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However, ROI is dependant on EFI-that’s exhibition follow up of those sales leads collected during the event. It’s surprising how many companies don’t have a marketing strategy for customer follow up. Doling out the business cards to the sales force and letting them get on with it, or not, is often the strategy, or lack of it.

Business leads that lead to business must be handled differently, divided into groupings such as hot prospect, medium term prospect and longer-term prospect. These must be called within 3 days of the event or a competitor will get in there first with its’ customer follow up campaign, and get the business or create the relationship. You also need to weed out the time wasters to determine what are real sales leads. This should be done on established criteria rather then a shoot-from-the-hip decision. It’s surprising how many exhibition follow up prospects are written off for unjustified reasons and are not included in a customer follow up marketing strategy.

Before you book your next event, quantify in real money what your ROI was on the last and see if a new focus on rapid exhibition follow up made a difference. An exercise for the sales and marketing directors: 6 weeks after the event, check the desk of your sales executives and count how many of these sales leads are buried at the back of desk drawers or still in the to-do trays. This is when we at Achieving Quality Leads are often asked to get involved, but invariably we say it’s not worth it, it’s too late.

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