At the recent Exhibitor show I visited a few booths devoted to lead retrieval and lead management that puts more power in the hands of the exhibitor. Often times the lead retrieval systems offered by show management are overpriced and offer little customization features to help with campaigns and post-event follow-through.
Owning your own lead retrieval system and taking it from show to show allows you to make the most of this sensitive piece of customer interaction. For example, you can swipe their badge and write notes on a strip of cash register receipt, or you can have the user swipe their own badge, answer a few questions on a touch screen, select the information they want to receive, and even download materials to their USB Memory drive. You can control the amount of information you want to gather, build a question structure that is sensitive to the customer’s job title, buying power, or readiness to buy. You can also automate the fulfillment of materials and speed up the sales follow-up cycle.
Once you have the leads, you have to do follow-up. At least one vendor was offering to take all your leads and deal with them. They sort, scrub, and transmit the leads to appropriate people in the sales force, and offer a variety of fulfillment needs as well.
Here are the vendors that stood out to me, in no particular order:
Capture Technologies offers a software package that enables companies to develop their own lead retrieval systems, including self-service kiosks that can deliver personalized content and follow-through.
Lead Wizard offers a PDA-based lead retrieval system that can handle bar codes and magnetic stripe badges. It does not transmit the leads as you get them but it stores them locally for easy import into Salesforce or several other CRM systems.
CardScan, the business card scanner people, had a neat Lead Qualifier package. You order a customizable pad of mini surveys which feature self-adhesive areas to which you attach your prospect’s business card. They fill out the survey questions on the sheet and feed the whole thing through one of their slick little scanners. In a couple of seconds you have all their contact information and their survey data in an application that you can use to deliver additional information on screen or automatically fulfill their requests. I like the paper backup it provides, and the fact that it not only circumvents the expensive lead retrieval database fees, but it even works at shows that don’t have coded badges at all.
Event Technologies will retrieve your leads, then manage and distribute them, following up directly with emails as directed.
Sorry you missed our exhibit at the Exhibitor Show. NewLeads created the field of third party lead retrieval offerings in 1996, and today is still the leading provider of the systems you describe. We offer touch screens, PDAs, TabletPCs and mini-laptops to help Fortune 1000 companies collect and manage leads. Many of our clients also use our web offering, “mynewleads.com” to distribute and strategically manage their leads after the show. If you’d like another look, please visit our site at http://www.newleads.com , or inquire with any of our longstanding customers, including Eli Lilly, Panasonic, Xerox, Motorola, Whirlpool and hundreds more. Thanks!–John Hasbrouck, CEO
woops – I didn’t miss your exhibit – I just didn’t bring back any literature to remind me to write about you. In fact, my badge was scanned at your booth using the “house” lead management system.
Sorry for the omission, and thanks for calling it out.
NewLeads definitely deserves to be mentioned here for providing such a wide range of solutions for exhibitor-owned lead-retrieval systems.
Rob: Great summary of some interesting things at the Exhibitor Show. Technologies and new companies have entered this market and there have been enormous changes (and choices for exhibitors) since I started in this business (auto id applications in the trade show market) in 1986. One of the things that has NOT changed is how some people insist on reshaping history to fit their own press release. Just for the record, John H. knows that he was still producing and selling morality videos to high school guidance counselors in the late 80’s when I created the first third part lead retrieval software product on the market (FreeLink). I am certain John remembers this because I sold him the badge reading DLL’s he needed to enter this market in 1996 (as I did with Capture Technolgies a few years later) . NewLeads and my company, ExpoBadge dont really compete and my focus is not really in the third party software products anymore (mostly because it s a business model that , in my opinion, cannot be supported) but I was reading your blog and thought that at the very least I should correct Johns’ oft repeated but seldom challanged description of his company ‘creating’ the field. NewLeads has done a great job of offering a mix of products to the market that are perfect for a certain type of exhibitor. They should be proud of what they have done over the past 10 years without embellishing the truth about who created the market. So what if they were second to market? Being second isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless you try to convince everyone you were first and the real first guy sees that you wrote it in a blog where all the world can see it.
I’ve certainly been on both sides of this sort of discussion. I’m not sure the debate belongs on this blog, but you’re more than welcome to make your point(s). I wonder if anyone can offer an idea of where lead retrieval is headed next.
