This is the resource page for NAB Show Exhibitors webinar with Cindy Zuelsdorf and Kevin Joyce.
Mini ROI Checklist:
1. How Often
Determine how often you will measure KPIs (key performance indicators).
E.g. Weekly, monthly… 30 days or x number of days after event.
2. What
Here are some KPIs to consider:
- Number of opportunities
- Number of opportunities that moved to another stage in the sales pipeline (e.g. new lead, demo, quote, deciding, won)
- Total unweighted and weighted value of the sales pipeline
- Marketing campaign engagement increase within the next
- MQL (marketing qualified lead)
- SQL (sales qualified lead)
- Website activity
Resources and helpful links:
Join the Broadcast Media Marketing Group here
Register for the next NAB Show Webinar here
Do you like this webinar? If so, tell NAB Show here on LinkedIn
Book with excellent info and examples of ROI (return on investment) tracking, scorecards, KPIs (key performance indicators).
Enjoy The Replay Here
Cindy Z.: I’m Cindy Zuelsdorf with the NAB Show Exhibitors’ webinar, and we’re here for you to help you have a great show. I’m also with Kokoro Marketing, my company, and today we’re going to look at how to track your ROI, return on investment for your trade show or event. So welcome. We’re here to share some real info that Kevin and I use in our businesses every day and share exactly what we’re doing with you. And by the end of this, you’re going to have several takeaways that you can apply immediately. And Kevin’s an interesting guy, and he told me yesterday when we were doing a little bit of a rehearsal that he’s been a trade show skeptic over the years and he’s had 180-degree turn. And he also talked about how trade shows are like French bread, which was really interesting. So welcome Kevin Joyce, Chief Commercial Officer at TAG video systems. How’s your day going, Kevin?
Kevin Joyce: Good morning, Cindy. Great. How are you?
Cindy Z.: Great. All right, Kevin, let’s jump right into it. When we talked the other day, you said trade show leads are like a French bread. Tell me what that’s all about.
Kevin Joyce: French bread gets stale very quickly. It’s delicious. I mean the world known for their bread, but if you don’t eat it right away, it goes stale. And there’s no difference with that in leads. Leads are, the highest value of a lead is as soon as you get that lead. And so there has to be some immediate continuation of engagement. And of course you have to be careful. You don’t want to burden people and turn them away. And that’s the nuance and challenge that we have in this art of marketing.
Kevin Joyce: But having spent the lion’s share of my career as a salesperson, leading sales forces, 32 years going to trade shows in seven different industries, it’s just been so frustrating, the amount of time we spend as marketers to invest in these trade shows. And to have the salespeople show up, waltz in, go to the booth overview and not follow up on these leads within a short period of time, just drives me crazy. And so instilling in both the marketing team and the sales team, the need to follow up on leads immediately and that there’s a direct correlation between how quickly you follow up on a lead and the value that lead has in your pipeline is an essential culture that needs to be impressed upon any organization.
Cindy Z.: Wait, wait, are you saying that when you get a lead at a show like NAB Show and you follow up with it on Friday after the show versus that next Friday or the Friday after that, that actually matters in terms of the value? I mean you place a different value on it?
Kevin Joyce: Absolutely. And that’s no different for any lead that an organization generates. Shows and of course in our industry, there are many events and a lot of outstanding events. So I don’t want to take away from the two primary shows that we often think about, but NAB and IBC are these anchors within our year that we work towards. But it’s true for any marketing activity, whether it’s a campaign, whether, it’s a press release, whether it’s a sponsorship, we track the value of our pipelines every single week. And when we say we that’s tracked by the marketing organization and by the sales organization. And you should be able to correlate a marketing activity within a finite period of time that you’ve defined and whether it has a direct value increase in the pipeline.
Kevin Joyce: And when a marketing team start talking about what they do, and let’s talk about NAB and NAB, I can tell you in my 10 years in this industry, NAB has contributed up to 40% of of the pipelines that I’ve been associated with on an annual basis, which is a massive number. And when you take IBC and NAB, they really are huge anchors. The sales team has to understand that the marketing team is thinking about their pipeline and and if you start correlating trade shows, leads, activity, and immediately start tracking that to the value of the company’s pipeline and the individual sales people’s pipelines, you will get faster responses on the leads you get from a show.
