Summary:

The annual NAB Show is known as more than a great place to showcase technology and services. It’s a one-of-a-kind opportunity for businesses to connect with customers and capture new leads.

In her post titled “4 Lead Follow-up Mistakes You’ll Never Make Again,” marketing guru Cindy Zuelsdorf of Kokoro Marketing explains how to be sure you’re making the most of all the work you put into the show. Avoid these mistakes and get other helpful pointers on effective lead generation and follow-up after the show.

4 Lead Follow-up Mistakes You’ll Never Make Again

Say you’re back from your latest online or in person event with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of leads. What do you do next? Do you send a thank you email and then just hand the leads to your sales team? Or make one quick call yourself, then hope for the best?

These days, it’s just not enough to send one email to a new prospect as a follow-up or just hand leads off to your salespeople. That’s why I work with so many of my customers to help them augment the work their sales team is already doing.

Once you’ve captured new leads, follow up with a great system that will help you succeed! Don’t let a single opportunity fall through the cracks. Here are a few of my best tips I give my clients to help them avoid common lead follow-up mistakes.

1. Don’t scatter your efforts across various products or services.

Pick one product or one service to work on first. I always suggest going with something that’s easy or offers a lot of opportunity.

2. Don’t go in unprepared.

Before you write that email or make that call, make a note of the 3-5 typical steps in the buying process. Identify the steps most people take before making the purchase. You probably know all this already, so just keep it top of mind.

3. Don’t forget to meet prospects with the information they want and need.

Think about the questions people typically ask about your product or service, and then create content and emails around each step of the buying process. Go one step further and choose the content style your prospects like most, be it an email, blog, press release, FB live, webinar, video demo, LinkedIn article, interview, lunch and learn, checklist, or SMS message.

4. Don’t work harder than you have to!

Put in some automated systems for efficiency and repeatability. Automation gives you the time you need to connect with people. Use technology (marketing automation is my fave!) to do better — and give yourself more time to do what you love.

Next Steps:

Maximize that lead gen! Talking to a promising prospect? Snap a photo of their business card on your phone and bring them right into your database? Ask visitors to your website or Facebook page to fill out a form, then send them directly into your database. Put in place a system that makes it easy for people to become part of your community. Give them a simple way to indicate interest, raise a hand, sign up, or join!

Turn all those random contacts into useful leads. Whether it’s a stack of business cards, new contacts in your phone, or an email scrawled on a napkin, use of today’s many fabulous systems and tools out there to bring them into your marketing system! Do this for every booth meeting, demo, and to your virtual events and online, meetings, too. Don’t leave that money lying on the table!

Wouldn’t it be nice to know who opens your emails, what they click on, and if they have visited your website? Use lead scoring to track who’s most interested and engaged. Lead scoring also allows you to put a rubric (above) in place that assigns points to different actions.

Fast lead capture for shows and traveling: Use your phone to get leads into your CRM

What To Do Next In Your Business? (Using Lifecycle Marketing to Skyrocket Your Business)

NAB Show Webinar – Lead Follow-up After the Show

Are you responsible for sales and marketing at a high tech company?

What people are saying about Kokoro

Cindy is such an incredible marketer, but also one of the most amazing business owners skilled at sales and the sales process. Cindy knows how to maintain control of the conversation while really making her prospective clients comfortable to ensure they get their needs met. Cindy is great at helping prospective clients see areas of opportunity they may not see themselves that are in their business by asking great specific questions. If Iwas a business owner seeking a head of sales position, I would do everything i could to poach Cindy away from her own business because she is amazing in growing businesses!

Kristina Rueling Regional Partner Manager at Keap

The crew at Kokoro Marketing was great to work with. Cindy and her team helped us out by providing some of the content creation and writing for our video marketing campaigns that my team and I didn't have time to do. They did the video editing, blog post, wrote several email marketing pieces, created the social media post templates for us to us, the video description, video transcript, and gave it to use in an easy to use format for us to then push it out in our marketing. Thank you!

Heidi Steffen Chief Revenue Officer at TitanTV, Inc; Marketing Manager at The Linn County Fair; Vice Chair of ATBA

I was on our stand at our biggest exhibition of the year and a colleague asked me, “Does the work that Kokoro do for you actually do anything, do you measure it?” I pointed to a demo happening right next to us and said, “That guy is here because of the email promotion we did. He replied to the email and set up the appointment. In fact, the 10 appointments we have this morning are a result of our work with Kokoro.”

Saifudin Mohd. Sani Regional Manager at Techtel

Kokoro is very professional and organized running webinars. So we don’t need to worry about anything with the webinar set up. They organize it, direct it, and then run the webinar. And even after, they gave me all the scores and quantitative information about how many people were there, their names, and how to follow up, plus they follow up with eblasts, so it’s very sequential and continuous. It’s been a very tangible, visible reaction from customers and very positive.

Satoshi Kanemura President and COO, FOR-A America

Team Kokoro actively feeds my obsession with results! They know their craft inside and out, and Cindy’s extensive knowledge of InfusionSoft and digital marketing is truly impressive. Her professionalism shines through in everything she does!

