Best Practices for managing Tradeshow leads?

[Anonymous]

We are developing our processes for managing leads that come from Tradeshows and I am interested in hearing what other companies do as a standard practice. We  do about 20 -30 tradeshows per year and generally have lists from each event. Some lists include all the attendees and some are just lists that our sales team has created from people who visited the booth. 

I would love to know what you have learned and your best suggestions for a standard process. Our goal is to have a streamlined process for uploading, but also get the best data for future activity and ROI.

Some questions I have:

• Do you do one program that encompasses all tradeshows (ex. 2013 Tradeshows) or do you do one program for each tradeshow (ex. Tradeshow 123 and Tradeshow ABC)?
• Do you track the costs in Marketo or do you track it in SFDC (if that is your CRM?)
• Do you do a standardize follow up with attendees after a show?

Thanks in advance for sharing!

[Anonymous]

So many possibilities  :).

You could create an Events channel and create a different program for each tradeshow. This will provide you the ability to track each event's success and costs seperately. You should track costs in Marketo so you can gain insight into CPL, Cost Aquired lead, cost per success, associate revenue, etc.

As a standard followup, I've imported each event  list into nurtuing with a Raw lead status so reps can cherry pick leads in SF if they want. However, those leads aren't their reponsibility yet. Those leads should go into a nurturing track to get warmed with the goal of elevating them to sales ready leads in the future.

Carey, if you need some deeper help on setting this up, let me know.

[Anonymous]

HI Carey,

We do a lot of events and tradeshows so this was something we've been working on. Currently we create a program for every tradeshow/event we do. This allows us to track a lot the appropriate period costs in Marketo for analysis. We also import any leads we get into that program with the appropriate progressions status. By doing it this way, Maketo will assign the correct acquisition program to new leads as well.

It also makes it easy to follow-up with these new leads or target them in the future when we attend similar events. Just my 2 cents.

[Anonymous]

I agree with Jeff and Jace's process. 

We also have a couple of different program statuses depending on what happened with them at the show.  We treat them differently after the show and they get different score points.

• Visited Booth - just registered for the drawing and/or snagged swag
• Engaged - had a demo, had a meaningful conversation with a rep
• Attended Speaking Session - went to one of our speaking sessions

[Anonymous]

Thank you all so much. This is all great information!

We had a recent tradeshow and so I created a program for it. I was able to attach the costs in the set up tab. We have a few different nurturing campaigns set up based on industry so I have a flow step to add them to those nurturing programs.

I really appreciate your insight. I may be back with more questions 🙂

[Anonymous]

Elliott,

How did you manage the process of uploading lists of leads with different program statuses? Did you just parse them into individual lists, or use some sort of identifier on a master list?

I appreciate the help!
-Trask

[Anonymous]

I should have mentioned that the Step values are the same for the "Visited Booth" and "Attended Speaking Session" program statuses and is a larger value for the "Engaged" program status.  This means that the "Engaged" program status will replace either of the others, and the "Visited Booth" and "Attended Speaking Session" program statuses can replace each other.  So we upload the "Engaged" list first, then the "Attended Speaking Session" list, then the "Visited Booth" list. The "Visited Booth" and "Engaged" lists are mutually exclusive, but the "Attended Speaking Session" list can include leads that are in either of the other two lists.

We also have a smart campaign that assigns more score points for "Engaged" than "Visited", so that is another reason those two lists are mutually exclusive.