Categorizing your trade show leads easily with tags

Standing in your exhibition booth you  see hundreds of visitors passing by. Some ignore you, some come chit chat and some represent a real potential for your business.

The ultimate question is: how to separate and categorize your prospects in order to easily follow-up afterwards?

Asking the right questions

You know the saying ““

That definitely applies to trade shows. . Instead, ask them questions, let them talk, understand who they are and what they need.

After 2 minutes discussion with a prospect, you should already know

• his name & position
• the company he represents
• the territories he covers (if he is distributors / wholesaler / retailer)
• what he needs and why

If you miss some of it, you probably did not ask the right questions. Rehearse a little, you need to get it right!

These questions are not only for you to “learn more”, there will also help you finding out how much time you should spend with each person (read “How to recognize good leads at exhibitions?“).

Once you got it all, it will be time to jump to next step!

Creating tags

You know who’s this person, you’ve identified its potential and you are ready to prepare a small report about him for future follow-up, great!

But did you really prepare ahead of time? Did you create tags to help you identify your leads efficiently?

Tags are labels you stick on every visitor’s profile to easily categorize and identify them. Whenever the profile fits a characteristic, you just “tick the box”.

A few days before your event, you must prepare your tags. Let’s take a few examples of tags you could create:

• territory covered (Europe, Asia, North America, etc.)
• quality of the lead (hot, warm, cold)
• visitor profile (marketing, sales, investor, partner, customer, competitor, etc.)
• product interest (product A, product B, product C, etc.)

Why doing this?

First of all, it will simplify your work – instead of making sure you don’t forget any detail when taking notes, you just need to read your tags list and check the boxes that match your visitor’s profile.

Then, it will save you a lot of time. If you use excel, you will be able to organize and filter your leads based on their tags. You could easily identify a specific type of lead just by selecting the corresponding tag.

Now that you’ve got it all, it is time to record your data (read “How to create a customer details list for exhibitions?“).

 

The Exhibitor.