaluate where you are going wrong. However, if you don’t check such metrics in the first place, then you might never get to know what needs to be changed.
Wrap Up
These were some of the important steps that you need to follow through in order to scale up your lead generation efforts post event.
Also, make sure that you stay in touch with all your leads disregarding the fact they get converted this time around or not.
The leads that you failed to convert this time might end up turning into your permanent customer during the next event. So keep on engaging them despite their response or lack thereof.
Are you ready to convert your leads into permanent buying customers? Do you think we missed out on something important? If yes, then let us know in the comment section below!