LeadWare Strategic Program

The LeadWare platform is a web-based tool that bridges the gap between Marketing and Sales. LeadWare Browser is the first fully functional web application providing a lead management tool for exhibitors to design and control their interactions with booth attendees before, during and post-show. Our platform offers best practice functionality to support the strategic intent of a diverse customer base.

Given the high cost to scan an attendee badge with show lead retrieval systems, we are often called by companies trying to save on the cost of lead retrieval. We believe this focus on the dollar cost of lead retrieval is misplaced; the focus should be achieving your strategic objectives and realizing a robust Return on Objective (ROO).

The purpose of a tradeshow is the matching of buyer and seller to achieve marketing and sales objectives. Marketing strives to meet defined goals e.g. accurate data, branding and the enhancement of the attendee purchase intent; on the other hand, sales needs accurate information to rapidly determine the business potential of a booth visitor. The first step in meeting the marketing and sales objectives is the primary qualification process. The effectiveness of the qualification process will have a direct impact on the ROI / ROO of the tradeshow.

A show lead retrieval system is an ineffective tool for meeting marketing and sales objectives. Show lead retrieval companies offer no ability to accelerate the sales cycle, leverage brand exposure to tradeshow attendees or reduce pressure on budgets by offering economies of scale or the ability to electronically correct the critically important badge information i.e. email address and phone numbers.

Embarrassingly, having to use a pencil or pen to correct information collected electronically calls attention to the archaic design architecture of the show lead retrieval systems. Also, show lead retrieval companies will often charge an exorbitant amount of money to give you access to your scanned badge information before the end of the show. Essentially, you are paying twice for your information. At the end of the show, you leave with little else but a text or excel file of, at best, poorly qualified contact information.

The Power of Branching Questions

Research shows that asking questions to a respondent outside of their business responsibility is aggravating. Consequently, asking the same questions of all booth attendees ensures that you will aggravate some portion of your visitors during the initial qualification process; there are hundreds of exhibitors taking your attendee through the same potentially aggravating process and using the same process is not the best first impression of your company’s uniqueness.

Research also shows that new client acquisition is the primary focus of the 76% of tradeshow exhibitors in 2010. The use of branching questions to qualify booth attendees is a critical step to meeting the primary strategic objective for sales: the delivery of the specific client business needs to the sales team.

The scanning of a badge is the first step to document a visit to the booth. It is quite common to have 4 to 8 different types of show attendees’ enter the booth. If you ask each attendee type six unique questions, your staff needs to remember and document as many as 24 to 48 questions and the associated answers. Without the use of LeadWare, this would be a very difficult task to accomplish for the booth staff.

The second step is asking meaningful questions to gather predetermined information for the marketing and sales team. In order to ask the meaningful survey questions to all of your booth visitors, you must utilize branching questions. The ability to document job specific answers will provide actionable knowledge to the sales organization to accelerate the sale to a successful conclusion. For marketing, branching questions gives you the ability to gather thousands of consistent data points across your events.

Clearly, not properly qualifying attendees and possibly aggravating them in the process is counterproductive. The use of branch/skip logic survey questions allows the surveyor to send respondents down different paths depending on how they respond to a question. To gather accurate and succinct information, qualifying questions can be based on job responsibilities and what information the sales team requires within the various job responsibilities or specific information about a stated product interest.

The Delivery of Sales Information

Within the booth, the optimal scenario would be a “meaningful interaction” followed by the delivery of the customer’s accurate business needs and product interests to the sales organization by an efficient booth team.

The sales team’s ability to review the salient details of the attendee interaction in the booth is critical to accelerating the sale. It is often frustrating to an attendee to discuss their needs in the booth only to have to start from scratch with a salesman on the phone 1500 miles away. You can be the perfect booth person but your value and hard work can be diminished if the needs of the customer are not effectively transmitted to the sales team.

The salient points of a 10 minute conversation in a booth can be electronically captured in 30 seconds and up loaded to a CRM in 30 seconds. Companies gain considerable competitive advantage when quality information is immediately available for action steps. It is quite common for our customers to have a qualified booth attendees information in a CRM before the close of a show day or at the least first thing in the morning. Your sales team can be talking to decision makers on a specific project with a strong competitive advantage within hours of a booth visit.

However, without delivery of the aforementioned business needs to the company sales organization, a “meaningful interaction” is tantamount to a tree falling in the forest. More importantly to your sales organization, without the qualifying information, the contact information now amounts to a cold call: a very, very expensive cold call.

Currently, the average industry cost of a face-to-face meeting in a booth is $203; the medical industry cost is $500 to $600. High quality contact information from a list company costs approximately one dollar per name. Let’s assume 50 quality face-to-face meetings in the booth. Without the information from the “meaningful interaction” collected and delivered to the sales team, you will pay $10,150 for information that would cost only $50.