Carolyn Archambault Director, Marketing & Communications at Embrionix

Cindy is terrific to work with - professional, enthusiastic and highly motivated to thrill her clients. My favorite part about working with Cindy is she has a consistent passion for understanding customer problems and solutions from their point of view - and seeks to write and talk about them in the language they use. This a sign of a skilled marketer.

Alan Repech Data-driven Marketer in Media and Entertainment and Pro A/V

Emotion Systems is a small company, but marketing automation allows us to punch well above our class. Without significantly increasing our overhead, we’ve been able to turn a successful organization into a much more successful organization.

MC Patel Founder & CEO, Emotion Systems

When it comes to sales and marketing, most professionals know one or the other well, or possess mediocre skills in both. At Kokoro Marketing, Cindy and her team have an unfair advantage of knowing and implementing both sales and marketing techniques and best practices with precision and drive. The excellence with which the team works ensures all partners are well serviced and receive special attention to their brand’s voice and goals. When you want to drive engagement, convert leads into clients, and ensure continued development of clients into brand evangelists, Kokoro is who I recommend. Their industry knowledge, passion for marketing and sales, and desire to help brands achieve the best results is like none other!

Shell Vera Voice Discovery Coach and Writer

All of this is a whole lot of awesomeness! Thank you for taking the time to read, watch, and understand Vizrt’s key messaging in our content, and spice it up to the next level. The copy within each email is exactly what I was hoping to see, and only wish I had the time to write.

Melanie Crandall Freding AMECS Demand Generation Manager

People remember people who treat them well, and Cindy understands this. She makes every client feel special, no matter how large or small, and she helps her clients do the same for their prospects and customers. After all, a small customer today might just wind up being your next big customer!

Jessica Colyer Director of Business Development and Customer Care, D2D Technologies

Cindy helped me launch my new consulting business last year. She has a keen sense of the market and was quickly able to connect with my customers, launch a web portal, and helped me become relevant in LinkedIn. She is also very agile and able to pivot a marketing plan when the need arises. She is a joy to work with.

Chris Homer

Even though I’d meet prospects at trade shows and have a great conversation, things would go cold after an email or two because I simply didn’t have time to follow up and nurture that relationship. If I didn’t hear back from them, I was onto the next thing. Since we started working with Kokoro, we’ve definitely become more engaged with our customers. Now we’ve got a lot going on, but I don’t have to physically do all the work. And our marketing work is turning into leads and sales. That’s the biggest impact for us.

Jill Sorgi Director of Sales and Marketing, Challenger Communications

In a word, Cindy is “amazing.” She’s a marketing expert who understands complex technical concepts like an engineer and is able to explain them through her marketing. In the past I have struggled finding marketing professionals who understand the broadcast television markets and technology. Cindy gets it. She is able to explain and speak to customer pain and present solutions through marketing. She’s an expert at marketing automation (especially but not limited to InfusionSoft), email marketing, online lead generation, Facebook ads, social media marketing, LinkedIn marketing, graphic design, webinar marketing, white paper or ebook marketing, content marketing and so much more. She stays up to date with the latest marketing trends and automation tools. Cindy is a valued member of the VidOvation marketing team. She is a true pleasure to work with and I highly recommend her.

Jim Jachetta, MS EE CTO, VidOvation

The pre-NAB campaign we did with Kokoro worked on multiple levels in that it gave us visibility and exposure, highlighted what we're about, and gave them that little bit of an appetizer, if you will, to come see us at the show and find out more and get the full course. A majority of people came to the booth saying they wanted to see more or know more about what I was highlighting in the campaign.

Joe LoGrasso Managing Director, 2110 Solutions

I am new to Cindy’s service on LinkedIn, it is refreshing to see immediate results from a marketing campaign. I have a fairly narrow target market and the results after 2 weeks have been amazing. Cindy and Fallon have been great to work with and really know how to get results. If you are using LinkedIn as a marketing platform, you need to see what they can do. Their follow-up and follow-through are the best. They deliver!

Jay Maynard Meemic Insurance Company

I have been working in Graphic Design & Marketing Communications for over 35 yrs. and I hate to admit it but I had not kept up with current trends, especially Social Media. I think Cindy Zuelsdorf and her company Kokoro Marketing offers its customers the latest insights into the most effective marketing tools & strategies for today's world especially with regards to how the business marketplace has changed since the pandemic. Cindy's experience in social media, webinars and automated marketing is second to none. She's among the best you will find to boost your business. Make sure to read her new book, " 7 Marketing Basics". I have known her for over 5 years and she has always been a pleasure to work with and always eager to share her business knowledge. I would highly recommend Cindy for any marketing needs that your business might require.

Gary Whitten Freelance Graphic Designer / Product Photographer / Retoucher in Albuquerque

We’ve been working together for 1 year and have developed all kinds of simple, efficient, cost-effective marketing emails for DekTec. Cindy understands that the key to success is providing simple, meaningful information about products, technology and market to our customer base. She advises us on what works and what doesn’t, helps us develop the content and handles all the work to make it happen successfully. Results in terms of visibility and sales are obvious. Cindy and her team have the right approach to modern marketing in today’s over-communicated-with-no-real-substance world. I would recommend Kokoro and Cindy in a heartbeat.

Stephanie Billat General Manager, DekTec America Inc.