Cindy Z.: And I’m going to just stop for just one second there. We have a lot of super experienced people on the call and there’s probably some folks on the call who might want to know what a pipeline is. And so Fallon, if you can just put the link over for the webpage with helpful resources and stuff on it. We have a quick checklist of ROI things there and the reason I bring it up now is we talked about pipeline right now and that might mean they start as a new lead, they get a demo, they get a quote, and then closed one, or closed or one. That’s a really simple example of a pipeline, but just wanted to share that with some of the folks who are thinking, “Oh, pipeline?” And I’ll hear pipeline used for PR. You’ll hear PR people and they’re talking about something completely different from what Kevin and I are thinking about in terms of a sales pipeline.
Kevin Joyce: That’s true. That’s true, Cindy. That’s a good point. It’s too ambiguous a term and pipeline means a different thing, whether you are in Alaska working in the oil business or whether you’re in marketing or sales. so for this discussion, I’m going to talk about, the context of the pipeline is the actual sales forecast, the forecast that the sales organization is working towards and closing on a daily basis. But let’s say most organizations forecast monthly, I forecast weekly and the new organization I’ve been in for 30 years forecasts pipeline weekly. Sales people hate that but the only way you can really track a change in the value of a pipeline, positive or negative, is you track it weekly and then you can measure monthly more accurately.
Kevin Joyce: So when I’m saying the value of the pipeline, I’m actually talking about the hard core value of a sales forecast that’s being influenced by the marketing organization because that’s the only way salespeople listen. I mean we’re marketers here, so let’s not lose sight of one thing, we only care about one thing in our life and that’s ourselves. And so as long as you know that, then you can market to the sales people. And, “What if I could increase your pipeline’s value by 20% in the next month?” Then a salesperson might actually listen and work very closely with marketing to be sure that their pipeline is, or their forecast is more valuable tomorrow than it was today. There’s no such thing as too much money, too much time, or your pipeline being too big. So they should be listening to you.
Cindy Z.: Now we told everybody on this call that we were going to talk about which methods work, what numbers you need to track and really where to start. And so I wanted to jump into one of the numbers that you talked about and maybe we can look at how a person can track that in real life, who’s maybe never done it before. So one of the things you talked about was the value of a pipeline measured weekly and that’s what you’re talking about right now. Is that a spreadsheet or how do you do that in your company? And just in the simplest, most basic terms?
Kevin Joyce: Sure, sure. It could be a spreadsheet. But one thing I’ll say before I answer the question is that often the tool, the CRM, Salesforce, the spreadsheet, can be an inhibitor to really the primary goal, which is tracking the value of the investments that you’re making in your business. And so people will say, “Well, once Salesforce is up and ready and I can actually track my opportunities correctly, then I’ll update correctly.” That’s a bunch of baloney and you can send them the 64 pack of crayons with the built in sharpener and say, “Here, here’s a crayon, here’s construction paper. You can do it with that.”
Kevin Joyce: Pipeline value, what I mean there is that there is a, regardless of what product you sell, in the case of TAG we sell probing and monitoring and multiviewers and there’s a value for that product. If you sell Ferrari’s, there’s a value for that product. So your product has a value, so each opportunity has a defined value. A closed opportunity, let’s say for the sake of this discussion, let’s say that an opportunity, a closed deal is worth $100,000. So now let’s work our way backwards and look at the steps of the sale required in order to get to that $100,000 and so now your pipeline is worth less at each stage as you head back to a marketing activity. I think really simply, to me there’s only three stages of a pipeline. There’s a 90% probability that something’s going to close. There’s a 60% something that’s going to close. And there’s a 30% that’s something’s going to close. And then prior to that, there are marketing qualified leads, there are leads and there are contacts and there’s value associated with them.
Kevin Joyce: So something that’s in the pipeline at a 30% probability for $100,000 opportunity is calculated at $333,000, or excuse me, $33,000. Something at the 60% is valued at $66,000 and something at the 90% is valued at $90,000. And it’s not really important what probabilities you pick, it’s not important the number of steps that you have in your sale. What’s important is that everybody speaks the same language and once everybody speaks the same language, by the way, everybody is everybody within the sales force, salesperson, sales manager, VP. Everybody within the marketing organization, the marketing automation, PR, event manager. And finance, teach the finance people that actually marketing people understand finance and business and when it comes down to budget cuts, they cut operations because they know finance is the best investment you can make, then everybody’s on the same page. And so there is a direct correlation between a marketing activity and the value that it adds to the pipeline.
