You made it. Your fair has been a success. Finally, after two years of pandemic you participated in a trade fair, you met new leads and you collected new contacts, which could generate you new sales and give new life to your company.
Now? It is fundamental to capitalize the positive experience and keep in touch with the people you met. The post-event is, in fact, an important part, which cannot be neglected.
Do not forget that 5-10% of the generated leads will have high chances to convert if the follow-up happens immediately after the fair (Integrate). In addition, converting a lead generated during a fair costs 38% less than using other channels such as, for example, phone calls (Convention Data Services).
Why is it important to follow-up after a fair?
Lot of people do not like to follow-up after a fair. They consider it a boring, repetitive and heavy commitment. In these kinds of situations, it is necessary to train your sales team and make them understand how important these activities are.
Here are some points to keep in mind.
Mails get often lost
The follow-up is often made, at least initially, through an email. By the way it can be lost among the many received every day. However, if you send a prompt and customized follow-up mail, you are half way.
However, it could not be enough: it becomes necessary to have a strategy, which includes also a phone call, to show to your potential customer how important is the dialogue continuation. In this case, it will be necessary to prioritize the hottest leads who have to be contacted fastly.
Prospects love to be “cuddled”
It is not enough to collect only lead’s contact information. A follow-up relevant aspect is to make people feel appreciated and cuddled. It is not enough to send a single email at the end of the fair, it is important to make the message customizable, without excessively selling the product or the service.
As Seth Godin says, “you are not going to be effective sending tons of unsolicited email, hoping for somebody to buy your product. The future belongs to people who build processes in which interested customers can understand when our product is what they are searching for”. (“Unleashing the Idea Virus”)
It helps to make improvements for the following fair
Follow-ups are a brilliant way to discover if the experience has been positive and to give you advices about how to improve your following fair.
The perfect tool would be a simple survey, with multiple choice questions, which you can send in your first follow-up mail.
5 tips for a perfect follow-up
Send quickly an email to the contacts you generated (within 24 hours). It is not about providing a particularly high benefit during this phase, but it is about standing out from the crowd. A simple thank you for visiting your stand and for the interesting conversation, customizing the message the more you can.
Same message to everyone does not like to nobody. Especially when it does not contain any reference to the conversation, you had during the fair. If you want to cuddle your potential customer, use the tracing technique and repeat some of the phrases or words he used during your conversation. You need to pay attention, pen and paper.
Probably the part that takes more time after a fair is the generated contacts management. It is about sorting leads according to their quality and the priority for the company in order to get a full view on which leads are ready to be converted and which ones need to be more qualified. Obviously, the categorization process is faster and more effective if you do it using vtenext.
You sent a first customized thanksgiving within 24 hours. The moment to do a structured follow-up is during the week after the fair. You have to provide informative and valuable content, remembering the conversation you had and the answers you already obtained from your leads. Do not wait too long; probably the leads are not going to contact you: they will lose their interest much earlier.
If a lead demonstrates a clear interest, it is ready to start a real sales negotiation. Else, if there are no interactions or an explicit interest, you should plan another follow-up within two weeks with further information and materials.
Manage your follow-up with vtenext
A CRM is obviously the best software to manage and contain all the information you can collect during a fair.
Managing your follow-up activities with vtenext is easy:
- manage effectively your leads: profile and manage promptly each lead, create automated processes to assign contacts to the correct salesman and to check if the lead has been correctly taken in charge, effectively track each interaction with the potential customer (email, conversations, etc.)
- do not miss any sales opportunity: using calendar events and automatic alerts, you will be sure you managed correctly every sale opportunity, increasing your sales chances
- coordinate effectively the sales team: profile and segment your contacts database, assign leads to salesmen, implement automation and customized campaigns
- plan each activity: after sending the first email, you can implement automatic follow-up processes to keep in touch with the customer and proactively individuate his necessities, generating new sales opportunities.