Quite frankly, in all these years I’ve hardly seen a trade show organizer in this region who has done lead scoring correctly. Trade show organizers are in the good position to do lead sourcing. Through organizing a trade event, the organizer is able to collect basically two types of data (1) Exhibitors, a.k.a. the customer (2) Buyers, I regard it a.k.a. the bait for the customers.

All the data are managed by common routines such as to punch in to a computer file and merely be classified into several ambiguous categories like A - B - C groups. The A and B groups are the leads with business interest, the C group is always interpreted as the bad leads. It turns out, no sales person is willing to follow up these scary bad leads. Is this your case?

Do you see how the ambiguity of grouping is misleading a sales person’s judgment on the lead quality? Think wisely, the less interested group could simply be the prospects in their early stage moving into a buying decision. Their potentials have yet been properly explored.

The idea of lead scoring is to rank your business prospects instead of to label them into types and categories. You can come up with any sophisticated scoring formula that does the calculation by row and column matrix. But I suggest to make it as simple and spontaneous as possible.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.
Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog
at We Blog Cartoons.

Because at the end of the day all you want is to give your sales persons a picture of “52/100″ instead of just the scary “C” - the bad lead. Do you see the difference? The 52 out of 100 scoring tells the sales persons how much they need to plan for a boost and how much more it can still be achieved from following up with the prospect. The mean-to-end picture looks far more encouraging, thus it also tells the truth.

In my suggestion to design the scoring method as simple and spontaneous as possible, event organizers can add score to the sources of leads such as online and offline, text response or voice response from a prospect or customer, etc. The methodology doesn’t emphasize on the weight of each score. It is about tagging a mathematical remark along with each activity for its communications.

From a single inquiry, a complaint, a service request, to an entrance registration, there are many activities which the organizers will be interacted with the customers and with the buyers. But remember it is the activities that should be labeled and all the relevant communications that should be scored.

Don’t put the wrong label on your prospects and scare the hell out of the sales persons. Otherwise, your business will be scored zero.

 Subscribe my feed