8 Best Practices for Lead Capture
In this three part transcribed video series, Ryan Schefke, CEO at Captello unpackages 8 best practices to help you make every event a success. Follow the full experience on video including associated presentation slides, free downloadable materials, and interactive activations.
BEST PRACTICE #1: Establish a Process
Building a business myself, and every company I talk to, if you want to grow, which I assume you do, you have to have process to scale. You do things that can be repeatable.
I want to emphasize, to be good at lead capture, you have to have a process.
How do you create a process?
1: TALK TO YOUR TEAM
The first thing that you should do before you pick up any solution, any software, is to talk to your team.
Event coordinators have the fifth most stressful job. And this is right up there with ambulance, police forces, very stressful job. There’s so much going on. And we see it, again, because we’re a provider.
People come to us last minute, and it drives me crazy, “Oh, I have an event next week, I need a solution.” But you have to have a process, you’ve got to talk to sales team. Ask them, “What’s important to you? What qualifiers do you need when you capture a lead? What information is important?”
Talk to your marketing team. What does marketing want? What information does marketing want in their system? What is their system? Is it a marketing automation platform like HubSpot? Is it a CRM? What is it? Talk to your team, don’t do it alone. That’s why you’re stressed, “I can do it. I got it.”
2: SKETCH IT OUT ON PAPER
Put your flow down of what you want to happen. What kind of information do you want to flow in? What information do you want to collect? Before I did this presentation, I thought it was overkill, but they had me do a mind map and chart it out, and I hated it, but it’s good. Do that. It gets you to think. Put it on paper. Map out your lead flow, what you want that to look like.
3: FIGURE OUR HOW YOU WANT TO QUALIFY YOUR LEADS
- How are you going to respond?
- Where do you want that information to go?
- How do you want to hand it off?
- Then what should happen after that handoff takes place?
BEST PRACTICE #2: Align Company & Personal Priorities
Last night at a little social gathering that I had, I was talking to the CEO of Skyline, Anthony. “Anthony,” I said, “What do you care about?” He replied, “I care about growing my business. We need to grow.”
And what’s the measurement of growth? Revenue. So revenue is super important.
How are we going to get revenue?
When we exhibit we’re going to get revenue by generating leads. Got to turn the leads into revenue. But at the very top level, that CEO is saying revenue. It’s important to them, but there’s not really an alignment.
I’m oversimplifying this, but this may be what we do when we get ready to exhibit. It might look like something like this:
If we wrote to our own company, “Dear company, here is my trade show prep list in priority order”…
- I need to build my booth.
- I’ve got to get my collateral.
- I have to organize my team.
Then at the very end, “What am I going to do for lead retrieval? I have to get lead retrieval.”
It’s an afterthought.
None of these other things matter if you don’t capture your leads and do a good job with it.
So we really need to think about lead capture first.
I’m going to design my booth experience and how am I going to attract people? How am I going to engage them? How am I going to capture leads? Why? Because I want to keep my job. I want to impress my company. I want to make sure we’re generating revenue.
Lead capture has evolved. I put it into three buckets:
1: The old way
2: A new way
3: The modern way.
What’s the old way? Lead retrieval.
Really as an exhibitor, do we want to go and retrieve our leads? You see that little barcode scanner, that’s how lead retrieval was. I know it’s evolved, but that’s the old way.
What’s wrong with the old way?
- It takes time to get your leads.
Sure, we’ll email them to you. You get them a week later. You’re sharing devices. That in itself is counterintuitive with lead capture.
- You’ve got to pay for each device.
That means I have to limit who I give it to. That doesn’t make sense. If I want to make sure I’m capturing leads, I want everybody to have the ability to capture leads. But paying for a device, you have to scrutinize who gets it, because it costs money and then you’re not getting the data you want. This thing doesn’t know your qualifiers.
What is the new way?
I’m going to puke if I ask, “What’s you’r lead capture strategy,” and I hear anybody say, “I’m just going to use what the show provides.” You’re not going to have process that way. You are now the afterthought that I told you we shouldn’t be. I don’t think your CEO or CMO would love that. But this is typically how think we act.
What are the problems with the default solution that the show provides?
- It’s a broken business model. Those reg companies, they want to charge a per user fee. Again, just like that little handheld scanner, you have to say, “Okay, only my sales people should have it.” Because you’re looking at costs. If you have a big booth with 40 or 50 people, everybody has to pay for it? Holy cow! That’s super expensive. Again, it’s counterintuitive.
- Disparate solutions
When you’re using this new way, every event you go to, it’s changing. It’s different. It’s not predictable. You don’t have control. And every time with these new solutions, you have to train your staff and teach them how to use it. Oh, it can’t collect qualifiers? Oh, I can’t rate people? You have to have control. You have to have a process.
We sign customers because we provide solutions for lead capture. But our clients that come to us, Siemens, Robert Half, they make us sign these data processing agreements and these master subscription agreements. Why? Because it is important to our legal team and we have to do it this way.
We have to cover all our T’s and C’s. Yet we go to all these exhibitions and we exhibit and we just give them our credit cards and take what the show provides. There’s a disconnect.
You’ve got to have compliancy. Ultimately that’s going to matter.
- Delays in getting your data
With the show default lead capture solution, lead data is controlled by someone else. You might not have it in real time. So again, unpredictable.To be scalable, we got to be predictable. We must have process.
>>> CONTINUE TO PART II OF BEST PRACTICES FOR LEAD CAPTURE >>>
Captello is a multifunctional event platform that provides: Universal Lead Capture, User Customizable Gamification, Marketing Automation, CRM, Lead Management, Sales Enablement, Leader Boards, Point Rewards & e-Gift Cards, Waypoints for Sessions & Scavenger Hunts, Player Profiles, and more with over 3,000 integrations for all common CRM and Marketing Automation platforms.
To see how Captello’s growing library of digital activations (games), universal lead capture, and reward-based solutions can help your company generate more leads at your trade shows, contact us today!
