Did you know that 79% of all leads are never followed up? If you've ever attended a trade show and asked for information from a lot of vendors, then most likely you've personally experienced that response rate (or lack of response). Did you make the effort to track that company down and ask for the information again? No, probably not.

So, now you're in charge of the lead management process for your company. You know you don't want that feeble level of responsiveness to be the case for your company. But, how do you set up a system that ensures adequate follow-up, and ultimately closure of sales, without overtaxing your resources and sending materials to people who really don't want them? You know that lots of people dropped their business cards into the fish bowl at your booth so they would be entered into your drawing for a free Palm Pilot, but they have no interest whatsoever in your product. While fish bowl giveaways are a good way to get people's business cards, they don't qualify prospects and they don't guarantee loyal customers. The dilemma you're faced with is how to determine who is interested and who isn't when all you have is a pile of business cards.

There are some steps you can take to make the lead management process a lot easier and your trade show (and other lead-generation efforts) much more profitable.

First, assign one person the responsibility of managing your company lead system so you won't have so many leads falling between the cracks. If you've followed the previous session on training your booth staff, you may have already assigned one of your booth staffers the responsibility for managing the leads for a specific show. That person should work closely with your Lead Manager.

The Lead Manager should be responsible for:

Writing/editing lead response letters
Determining the fulfillment package contents
Making sure the fulfillment packages are sent out in a timely manner -- not a month after the show, but a week after the show
Distributing leads among sales reps (or, if your budget allows for lead-qualification staff, managing the qualification process and then distributing the qualified leads to sales reps)
Developing a lead form to collect exactly the information your company needs (or, reviewing the individual show's electronic lead collection systems that are usually available for rent)
Setting up a timetable/flowchart for following the leads once they hit the field so you can come up with a return on investment for the show
Writing Response Letters
Writing a lead response letter is usually a much less painful process than writing letters for direct response mailings or other media. In the case of response letters, you know the people have shown interest in your product or service, and now you just have to make sure you answer all of their questions and give them the desire to act on your offer. A few quick tips include making the letter short, your voice and verbs active, and making the closing compelling. 

You need to make sure your sales reps are actually calling the contacts you've turned over to them. The top reasons sales reps give for not following up on leads are that the leads haven't been qualified, the information is not complete, or they just don't have the time because they're following up on leads they feel have more potential.
If you've provided your reps with phone numbers, then you have a better chance of getting somewhere. If you have a telemarketer in place to qualify the leads first, even better. Having a person dedicated (or at least responsible) for lead qualification is a luxury for many companies, and often is not an option. However, selling the idea for the position can be made easier if it is identified that it is also instrumental in the building of a client/prospect database. (In some companies, lead qualification is part of the client database manager's job.)

One solution is to have your booth staffers ultimately responsible for following up on their own leads, which makes sense from a consistency standpoint. Many show attendees will expect to get follow-up information from the same person they spoke with at the show. But, what if your sales organization is divided up into regional territories, and the show attendee fell into another rep's territory. These are all questions you have to wrestle with when coming up with your own system. The main thing is to get these contacts called. A personal phone call is typically the best way to get the response you want. 

To address one of the complaints of sales reps about the contact information not being complete, you can develop a lead sheet that includes spaces for all of the specific information your reps need in order to make a sales call. These sheets should be small enough to fit in a coat pocket, and typically work best in a notepad form. One critical piece of information to add to the sheet is the priority code (or lead assessment). Come up with a simple 3-to-5 level rating system to assess how "hot" this lead really is. Make sure your booth staffers understand and use this rating system when they talk with show attendees.
If you are planning on renting one of the electronic lead-collection systems that gather information from the attendee's swiped nametag, pay the additional costs for customizing the data that it can collect. All of these systems tend to be slightly different, so study the literature well, and make sure you can record as much specific information as possible. If you can't customize the information, it might make sense not to rent one at all and simply use your own lead sheet.

Follow-Up Flow Charts
Before you know it, hot prospects will be cold, and lukewarm prospects will have absolutely no recollection of who you are. Therefore, it behooves you to move quickly with your lead follow-up process. Make sure you have a schedule in place for lead follow-up. This means:

Getting fulfillment packages out within five days after the end of the show
Allowing two to five days for lead qualification (if you have that option)
Allowing no more than two weeks to pass before phone contact is made by your sales reps
Getting an initial sales report on the likeliness of a sale
Closing the sale
Getting the final report of closed sales for the show report