And yet, we still get calls because someone wants to save $50 on lead retrieval.

Electronic Media Delivery Systems

Based on the ability of the seller to effectively qualify the customer as a buyer, the next task is to provide the requested product information. There are multiple methods to deliver product information; many clients prefer to deliver product information electronically in the form of retention e-mails. Retention emails are sent with the recipient’s permission and, as such, will continue to replace paper communications and will account for more than 30% of all marketing messages in consumers’ in-boxes by 2014.

The electronic medium supports a positive environmental statement by eliminating paper production and fossil fuel shipping costs with the additional benefit delivering information immediately to the desk of the requesting customer.

Currently, there is no cost effective lead retrieval solution provided by a tradeshow that offers branching questions and electronic product delivery system except for the shows managed by Capture Technologies.

The LeadWare Annual License

The annual license from Capture Technologies is the only true “economy of scale” offering in the tradeshow industry. The ability to reduce the cost of lead retrieval is directly linked to the number of tradeshows attended and savings realized due to the functionality of the LeadWare™ Browser platform. For a fixed fee you can use LeadWare™ an unlimited number of times during a calendar year on a computer. So as the number of events attended increases, the cost of lead retrieval decreases. When adjusted for savings realized because of the software functionality, you are actually returning dollars to your budget.

LeadWare™ Annual License offers substantial savings over standard tradeshow lead retrieval priced at a conservative cost of $300 per unit.

LeadWare™ Annual License Savings

20 Events 16%
30 Events 44%
40 Events 58%
50 Events 66%

The annual license can be the easiest and most economical approach for companies exhibiting at multiple events. You retain the badge scanning equipment during the period of your annual license. Your inventory of badge readers and a business card scanner can be moved from show-to-show in our custom shipping container by your Exhibit House or Tradeshow Team. CRM compatible event files can be uploaded to LeadWare™ Browser for immediate access.

Browser Edition is a fully functional web application providing a lead management tool for exhibitors to design and control their interactions with booth attendees before, during and post-show. Survey questions, product catalog, corporate graphics, online surveys and e-mail blast can now be controlled from the web. Tradeshow managers can design their event from any computer connected to the web and deliver an event file to a booth captain or exhibit house. Achieve superior functionality at a substantial savings.

A Step-by-Step Strategic Plan

To improve your ROI, the first step is implementing a streamlined cost structure for lead retrieval by taking advantage of LeadWare. For companies doing fewer shows, the software can be used on a show by show basis for either $250 for the basic version and $500 for the professional version. The reduction in staff hours alone will cover the cost of using LeadWare™.

The second step is the elimination of the production, shipment and drayage of onsite paper marketing materials. That savings could be as little as $300 to $3,000 per show (some ship pallets of marketing materials). Our LeadWare™ product catalog ensures the optimum in after-show contact to drive sales with dynamically merged custom HTML documents with specifically selected product URL's sent daily. This allows potential customers to push product information back to corporate stakeholders and decision team members for review which often promotes follow up visits to your booth.

This also makes a very positive environmental statement for an event. Plus, the harsh reality is this: 70% of this product information is thrown away before the attendees leave the hotel. It is clear that the use of paper marketing materials at tradeshows is dying. Imagine an environmental solution that protects your budget and leverages sales.
The third step is the efficient qualification of potential customers visiting your booth. Today’s exhibitor, small or large, wants to gather specific client information with branching questions and deliver specific product information electronically to accelerate their sales cycle

The fourth step is providing marketing teams the tools to generate pre-show and post-show HTML brand extension documents and online surveys that present a sophisticated image for their company. The ability to data-merge the attendee information into HTML documents for e-mail campaigns is an important function of LeadWare™ software. Electronic information is a competitive weapon in business and Capture Technologies offers you the tools to compete.

Finally LeadWare™ is the only unified lead retrieval software platform in the industry that offers custom surveys and a product catalog integrated with e-mail capabilities to send HTML product centric documents via a web application. Attendees can now be qualified to a much deeper extent than current show lead retrieval offerings available to show organizers. A common platform also saves considerable staff time and allows a single event file to used across multiple technologies such as laptops and mobile wireless devices. The Total Cost of Ownership of LeadWare is very low based on multiple cost reduction opportunities provided by the software.

We save companies tens of thousands of dollars on lead retrieval not because they were trying to save money but because they wanted to be efficient in meeting their strategic intent.

Call me and take the first step to an effective strategic plan powered by LeadWare™.

Steve McWilliams, VP Sales
smcwilliams@captureleads.com
973-890-7600 ext 117