The 7 Deadly Sins of Tradeshows

After having done many trade shows and conferences across US, Europe, Asia and Africa, I can tell you one key lesson I've learned the hard way: trade shows can be the biggest waste of money. A lot of organizations spend $100,000 or more on a single trade show, with a general metrics to sell ten times that amount or more. But unfortunately in most cases they don’t even recover the initial investment. However, if done right, trade shows can also be a great way to not only hit your 10x metric, but also increase your brand awareness, build up your prospect database, announce major products and company strategy, and win the hearts and minds of the press and the analysts.

The secret to a successful trade show is based on planning, preparation, and execution at the event. Here are the top 7 mistakes made by marketers with trade show marketing that lead to little return on the investment.

1) Investing in the wrong trade show: Nothing worse than wasting money on the wrong trade show. Determine what sort of trade shows you want to attend, and focus on those only. They can be trade shows that target senior level people, like the Gartner Symposium, or trade shows that focus on the folks in the trenches and techies, like in the IT space it would be CiscoLive, VMworld, IBM Interconnect, and others. Whichever one you focus on, make sure that your message, and your strategy at the event is also geared towards that audience.

2) Not engaging with your audience before the event: The actual event is only half the battle. Determine your strategy and how you will engage with your audience before the event. As much effort it takes to run a trade show during the event, you should spend an equal amount of energy, or more, before you get there. Send out invites to your customers and prospects, and let them know you will be there. Offer them an enticing gift, reward or prize for coming by and seeing you at the event. And if you can afford it, it is a good investment to buy the list of attendees before the event and send out special invites. And during the event, you and your team should be setup with the the tools and ability to schedule follow up meetings on the spot!

3) Staffing the booth with the wrong people: At the event, make sure you pick the right type of people to man the booth, who are not shy to talk to people. I've made this mistake too many times allowing people who "want" vs who "should" be there. The people that are representing your organization at the booth can be a critical decision to which you must pay very close attention. Select people who are easy to talk to, not shy, and have good work ethics and energy. Make sure they stand in the walkway and pull people in. Most importantly, make sure they are energetic and fun to be around as the image of your company comes out through those people.

4) Not having a strategy on how to attract prospects at the event: At the event, you’ll want to pull some creative ideas together that attract people from around the show to come see you. Remember you're competing with possibly hundreds of other companies for their attention. My favorite tactics has been flashing shirt pins, with your logo or message on them that people would wear around the show floor in order to win prizes. We've done this a number of times, which has caused many other people to come by asking for the "prize patrol pins" while we have another person walking around the show floor handing out $5 gift cards, and other small items. At the end of the week, we had pretty much everyone wearing our pins, advertising our brand and name, and also pulling other people in to come speak with us. Creative and funny messaged T-shirts are usually a hit, as well as toys people like for their desk and their kids. I'll write another blog later focused on the topic of successful tactics to getting attention at trade shows. But overall, don’t expect that all attendees will come and see you. You’ll have to go after them at the event.

5) Not having sales conversations: When you are at a trade show, you are selling. Many companies at trade shows offer expensive and sometimes elaborate awards in the form of drawings like cars, motorcycles, Apple Watches, and so on, for the purpose of attracting prospects. But, they are useless if you simply collect the person's name and enter them into the drawing. The idea should be to use the giveaways to start conversations and to be selling, selling, selling. Always, make each person and fill out a form at a minimum about their (budget, authority, need, timeframe). This can be powerful conversation starters when sales people are following up with them. But more importantly have conversations about their needs and how you can help them. Should you have giveaways in the first place? Absolutely. They attract a lot of people you would never sell to, but it also attracts the buyers! So be prepared to treat every prospect like a future customer and ask the right questions from the start. And more importantly, take notes and capture their requirements and details to pass on to the sales people who would be doing the following up.

6) Not communicating to sales the value of each lead collected: Invest some time to rank or score the leads from the trade show, based on the conversations and feedback your staff has received. This is so important for follow up and for the sales people that will have to figure out which leads to follow up on first. Always take notes about the conversations you and your staff have. And you should make it mandatory for staff to collect notes. Make sure those notes and lead scores are associated with each lead and sent to the sales people for follow up. Do this daily after the show, before they forget.

7) Not following up in a timely fashion: Always follow up with every lead within 1-2 business days after the event, not a day sooner or later. Remember that your prospects who attend trade shows will speak with dozens of companies about hundreds of products, and it all becomes a blur after a few days. You want to send a custom email from each person that spoke to that prospect. For example, if John from your company spoke with Joe from ABC organization about their XYZ issues, makes sure that Joe gets a follow up from John regarding XYZ and establishes next steps. Don't wait days and weeks for this to happen. Not only will your prospects forget about you, there is also the risk of your competition getting to them before you.

I hope this is helpful. If you have any other best practices or ideas, feel free to share them here with others. Happy hunting! 

