Differentiating Your Event Follow-Up
Most of us will recognise this common scenario; You return to the office from a trade show,or taught a workshop or seminar or hosted an event. You face the backlog of work waiting in your inbox, all the event information to share with the team, but most importantly, you want to follow up with every single new lead you connected with at the conference and do it fast.
The problem is, everyone else that attended the event is thinking the exact same thing. Prospects will be getting a ton of emails and calls from many different sales reps, all thanking them for visiting a booth and trying to turn a conversation into a deal. Out of all of those many messages and calls, how can you ensure that your follow up catches someone’s interest?
It’s tough to stand out from the crowd, but with the right tactics, you can turn those cursory conference leads into real business for your company.
Image Source – David Spinks (CC License)
Prioritise contacts
There’s almost no way that you can quickly follow up with a phone call to every single new lead from the conference. Instead, you should prioritize the people you actually had a good conversation with in-person. At the conference, you should take notes on the back of the prospect’s business card, writing down important contextual information before you forget. Even if you’re great with names, after having 50 or so of these conversations throughout the week, you’re bound to forget details if you don’t take notes. When you get back to the office and call that prospect, remembering some personal details as well as their business pain, will lead to a much stronger connection. This type of high-quality conversation will be much more likely to convert to a deal in the future. Remember all business intelligence gathered at an event has value.
Chase the Opt-Ins
After the event, your marketing team should be sending out relevant emails to all the new leads that engaged with your company at the conference. After you follow up with all of your personal connections, the leads that opened those emails should be your next target. Anyone that downloaded an eBook, read a blog post, or clicked on a link in an email is a higher quality lead than the others. These leads need to be called up, and try to engage them further. Try and find out what was it that made them engage with your company or product or service. Talk to them about their business problems, and try to find out if your product could help them with their problems. You should always be helping your prospects improve their business.
Offer Value
For any other leads that you have a chance to reach out to, the key is to always offer them something valuable. Send them content that is relevant to their business, offer a personalised webinar, an eBook or a live demo of a product that could help their business. It’s also important to be creative and stand out from the crowd when it comes to following up. These colder leads are getting a lot of emails and calls, so why should they talk to you? Try something different like a funny video or an unexpected image in an email. On the phone, try to come up with an amusing or pertinent opening line that relates back to the conference or event. The worst thing that can happen is they’re not interested – but you’re more likely to get their attention with something different than by just being another vanilla bland company.
It’s nearly impossible to turn every lead from an event into a deal, but with the right tactics you can convert a much higher percentage of leads into positive sales conversations. Focus on personal connections, find engaged leads, and try to stand out with different tactics. With the right follow up, you will close more deals thanks to that event.
If you are planning or have just hosted an event or seminar, and you are looking to increase your potential ROI, then please contact to see how we can help you further with your event follow-up, contact us on +44 (0)1403 788480 or use our contact page.
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Andy Dickens
Andy Dickens is a veteran of IT Sales, used to leading by example. He is the CEO of Virtual Sales Limited (VSL) who offer telesales, telemarketing, lead generation and appointment setting services to B2b businesses. He previously was Sales Director EMEA for Red Hat and before that ran sales at Visio before it was acquired by Microsoft.