A candy for a factory is a Cantonese idiom. It means pay less for more. In my previous post, I suggested trade show organizers should share the visitors data to facilitate lead management efficiency for their exhibitors. I advocate this practice for the benefit of the organizers and I will tell you why right now.

Visitors data isn’t a trade secret on the fairground. Shaking hands is normally followed by presenting business name cards. The standard business ritual happens every time when a visitor meets an exhibitor. On the other hand, the organizer collects all the visitors data through offline and online registration before it distributes the badges. Depending on the practice, the organizer spontaneously has the visitor profiling done through a standard procedure.

A serious exhibitor should follow up all the leads generated through participating an event (you can revisit my previous posts about lead management practice). And one crucial factor that affects the entire lead management efficiency is the time being lost, a.k.a. interval, in re-organizing the tedious information.

Photo by Geek&Poke

Exhibitors will be able to start nurturing the leads, by doing something like to send each relevant visitor a thank you email or mobile short message right after the event, etc. Since all the data are interfaced in digital format, the feed can even be directly dropped into the exhibitors’ CRM system for future sales development. This isn’t a Sci-Fi scenario. I have done that 4 years ago.

The benefit of sharing the visitors data is enormous for event organizers. There is no doubt that the practice will facilitate the exhibitors’ lead management efficiency. But even for the organizers, not only they can obtain the visitors/buyers demographic profile, but also the meta data that indicates visitors/buyers business interest accumulated through each badge reading by the exhibitors.

With carefully crafted analytics, the organizers will be able to do advance data mining for matching the buyers applications with the market and to extract hidden potential from the value grid. A professional organizer should have proper understanding towards prospecting future exhibitors through the visitors data. That yields huge value on lead sourcing.

In the last 2 years, I met at least two professional organizers in the region who would like to explore the possibility of using RFID in trade show traffic management. Although the technology was proven, the cost wasn’t justified for mass application. However, as I’ve just mentioned, we don’t need RFID to do advance visitors tracking. Trade show organizers have everything ready to strengthen their practices.

Face-2-face marketing is an effective vehicle for lead gen. But the marketers won’t just pay for a booth to distribute brochures and collect business name cards. Trade show business is also highly competitive. So only the organizers who can think outside the box and serve the exhibitors outside the booth can face the competition.

Think wisely, to share just a little and do your customers a big favor, you will gain more in the future.

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