This entry is from Part #2 of the 7 Deadly Mistakes Exhibitors Make When Purchasing Promotional Products For Trade Shows – “Not Qualifying Recipients”
Promotional Products Can Drive OUT Disqualified Traffic. Ok, you might be thinking, “What’s this guy talking about? He just got finished telling me how great promotional items were for drawing traffic TO my booth.”
Truth is, if you are prospecting for qualified leads, you can also use promotional items to quickly get unqualified traffic OUT OF YOUR BOOTH. It all comes down to this. If everyone at the show is not a potential buyer it is just as important to disqualify people as it is to qualify them.
If an attendee is not qualified he or she is not a prospect. What’s more, they will cost you money by taking time away from prospecting good leads. Your show time is finite and must be managed to maximize results.
Here’s an Example: A True Story
The first thing I did before I ever exhibited at a trade show was learn everything I could about exhibiting. The one thing that stuck in my head was Time Management.
One particular show comes to mind. There were thousands of attendees, but only a limited amount of potential buyers of my product. So, it was important for me to set a goal of getting as many qualified leads as I could, and then market to them after the show.
Here’s what I did. I bought a putter, a portable putting green, 300 globe stress balls, and T-Shirts. I drew traffic by offering a free t-shirt to anyone who could make a putt.
Now here was the kicker… They had to make the putt with a globe stress ball – not a golf ball! Trade shows are fun and most people enjoyed taking putts and watching others putt. It was always funny for the non golfers to see their golfer co-workers
put on an even playing field.
So here was the plan. While people were waiting their turn to putt, we made sure to ask them what they did, and if they ever bought trade show giveaways.
Now, everyone who made the putt got a free T-Shirt, but if we found out that they were not qualified and they missed the putt, we didn’t want to spend too much time with them. We simply gave them the stress ball and some literature to pass along to
the decision maker. We moved them in and out of the booth in 3 minutes.
If we felt they were qualified, after the putt we would take them through our sales pitch. Whether they made the putt or not, we made sure to give them an assortment of samples, company literature, and a T-Shirt.
What makes this so special? The T-Shirt was not only an item with more perceived valuable, but as I mentioned yesterday WEARABLES have a huge retention and re-use rate. So we made sure to get repeated exposure to a qualified prospect who had the need for our service.
But you know what else? We took their business card or information and asked permission to follow up after the show. We DID NOT TAKE INFO ON NON QUALIFIED BUYERS.
Why is this important? Because if they are not a qualified prospect, you don’t want to spend time and money marketing to them after the show. I never rented a lead system because I did not want a bunch of non qualified leads in my database.
The business cards we collected were stapled to a lead sheet where we wrote notes to use in our follow up. All of our marketing after the show was focused on buyers. Needless to say we had a great conversion rate.
Let me just quickly reiterate. The product we used to move them along was the stress ball. Everybody left the booth happy and we kept the lead machine moving.
Keep in mind…Unqualified leads cheering in your booth is a good thing too. People were drawn to the “buzz” in our booth. Remember, TRAFFIC DRAWS TRAFFIC. Slow days and slow hours were always busier for us than the booths around us.
There are a lot of different things you can do with promotional products at trade shows but as you can see from my example you should probably have a disqualifier (inexpensive) and a qualifier item. Both will serve you well and it sure beats giving stuff away and not knowing what you spent the money on.
