Even in 2018, a trade fair appearance is still an important concept of a sales strategy in a company. Despite increasing digitalization - or perhaps precisely because of it - personal contact at a trade fair with the associated sales opportunities is important for many decision-makers. In Germany, for example, the turnover of trade fair organizers is also rising continuously - from 2.35 billion euros in 2005 to 3.4 billion euros in 2015. In the following sections I would therefore like to discuss the opportunities that a company has for a central problem at a trade fair: effective lead management.
Organizational problem: How do I transfer the information from a customer meeting into CRM?
In addition to exhibition space design and the organization of a trade fair appearance, there is another important area that many companies neglect. How are the important lead information extracted from the discussions and prepared for the sales employee? When and how do interested parties make follow-up contact after a trade fair? How are the discussions documented and how is this information collected centrally? A good concept ensures that the (usually) high trade fair budgets also have an effect on later sales. It is not enough to ensure a good stand concept and then leave the sales staff alone without a concept and rely on their organizational skills on site.
The classic way with capturing trade sheets requires many manual steps
One way to solve this problem is to use the frequently used trade fair forms. Important questions and metrics are identified in advance of a trade fair and then queried by a list. In this case, the sales representative simply fills out a pre-printed sheet during the interview. Typical features or questions here would be, for example: concrete need for action?, personal consultation desired?, company size, location, customer category, what is the name of the employee responsible for the XYZ area? And so on.
After the interview, the completed forms are then collected centrally at the stand and taken to the office for post-processing after the trade fair. Here, the forms are evaluated manually and the individual answers are typed into the company's own CRM system by the sales staff.
Get significantly faster results with snapADDY VisitReport
snapADDY VisitReport was developed with the aim to solve exactly this problem. The sales employee loses valuable time by typing in the exhibition sheets, which he should rather use for his actual sales work. Even if interns or working students take on the task of entering data into CRM, the results are inaccurate. Often, for example, a font cannot be read or the telephone numbers are not entered into CRM in a uniform and standardized manner - every sales representative knows this problem. In addition, there is competition today in which companies try to address the contacts at a trade fair as quickly as possible by mailing after the conversation. Once the trade fair forms have been typed in manually, it takes time before a personalized mailing can be started.
This is exactly where snapADDY VisitReport comes in. The solution consists of an app with which all sales staff accompany their conversations. The questions that were previously answered on paper are now filled out digitally in the app either as a free text field or via various types of selection fields. The special thing: The answers to the individual fields of the questionnaires can be transferred directly to your corresponding fields in the CRM. Once a conversation is over and all questions have been recorded or filled in, the data is directly available in the CRM. A personalized mailing can thus be started within minutes of a trade fair visit - the prospective customer still has the conversation in mind.
Flexible evaluations and your own questionnaire configurator
In addition, snapADDY can be used to create evaluations. Which employee has conducted the most customer interviews? From which regions or industries do the interested parties come? How large are the companies on average? Which industry has generated the largest turnover for me? At what times of the day were most customers involved in discussions? The scope of the evaluations is continuously updated and expanded by snapADDY.
The questionnaires that are used do not fall back on a given standard. Using a configurator, you can create your own questionnaires with customized branding. This makes your trade fair appearance even more professional and you have the design with all options at your fingertips, such as text fields or multi-select selection fields, signature fields etc.
If you are also interested in such a solution for the 2018/19 trade fair year, please contact us. We will be happy to discuss further possibilities for your company with you.