Best practices in working with sales to capture leads from tradeshows?

[Anonymous]

What is your most foolproof method to align with sales to capture leads from tradeshows? Is it via their salesforce mobile app? A list you collect afterwards and import into Marketo? I'm trying to please the masses but don't want to create too many steps or allow leads to be left on the table.

Traditionally we ask the sales team to provide an excel spreadsheet which we import into the marketo program in order to process and tag with the data we need accordingly.

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Naor,

If you can get an iPad for your sales team, the Marketo Events app does a pretty nice job of managing both people who registered/were invited and adding new people directly into your program.

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone. I've used the marketo ipad app extensively but it is very buggy - unless they've had any recent updates? For me, it always freezes and the sales team gets frustrated. The import option of course is always on the table, but I did not think of Josh's idea to create a landing page kiosk specifically for that event. This is smart thinking, I just have to ensure it is mobile friendly!

[Anonymous]

Courtney - would you say the Marketo Events app is better suited for when you're hosting your own events with a reg list to be checked-in etc. as opposed to identifying new leads at a tradeshow booth?

[Anonymous]

Hi Naor -

I like Courtney Grimes​ suggestion. We are trying to get to that point.

However, for many of the trade show we attend the association has a sponsored "lead scanner" company. The exhibitors are forced to purchase the lead scanner from the association so we're able to scan attendees badges to obtain their information. We are then able to download a file with all the attendee information. To my knowledge, the Marketo Events app doesn't have that capability (yet).

So what we're doing in the meantime...

We're importing our trade show leads via CSV file directly into our trade show programs on the "members" tab. We do clean up the lists before importing them. Due to lead routing rules within our CRM, there are certain fields needed to pass leads over. We always import the leads with "most recent lead source", "most recent lead source detail", indication if the lead is a MQL. In our flow steps we create an interesting moment (type = milestone) so our sales team knows how the lead was obtained and acquisition program. It will also be important that you have your trade show channel steps defined so you can attribute success to the program.

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

I agree with the other responses. You may also want to just create a Kiosk page for the event where Sales types in the names directly for the key people they want to claim later.

[Anonymous]

Do you have to adjust settings in order to cache page or avoid auto-populating most recent form submit values and hopefully avoid any negative impact on cookies/web tracking reports.

[Anonymous]

What are the advantages of using another lead capture tool that integrates with Marketo that you can't accomplish with Marketo LP and forms?