@Rob
I believe that I do have some insight (a fair guess at least) on where lead retrieval is headed. I think that anyone interested in this blog should have somewhat of an understanding of the history of lead retrieval. Compared to most technical equipment, lead retrieval technology has tended to move a bit slow. In fact, card swiping is still a mainstay of collection methods – very OLD technology.
What I would like to explore, is the future of third party systems. I do see a place in the near future for third party systems. For the time being, exhibitors remain mostly unchallenged by the official lead retrieval vendors of trade shows. They often offer a license for exhibitors to use their third party technologies in cases where they have proprietary bar codes and the like. They also offer to convert their captured IDs to data for a fee.
However, in cases where badges have encrypted information, and the lead retrieval vendor is unwilling to offer licensing, third party systems – and in fact, the entire process the exhibitor has come to rely on for lead follow-up, are compromised.
As lead retrieval companies begin to protect their market share, you may see that third party systems become less viable in the future. Unless the third party vendors can come to agreements with what is – in not uncertain terms – their competition, third party systems will be less viable in the future.
Beyond those issues are hardware issues. Will you always have the right technology for the job? There are a plethora of barcode symbologies, track encoding on magstripe cards, and RF and UHF ID tags to consider – as well as future radio tag standards and frequency operations.
Lead retrieval vendors will slowly introduce more robust on-line post-show marketing tools as time goes by to fill the needs of exhibitors and add value to the cost of rental. The tools will be limited and not fully functioning as most software CRM packages, but will most likely allow exhibitors some form of follow up.
That’s my take on where things are headed.
As someone who has spent nearly his entire adult life in the lead retrieval business (first as a provider of ‘third party’ software to exhibitors – 1987 and then as a lead retrieval company – 1992) I spend alot of time thinking about where this market is heading. Obviously I have a vested interest because its how I (and the other employees at my company) make money but I also like to think the reason I have been around for so long is because I try to stay somewhat realist about the various technology and marketing claims being advanced in this market.
Where I think things are heading from a users point of view is what I like to call Instant Leads. That is, the exhibitor will ‘expect’ at some point in the future that the lead retrieval solution offered at a show (either by an approved contractor or a third party vendor) will enable an exhibitor to collect and retrieve the attendee data online, instantly. This expectation, I hope, will help move the various players and decision makers in this market to provide the exhibitor with products and services which allow for this.
I dont have a lot of faith in the idea of a standard (encoding format or technology type). Not because it is not a great idea or because it would not work, quite the contrary. It would be a real benefit to everyone involved in the chain if standards were created and used. I just know that the humans in the chain have too much invested in not having a standard and other humans in the chain dont care enough to make the standards work.
Regarding the future of ‘third party’ vendors, I think the market has already decided what will happen to them in the future. Just look at the current state of the players in this market. None of them have ever (combined) taken more than 2% of the market away from the appointed lead retrieval provider for a show and most (if not all of them) have at one time or another become (or attempted to become) full service lead retrieval providers. On the other hand I cannot think of one lead retrieval provider who has become a third party vendor of software and hardware to exhibitors. The reasons for this are: first, to paraphrase Willy Sutton – to be the appointed contractor – thats where the money is, and second there are too many types of encoding formats and encryptions schemes used today that keep the third party vendors from taking a large portion of this market.
As for the future of specific technologies I would say that as long as people encode badges one thing will remain true in this market:
a badge technology will gain wide acceptance in this market if it is less expensive than the alternative. To illustrate this point look at what happened in 1993-1995. In 1993 nearly all badges that had encoding and contained useful data (I dont think of a 1D string of numbers as useful data) were magnetic strip. Nearly all of the largest full service reg contractors where using this technology (RCS, Galaxy, CDS, Worldwide – some of the names have changed over the last 15 years). Then in 1993 2D barcodes hit the market and within a year or so this new technology had taken more than 50% of the market. Compare this to RFID today. Even though our industry shows have given countless seminars and workshops on RFID over the past 5 years and told everyone who would listen that RFID will be the next ‘really big thing’ in badge technology, today less than 5% of the market is using RFID , BECAUSE it is still 25 times the cost of printing a barcode and 12 times the cost of a mag stripe card. These last five years have been good for new companies trying to put ’square’ RFID into the ’round’ badges but the fit just wont happen for most shows.
Just a disclaimer, I consider myself neutral when it comes to the best technology to use for things like lead retrieval at trade shows – I just want something that works and can fit into the distribution channel the market has already created.
That’s my take on where things are headed.