Lead Retrieval and Management (from Exhibitor 2007)
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.
(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5)
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April 22nd, 2007 at 12:08 am
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
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:21 am
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.
November 9th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
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.
November 11th, 2007 at 2:20 am
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.