Aligning marketing programs to sales process

As marketers our goal is to enable sales....obviously! But as we plan our programs and execution, we have to understand the sales process, align activities with it, and what types of marketing programs are required for each step. Here is a basic rule you can follow:

There are four major stages a buyer goes through.

1. Awareness: 
This is the stage where the buyer becomes aware of your offering, and knows who you are. Most marketing activities that fall into this category include public relations (PR), analyst relations (AR), web site optimization, adwords, and all activities designed to increase general awareness.

2. Knowledge / Education
This is the state where the buyer knows what you are offering, but wants to become more educated, not only in your solution, but also what he should care about in the decision making process. Marketing activities that align with this category are items such as educational webinars, seminars, whitepapers, white boarding videos, data sheets and other collateral that help the prospect get better educated about your solution, but also about the general topic of which the solution addresses.

3. Trial
Now that the prospect knows who you are, knows what you do, and how you do it, and what he cares about, the next thing they want to do is to touch, fell and see the product in action. This is where the 'trial' stage comes in. You need to make it possible for the customer to experience the product. You can offer custom one-on-one online demos, a version of your product (if software based) to be downloaded for free or for a trial period. Perhaps you want to offer the user a full blown product limited to a few days. At a minimum you should provide some short videos of the product that show the value of the product in an easy to understand format. What I have seen work well is standing demos that occur during a set time in the week that people can join and see the product in action.

4. Preference 
This is the final stage where you want to be the preferred vendor to work with, when all else, such as product capabilities, price, etc. is equal. The customer at this point wants to avoid risk to his business, himself and their budget. You want to comfort him that by buying from you, the risk is the lowest compared to anyone else. Here you want to invest heavily in customer testimonials, case studies, ROI calculators, and other tools to validate to the customer that the decision to buy from you is the right decision. Being responsive to their requests, giving them a taste of your excellent support organization, and showing them that it is easiest to do business with you also helps.

Now you know the 4 basic stages of a sales process. Everything you do in marketing needs to align with one of the stages.

Contests: possibly your best marketing idea...

Today is July 4th, and Nathan's is holding its famous annual hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. According the a story CNN ran today, this contest has done marketing wonders for the hot dog and burger joint. Since 2003, Nathan's sales have doubled, with very little budget spent on any other types of marketing - Nathan's has invested most of its annual marketing budget to promote its hot dog eating contests. A pretty gutsy strategy, which luckily has worked very well for them.

This got me thinking today about the various types of marketing programs I've seen succeed, and it does not surprise me that when done right, the types of marketing that engages its users can by far be one of the best marketing investments you can make. We recently ran a couple of such programs to engage with our audiences, and in all of the cases they worked wonders. In one of the programs we asked our technical users to take an online quiz to show off their level of technical know-how, and the results were really good. During the American football season, we asked our users to play a virtual online football game, where they would move up 10 yards for every correct answers about our products, the company and the types of problems we solved. And when they achieved a "touch down" they would qualify for a special prize. Again, the results were by far better than any other online program we had done. What was great about this game, is that not only did it attract more people on average than other programs because of it's "fun" and "entertainment" factor, but we used the game to educate the market about our products, the market itself, our company and how we could help them solve their critical challenges. I don't want to take credit for this idea all together, as it wasn't mine, but how it was executed and the engagement process was done well enough to make it a huge success.

So, the lesson here for you is: find ways to engage with your audience, and contests and fun ways to establish that engagement work really well. But also pay close attention to the details of the event and put yourself in the audiences place, and why they may or may not want to engage. On average, compared to any other program, you'll find this to be very successful. User engagement marketing programs should always be on your annual marketing plan.

Leveraging the analyst community to increase awareness

As I had mentioned in another article that one of the top 3 sources that generates natural market pull and awareness is the analyst community (the other two being your own web site and its ability to attract traffic and PR).

Here is how to win with the analyst strategy.

The companies that are on top of the analysts' mind will get the most benefit, because as the analyst clients call to ask questions about products and services, the analyst will drop names of companies that they not only remember, but care about. So, it is important to make the analysts your friends and make sure that you are fresh on his mind.

What should you do to accomplish this and stand apart from your competition? Here is a trick that will surely help you get there:

Schedule at least 3 analyst inquiries per week per analyst firm. If you are a customer of firms like Gartner, Forrester, IDC and others, you have (in most cases) unlimited access to the analysts. When you schedule inquiries, you are saying "I want to speak with an analyst to ask questions and learn" and they don't have a choice but to schedule a 30 minute call with you. But what you are really doing on the call is to spend 50% of the time to ask questions and learn for the sake of learning (that can't be bad either), but spent 50% to educate the analyst about you! Analysts, like you and me always want to learn, and by taking 15 minutes to bring them up to speed on your company, strategy, and recent customer wins, can be appreciated by them as well.

Doing this consistently on a weekly basis is time consuming, but I will guarantee you that it will pay off in the long run. Once you have gone through a long list of analysts, start again with the first analyst and repeat. You must do this consistently and not only will you be well educated, but each analyst firm and their analysts will know your company well.

