After the Lord Mayors Show…

22 Nov 2016

As you may have seen on Twitter, I was delighted to attend the North East Expo last week, as described in my recent blog post.

But what now? When you get back from a conference, expo, or other big event, there’s still some work to be done. You have all of the information that you collected on the day, don’t let it all go to waste.

Enter that data!

By entering all of the names and information you collected into OpenCRM, you can keep hold of all of that valuable data and make sure that you stay in contact with all of those potential new customers.

In order to keep thing organised and be able to calculate ROI, I would always suggest you create a new Lead Source for these individuals. I created ‘North East Expo’—obvious, I know, but I like things to be clear.

This sounds very simple, but it really is a vital step.

Down the road, when you’re reflecting on the validity of attending the event—maybe to help you decide whether to attend another—you can run an Order Report by Lead Source and see if it was good value. An easy way to calculate ROI.

Record your Notes

This is tedious, but always worth it. Take those notes you scribbled on the back of the business card you were handed or in your trusty notepad and put them into an Activity.

Now, I have colleagues that are really organised and add their notes to the Mobile Framework the instant they meet someone, so they can skip this step, but I’m just not that person.

I’m a talker…and a scribbler…but not the most dedicated note taker.

Follow up!

Once you have put all of these valuable Leads into OpenCRM with the Lead Source ‘North East Expo,’ you can then create a Custom View to just display these Leads or just a simple search for them. I would always suggest creating an Event and add all your new Leads to it, but that’s entirely up to you.

The important thing to do at this stage is to follow up.

Dropping them a quick email with an offer or just to say hello, you remind them of the brief conversation you had with them and take away the burden of that first communication. Now they can respond easily and with just a couple clicks, you’ve got yourself an opportunity with real potential.

 

With these simple steps you’ve recorded some great quality data and done everything you can to make your expo experience worth the investment.

Plus, if you get an email out of the blue in a few months’ time, you will be able to look in OpenCRM and see that you met this individual at the North East Expo, that you spoke briefly about their new business, and that you dropped them an email to reconnect.