I’m writing this week about this topic because I recently visited my local Chamber of Commerce’s Expo, where about 200 businesses had booths and/or offered food in the food court. What a terrible experience. Not one…not one of the exhibitors had any mechanism to gather the information from a visitor.

Why would they need to do that? Because how can you contact or build rapport with a prospect if you never got them to give you their contact information.

All that was needed was to have a drawing for a prize where the visitors would fill out a card with their name and email address.

Trade Shows and Consumer Shows are one of the most abused and misused marketing tools in the world. The majority of exhibitors go into a show without any strategic plan. And if they do happen to have a mechanism to gather the visitor’s information, they do a terrible job of follow-up. Every time I go to a show, I’m just amazed watching the reps standing around in the booths looking brain-dead.

Here are some keys you should consider if exhibiting:

1. Create a detailed plan of what you want to accomplish and who you want to talk to.

2. Do some pre-show marketing in the local media. Target this to those “groups” of prospects you want to visit your booth.

3. Create a method of collecting and qualifying the leads.

4. Create a strategy for making immediate sales. No one ever asked me to buy when I stopped at their booths.

5. Create a plan for following up on the leads IMMEDIATELY after the show.

If you do one thing and one thing only, create a form to have whoever stops at your booth fill in their contact information. This way, you can communicate with them over the next few months.

Refer to my blog article at http://www.kenvarga.com/news/how-to-get-a-95-closing-ratio and read about what you should do to get a 95% closing rate. In order to accomplish this you need to communicate with them over the next 13 months at least 15 times.

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