Successful Webinar Tactics

If you're doing B2B marketing, then you are probably doing lots of (or at least you should be doing lots of) webinars - which are online live presentations.

As a marketer, you need to track and have specific goals for a number of metrics that differentiate a good webinar from a bad webinar. Here are the variables you want to measure and strive for the best outcome:

- Get the most registrations from each webinar (email to registration conversion)
- Get the right type of audiences (registration to opportunity conversion)
- Get them to show up during the webinar (registration to attendance ratio)
- Get them to stay for the entire duration of the webinar (attendance to stay ratio)
- Get them to buy (opportunity to sale ratio)

How do you succeed in all these? Well, after having done hundreds of webinar, I've learned that an entire book can be written around webinar strategies and tactis, as there are many variables that affect webinar outcome. However, here is a summary of a couple of key things you want to make sure you do to achieve a successful webinars.

1) Invite your own prospect database, but always have a plan to purchase or go after external databases as well for invitation to the webinar.This ensures that you hit your target registration metrics. You might have to invest in multiple databases, if the target is high. And you'll want to set your target to align with the sales target and everything else you to do support sales. It's always best to do fewer webinars and do them well (with lots of registrations), then doing lots of webinars with small registrations.

2) Give the audience at least 2 weeks from the first email to register. Ideally, you want to give them 3 weeks.

3) Send at least 3 reminders (first email about 2-3 weeks out, 2nd email about 1 week out, 3rd email the day before the event). Make sure that the subject of your last email starts with "Last chance to register for...".

4) Keep the emails as short as possible. If you can't read the entire email in less than 10 seconds, don't bother sending it out. It will not get read. Keep the subject related to the webinar. And always, make the emails personalized to the recipient.

5) Always have a drawing for a nice reward for people who register and attend.

6) Don't give the reward out to anyone - make them take a final 3-5 question survey, and ask them more about their business needs. And make sure the audience knows that only people who submit their surveys will qualify for the reward. This will dramatically help with the 'attendance to stay' ratio.

7) Keep the presentation under 30 minutes. You start losing people after that. Also, make it interactive with Live Polls during the presentation.

8) Have someone introduce the main speaker. This gives the speaker much more credibility.

9) Have people submit their questions, and then cover as many as you can at the end, but always have 3-5 questions pre-written to ask, in case there are no questions. I've also found that when you ask a question of your own, it is a nice ice breaker and gets others to start asking questions.

10) Promise the audience that they'll get answers to all the questions in a few days via email. In about 2-4 days, send out an FAQ style document that has all the questions submitted, a link to the recording of the webinar and a copy of your slides to the audience that registered. This not only ensure that people that could not make it see what was covered, but more importantly, it makes it real easy for people to forward to their friends and colleagues.

And finally, post the recording of all webinars you do as "on demand" presentations on your web site, to continue to produce leads over time. The more webinars you have, the better.

Good luck.

- yh

Good verses Great Leads

As marketers we are constantly trying to get more and higher quality leads. In a recent study we found out that the best leads that convert to opportunities and then eventually into sales come from the company's own web site! This shouldn't be too shocking, since most people that fill out a form on your web site and convert into a lead most likely has a pain that your product or service can help alleviate. And some how they've found their way to your web site.

This got me thinking that in all the marketing activities we do, it all comes down to two types of marketing tactics - those activities where we go after prospects, and those where the prospects come to us. And in all the analysis I've done, and I'm sure you would agree, those prospects that come to you are much better leads, with a higher conversion rate, than those where we chase them - such as email blasts, shot gun approach banner ads, trade shows, and so on.

The question is, how do we get more prospects to find us and come to us, at the time of their pain (meaning they are ready to make a purchase potentially). Well, there are only four places that I've counted that you need to be, to get in front of these prospects:

1) The web - of course! People use the web as the first place to start their search for a product or service when they are in need. You want to make sure you have a solid AdWords strategy, and that your web site is very well optimized for search engine. More on that in a future blog post.

2) Analyst Community: Many organizations who make large purchases go to the analyst community for advice. And you better be one of the company names that those analysts throw out as potential products/services. You want to have good relationship with the key analyst firms, and makes sure that they are very well educated on your products and services.

3) Media & Press: This is where people go to read and learn about the latest trends and products. You want to make sure you are well covered in your space.

4) Social Media - This would technically fall in the same category as #1 above (the web), but social media requires its own strategy. Some people who may need a product or service will go to a forum and post their question to the community for product/service recommendations, and/or how to solve a particular problem. You want to have a daily summary of all these posts, and the ability to respond/reply to those folks very quickly. If you don't already know, you can do all this via technology today. More on that later as well.

So, there you have it - four (technically 3) specific places that your prospect go at times of need, and you want to get in front of them at the time they are looking. Investing well in these four categories will surely help improve your overall business.

- yh