Tradeshows exist to facilitate sales between exhibitors and attendees. Lead retrieval is a key part of the tradeshow cycle for exhibitors, second only to actually closing deals. There are many different approaches to capturing lead data and a number of companies providing these services. One example is Seattle-based Validar Inc. Victor Kippes, CEO of Validar, describes his company as “providing technology services that enable a marketing leader within an organization to measure the value of their marketing efforts, while at the same time drive leads to sales qualified to the exact specifications they desire.”
Validar services start with lead retrieval, either through the use of a show’s lead retrieval services or through Validar’s own proprietary technology. Kippes states, “We provide an alternative to renting lead retrieval from the show. So instead of taking the order form out of the exhibitor kit, filling it out and being presented with what is available at the event, we will give you a universal lead retrieval solution that can be customized to work at any event. When clients buy and work with us, we provide the service in conjunction with the registration contractor, so they are actually being serviced by two vendors, not just us. This makes for a much safer and easier implementation since we are working within the events ecosystems versus going around it.”
Validar customers have the option of using their cell phone as a lead retrieval device. Kippes continues, “If a customer is going to a hundred shows and he wanted to use his cell phone as his lead retrieval device, all we would need to do in order for him to initialize his device to work with our application is to send him a text message. When he clicks on that message, it will initialize his software, load his survey information, and be branded to the event and pre-mapped and tested to the badge media for that show. As he is capturing his leads, those leads will go into his CRM (customer relationship management) system, ranked and categorized with duplications eliminated in real time.” Any phone with the Windows Mobile 6 platform becomes a lead retrieval device by simply downloading Validar’s software and attaching a supplemental device, such as a barcode reader or badge scanner.
Utilizing Validar’s software, users can gather leads by asking targeted questions that will determine the priority of the leads. Through these questions, leads are then sorted into four or more categories, such as: A, B, C, and uncategorized. 'A' leads are very good prospects, 'B' leads are incubation prospects, 'C' leads are not prospects at all, and uncategorized leads are leads that are scanned but not qualified and therefore might fall into any of the three previous categories.
Kippes elaborates, “If an exhibiter comes and has a portfolio of questions he wants to ask attendees such as ‘buying authority?’, ‘role in company?’, ‘interested or not interested?’, ‘when do you want to buy?’, and ‘what product are you interested in?’, those are good questions to ask at a trade show. If someone comes in and says ‘I am c-level, I have budget, I want to buy right away and I want to buy a quantity of over one thousand,’ then I can put them into category A. In contrast, if an attendee responds, ‘I’m a student, don’t follow up with me, I just want your squishy ball,’ then I can put them into category C and forget about him. We can do this automatically by product type, customer type, or sales territory. The benefit of doing this is tremendous and worth its weight in gold to these organizations.”
By sorting this way, companies can focus on the leads that will be the most profitable to them. Kippes continues, “It is amazing how much money really smart public organizations are spending to work on bad leads. By not qualifying at capture, most organizations today are forcing their company to treat every lead as if it were an A lead. Companies are paying to follow up on bad leads while losing potential revenue by not finding the good leads from the start. If it takes a company four weeks to identify all of the good leads, then normally that number of leads will have decreased in the time it took to find them -- they will have lost revenue opportunity by not focusing on those deals faster.”
Many companies do not realize how much they can save in expenses and earn in revenue by being smarter about how they treat their leads, which Kippes says comes as a “huge surprise to a lot of companies.” He continues, “With new clients, we will do an analysis of the cost of business as usual for the company in comparison to the cost of business utilizing our lead capture application. We will embed into this exercise data from an actual test event where they have deployed our technology. Afterwards, we will produce a gap analysis for them detailing the economic benefit of our solution.
Validar’s gap analysis takes into account the various costs associated with working all of the leads gathered at a show. Kippes states, “We look at the cost of a company doing business as usual, using telemarketers or direct sales, and their production levels: how many calls a day they are making, how much the company is spending on them, etc. We will also attach to this model lead decay metrics – for example, how many of their A leads are no longer A leads two to six weeks after the event? What is the average sales price for an A lead and close rate? What is the average sales price and close rate for a B lead? We can then model all of these metrics and look at the value for however many shows we want. For one company we found they were spending around $3,300 qualifying leads per event by treating all of the leads the same. With our tool, separating the good leads from the bad, we were able to knock that cost down to just above $500 per show. And, by getting to the good leads faster, we were able to avoid lead decay and find this company an additional million dollars in revenue.”
A key value Kippes sees in his product is the ability to effectively utilize closed loop marketing by tracking three key metrics: actual, projected, and pipeline revenue. He states, “By effectively utilizing a customer relationship management system, a marketing professional can articulate their value back to their organization. An exhibitor for a company can say, ‘I had x amount of money that I spent at y number of tradeshows. I got this number of leads that are divided up into these four categories. Here is our projected revenue from the initial x amount of money we had to spend.’ Integrated with a CRM application like Salesforce.com, customers can also attach to their projected metrics pipeline and actual revenue from the leads identified at tradeshows. We provide this functionality to quantify and justify the costs associated with attending events.”
Lenny Daniele of Commvault is among customers who have benefited from Validar’s services. Daniele states, “Sometimes when we are trying a new technology we are skeptical as to what it is going to do for us, but Validar’s lead capture has lived up to what Victor claimed it would do. It has been great – if it was not we would not be using it.”
Every exhibitor can see benefit from utilizing Validar’s services to allow marketing personnel to easily quantify and justify the time and money spent on attending shows while increasing their revenue through quicker follow up of better leads.