Trade Show Lists - Best practice?

[Anonymous]

Hi Folks,

We attend several trade shows a year and aquire the trade show lists, import into our system, and follow up with personal emails, lead nurturing and vetting campaigns to make sure these leads want to stay in our system or not.

My question is, each tradeshow we go to typically has the same people attend, so chances are when we import new lists, we're importing the same people each year. Typically, our practice is when a lead goes through a vetting campaign and does not respond after a certain amount of time / are not and will never be intereted, or just in the wrong business, they get deleted.

But what happens after they get deleted, then reintroduced into the system as a "new lead" and go through the same introduction process?

Is there any best practice that you perform? Do you scrub the lists and perform a backup of the leads that will get deleted so you can compare the two lists or is there something easier?

I know we're catching up on all our management mistakes from years prior; it's defintely a process and we want to keep it clean like everyone else.

What do you do?

[Anonymous]

I don't delete the leads. I give them a status of Disqualifed, Graveyard, Not Interested, etc. and then don't market to them. That way I don't reimport folks who have opted out, etc.

[Kim_Allen]

I agree with Jason. I wouldn't be deleting the leads. Change their status and then you still have that history. This is especially important with leads that may have unsubscribed previously.

However, if you are still getting these leads at tradeshows (if visiting booth) they may be showing new interest. I'd be tempted to take all of these "graveyard" leads / not unsubscribed / that have now been re-introduced by recent tradeshow and throw them in some sort of stream to nurture. Idk just a thought 😉

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree with Jason and Kim - never delete anyone related to your business. Here's what I would do:

1. Clean up the spreadsheet. Consider deleting any obvious trash leads now. Lead Source = Trade Show (new leads only)
2. Import into Marketo Program. Marketo will dedupe.
3. Make these people Members of the tradeshow Program in question. Any new leads will be marked as Acquired By.
4. Do your vetting campaign - not sure what this is for you. Send them a follow up. if any Leads were marked as Hot by Sales, make sure they get to the right Sales person asap.
5. Anyone else should be sent to whatever nurturing program is available.
6. Overtime, leads will float up to Sales or become recycled or inactive.  Score appropriately.
7. Don't delete anyone unless they are hard bounced and inactive and even then I'd wait a certain period.

[Anonymous]

OK, thanks for the information.

Another issue that I failed to mention is that our Marketo DB is synced with SFDC, but not all of our leads in SFDC are in Marketo. Reason being is because we have more leads in SFDC than in Marketo (cap of 10K). To keep our database within the threshold, we have a custom sync filter enabled on the Salesforce side. So, the unresponsive leads or leads that opted-out are still in SFDC but not in Marketo. If I import the list into Marketo, Marketo will only recognize them as new leads since they will not see that they are on the SFDC side. It's complicated.