Trade show after-sales – do your leads go cold ultrafast

The potential clients who visit your booth are unlikely to contact you! It is the sales person’s job to contact future clients as soon as possible after the trade show. Other marketing ventures should support the establishment of customer relationships and sales.

When your goal is to turn as many trade shows leads into clients and sales as possible, you should contact the client immediately after the trade show. Keep in mind that the trade show visitors have already been screened as potential clients by coming to the trade show. Therefore, they are making or planning to make purchases immediately or relatively soon and they will choose their current supplier or their favorite, unless you act decisively and fast.

The clients who visited your booth were left with a certain impression of your company, your products, sales personnel, and the general atmosphere. This impression must be reinforced and utilized as soon as possible after the event by contacting the client through sales or marketing means. The strength of the impression given to the client depends on how well your sales personnel is attuned to working a trade show. After-sales will be a waste if you have haven’t planned and built proper methods to ensure access to the information of potential clients in advance. The quality of the potential is also significant!

After-sales methods

Now that the GDPR has been implemented, you should also consider the permission-related issues regarding the gathering and using of information, as well as how to present them to the clients. Actual clients, particularly those whose interest has been raised at the booth, will be happy to provide you their information. This is a strong purchasing signal!

An email thanking the client for visiting your booth is still an effective method. However, the message needs to be sent immediately after the trade show. With the passage of time, the message may in fact start to generate “badwill” instead. Think how important you would feel as a client or a person if you received such a message two or three weeks after the event! In the worst-case scenario, you might not even remember the company any more.

The sales director must ensure that the sales personnel have reserved sufficient time before the trade show to handle the created sales leads. It is especially important to ensure that in addition to the hottest leads that are the most interesting to the sales personnel, clients who make purchases at a later time are also brought into the sales funnel. Remember to ensure follow-up!

You should also create channels in advance to utilize social media for after-sales. Clients with whom a sales person has had solid interaction are typically also willing to become LinkedIn partners. Therefore, be sure the set up these channels, train your sales personnel to work actively within selected social media, and ensure that there is enough relevant material to share.

Marketing should also ensure that data is made available for active use by the company’s marketing. The received contact information should be analyzed to both support sales and improve the targeting of future marketing activities. The information received should be connected to the specified objectives and their measurement, to facilitate evaluating the repayment period for the trade show investment and the ROMI.

Other after-sales tools include inviting the clients to other events and trade shows, various surveys, offers and campaigns that might interest the client, and specialist blogs among many other methods that can benefit the clients in their business operations.

The most important thing however is to demonstrate to the client that they have been acknowledged and that your interest in them goes beyond their pocket.