Mining Conference Exhibitor Leads With Inside Sales

So, you've heard everything that needs to be said about marketing at industry conferences and seminars? You've moved on to the promise, and results, of Web-based marketing and don't want to waste your precious marketing budget on those expensive, 'old-tech' events? Time to re-think. Exploited intelligently, the right conference or seminar can give your Cleantech start-up a surprising number of qualified leads.

Here's how: the traditional, and expensive, conference lead generation and branding campaign is very well documented. ID the related industry conference, negotiate with the conference organizers, contract for booth space, build your campaign around that booth. Then, integrate various marketing and sales components such as your Website, press releases, pre and post-conference direct mail and email, custom collateral, impressive booth graphics, installed base newsletter promo's, conference week dinner or bar sponsorships for key prospects, booth give-aways (anyone need a logo'd aluminum pen), can't live without prize raffles (every wonder why you never won the prize when you dropped your business card into the plastic fishbowl at the booth?... Marketing and Sales make sure only the top prospects 'win' the raffle, leveraging that for the follow-up sales call... I know, I know, unfair... now you can save that business card), even magicians or other acts hired to attract conference attendees to your booth. The list of integrated marketing activities prior, during and after the conference that, with a little innovation and stellar execution, result in the right (though expensive) outcome, is long.

However, there is another way. Leveraging clever pre-conference analytics, an inside sales team armed with the right call list, phone and email scripts, marketing back-office follow-up, and on-site conference support from your company's Sales Team, your company can skip the expensive conference booth and still capture those qualified leads you so highly desire. The trick is to realize that many of those leads are already at the conference exibiting, not just attending. The surrounding conference booths are staffed by both influencers and buyers from companies you want to do business with. Once you realize this, you now have defined targets that you can locate easily and approach intelligently. While the target volume is lower compared to the attendee volume flowing by your booth, the quality is much higher.

So, here is a short, linear summary of your lead generation campaign:

1. ID the appropriate conference to target your lead generation campaign toward
2. There are a number of clever ways to do this that are too numerous to mention in this post
3. Analyze the conference exhibitor list, the list is published by the conference organizers on the conference website EVERY time
4. As a bonus to your campaign, review the conference speaker's list on the conference website. Some speaker's work for the exhibitor companies, some don't. Some speakers work for companies you want as customers
5. Once you have your macro list, eliminate the obvious exhibitors and speakers that don't fit your target profile. Marketing should take this first screening cut
6. Next, qualify the list further with your Sales Team. Some on the list will already be customers, and may, or may not, need targeting at the conference (think up-selling)
7. Your Sales Team will tell you what companies on the list they want to priority target
8. Now, you have your final target list of exhibitor companies and conference speakers
9. At this point the next phase of your campaign project plan begins with...