3 Ways to Get the Most From Your Trade Shows with Online Presentation Software

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 12:49:08 -0500

So what’s the measure of a successful trade show? Lots of business cards? Lots of conversations? Collecting lots of trinkets for your kids? The answer is, you won’t know until those leads you got (from collecting business cards and starting conversations) move through your sales process. Only until you learn the amount of business that originated from the trade show will you know how successful it was.

If we agree that success is defined by the amount of business originated from the trade show, then we can identify the main drivers that go a long way to determining success. They are the volume of leads you generate at the trade show and the yield of your lead-to-customer sales process.

This post focuses on the latter driver – improving the yield of your trade show lead-to-customer process. Three ways online presentation software can help you get the most from your trade shows are:

Prioritize Your Follow-Up
Fortify the Connection
Focus on the Relevant

Prioritize Your Follow-Up

A challenge to trade show follow-up is that you are instantly inundated with an influx of leads immediately following the trade show. In an ideal world, you would receive a batch of manageable, fresh leads on a daily basis. However, what happens in trade shows, as we all know, is that we work really hard for a few days and then have a (hopefully) huge volume of fresh leads all at once. The challenge is timely follow-up. While you’ve been working the trade show floor, you’ve had to let some of your other follow-up work wait. Now add to this, a huge stack of business cards that you need to get through and you’re faced with a situation where something needs to give. There are only so many hours in a day and, as a sales professional, you’re probably already working long hours. What ends up happening is that despite the large investment both your company (in dollars) and you (in hours) have made to earn those trade show leads, some leads sit and age. Unlike wine, leads do not get better with age.

How do you keep as many of those leads on the path through your sales process and avoid having them fall into the abyss of stale and poorly followed-up leads? The key is having the ability to focus your attention and time on those prospects that are most interested in your product or service. In essence, you need the ability to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff.

Online presentation software can give you this ability. By sending a trackable online presentation to every lead you earned from the trade show, you can then prioritize your follow-up based on the level of engagement your recipient has with your presentation. This enables you to invest your time in those prospects that are most likely to be interested. Wouldn’t you rather talk to someone who has viewed your presentation 3 times as opposed to someone that hasn’t viewed it at all?

Fortify the Connection

In sales, it is important to connect with your prospects. Trade shows offer a great medium for this in that it affords you the opportunity to come face to face with your prospects. However, it is less than ideal in that your prospect has likely met dozens, if not hundreds, of new faces in the very concentrated time of the trade show. Sometimes when you follow-up with that trade show lead, they may have a hard time distinguishing you in their memory from the many other people they met at the trade show.

With online multimedia presentations, you can quickly and easily capture and embed video. In addition to uploading video, you will have the ability to quick-capture video using your webcam. With the click of your mouse, you can record a video message. You might say something like, “Hi, this is Mike here. We met at the Javits Center last week at the Yadda Show. As I mentioned to you, we have a great line of widgets that could work really well for your company. Please click through this presentation and we’ll be in touch soon. Thanks.”

By sending a multimedia presentation complete with a personalized video, you are helping your lead remember who you are amongst the hundreds of other people your lead likely met at the show. In short, online presentations with personalized video can help you to fortify the connection.

Focus on the Relevant

The tracking features of online presentation software enable you to know who’s interested and who’s not. As previously mentioned, this is great for prioritizing follow-up. In addition to this tracking capability, there are also detailed analytics that gives the sender insight into the exact interaction levels that their recipient has had with their online presentation. In other words, you can tell what your recipient has looked at within your presentation and for how long. You’ll know how much time each recipient viewed each slide of your presentation.

With this information, you now have the ability to focus your pitch when you do follow-up. You can infer what your lead is most interested in because you’ll know how much they spend on each slide. For example, if my prospect spends most of their time on my slide that showcases some case studies and hardly any time on the slide that addresses our technology, I will be sure to focus on customer success stories and not our technology.

We’ve all heard the old cliché that it’s better to work smarter, not harder. Online presentation software enables sales professionals to do just that. While leveraging online presentations throughout the sales cycle can be of enormous benefit to salespeople, utilizing them for trade show follow-up is a quick and easy way to get the most from your trade show investment.

Why Use KinetiCast’s Online Sales Presentation Tool?

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:08:36 -0400

This morning I was speaking with the Vice President of Sales for our largest customer. I could not help but remember that our relationship began with a cold call over a year ago. The first conversation was very short, he asked for some information. I sent him a KinetiCast presentation, then followed up with him after he watched it. The second conversation was essentially him, telling me, that they did not need KinetiCast because they already had PowerPoint, video and email.

So I asked him, if he had these tools already, were they experiencing the growth they were hoping for? He said that they were not, so I asked what was stopping them? We started to communicate in a different way. Him asking me lots of questions about potential applications, and me asking how they were currently selling, ultimately identifying some perfect uses for online sales presentations in their sales process.

Inspired by these events:

Here are five reasons I have given to prospects why they should use KinetiCast’s online sales presentation tool.

1. Are your prospects and customers important enough for you to customize communications for them?

Of course they are! KinetiCast will give you the ability to easily personalize each and every sales communication, actually prompting the sales professional to think of a specific value proposition for each and every sales communication.

2. Are your sales communications receiving the attention they deserve?

It is impossible to tell with the conventional sales arsenal. But with KinetiCast you will be able to send a message that is tracked with award winning analytics so that you will know who is interested, and exactly what part of your message they are most interested in.

3. Are you leveraging the power of multimedia in your sales communications?

This is nearly impossible due to mailbox size constraints. Studies have shown that video and audio can significantly increase viewer engagement and retention. Is this happening for your organization? Why not?

KinetiCast is the simplest and most effective way for sales people to create, send and track multimedia presentations that are proven to work.

4. Do you have the ability to embed key information in your sales communication?

A call to action is the logical next step in the sales process, or buying cycle. If you take the time to interact with your prospect, at least let them know what you would like them to do next. Nobody buys confused. While you are at it, include all of the resources they will need to start a successful partnership with your organization.

5. Are you gaining the desired incremental revenue from your existing customer base?

It is widely known that your greatest potential for new business resides in your existing customer base. Is this happening for you? Why not?

Primarily because sales people can get so wrapped up in mining for new gems, that the ones they already have get taken while they are not looking.

KinetiCast will enable proactive customer communications so you can identify and qualify desirable business from your best prospects, while keeping you connected.

I am not saying that there is anything wrong with the tools that are already being employed by your sales team. I am simply saying that there may be a better way to use these resources, and to differentiate yourself from everyone else who uses them.

So please ask yourself the questions above, then give us a call.

KinetiCast Blog

3 Ways to Get the Most From Your Trade Shows with Online Presentation Software

Why Use KinetiCast’s Online Sales Presentation Tool?