Kevin Joyce: Is it an exact science? No, certainly not. And there are factors all over the place, but in this day of direct response marketing, there is a lot less ambiguity than it was years ago. And you can correlate a show like NAB. So what we will do at TAG is, because we’re measuring our pipeline every single week, when we finally come after NAB or even throughout NAB, we’re measuring the value of our pipeline in actual dollars, which is tied to the number of opportunities in that pipeline. And there’s a correlation, you’re going to see a spike. So we anticipate that our pipeline will increase, at least the whole value of the pipeline will increase 20% in its overall value based on the opportunities and leads that we get from a show like NAB.
Cindy Z.: I love that. And so for folks who are feeling like, “Okay, I’ve got Salesforce, I already do that.” Awesome. And maybe take some of these insights and apply them. And for folks who are like, “I don’t have software, I don’t know, I don’t have that stuff at all. I just come back from the show and I hand the leads to the salespeople.” Okay, for folks who are feeling like that, it’s okay, don’t worry. You can change it and use this to your advantage and increase your business by doing something as simple as a spreadsheet or even a whiteboard.
Cindy Z.: So you could have a whiteboard in your office and back in the day, that’s actually how I did it when I worked at a smaller company and it was just a handful of people. We would put on the whiteboard, for example, 90% chance of closing and list out the five people or so who those were and put the dollar amount next to it. And then the next one is 60% chance of closing. And then you just, same thing, I’m going to put NBC, Fox, TAG, whatever it is and put the dollar amount next to it. And then 30%. and then you just add it up, super easy. And the next week when you get together and when we got together, it might be me and one other person in a small company or just me, myself and I, I look at it and go, “Oh, I’m going to move this 60% to 90%. I have a couple more people to add to 30%.” And then you just add it up.
Cindy Z.: So like you said, it’s not an exact science but neither is a trade show and really neither is a phone conversation a lot of times either. And so it’s, instead of worrying about perfection, just write it down and do it and measure it because it’s going to improve your business. Kevin, have you seen this book by the way called Traction? It’s right up your alley and I put it on the resource pages because the guy is talking about scorecards and report cards… Hi. Scorecards and report cards and ROI tracking in a way that it just caught my attention. I really liked it. So I put that on the page. I just wondered if you heard of that book, because Kevin, I feel like you could write that yourself.
Kevin Joyce: Yeah, no, I have not-
Cindy Z.: It’s up your alley.
Kevin Joyce: I’m sure it’s great, but I’m getting old and so there’s a finite amount of information I can stick into my head.
Cindy Z.: I feel like you could write the book, I mean like I don’t think you need the book. It’s just-
Kevin Joyce: But let’s go. Yeah, I would say start at the basics and in my experience, and this is again too many years to even say it again, across seven different industries and it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen it. It’s the same in every industry. A billion dollar company, a $5 million company, a start up, it doesn’t matter. The first thing I would recommend is that anybody in the marketing organization, I know some of this is going to be an eye rolling, “Yeah, thanks for that great insight”, is, do you know what the budget is for the company for 2020? Do you know the quota of every region or every salesperson in the organization? You better know the quota of every sales person. And then do you know the pipeline? Do you know the current forecast of every salesperson in your organization? And now can you actually speak specifically to each salesperson on how you’re going to help them achieve their goal and their quota this year? Can you answer all of those questions? If you can answer yes to all of those questions, then you are ahead of 99.9% of the 10,000 salespeople that I’ve managed in my career and a thousand marketers in my career.
Cindy Z.: I love that and I’m just going to say for again, tons of experienced people on the call, for people who are maybe a little bit newer to pieces of this, the sales quota or sales budget for a salesperson is how much they need to sell this year. And so it sounds really daunting, especially when one is at a smaller company, but if you just for round numbers, you say your company’s going to do $1 million this year or $10 million this year. Then you might think, “Okay, in North America, X percent is there. In Asia, X percent is there. In Europe, X percent is there.” So you kind of look at your numbers in EMIA and stuff like that and just decide.
Cindy Z.: And it doesn’t have to be super complicated. You can just go, “Okay, I’m going to do a third in each and I’m just going to touch base with the two salespeople we have or the 20 sales people we have or whatever, and just check and go, how can I help them reach it?” And then just write down a number. It will help you be more deliberate and intentional in what you’re doing instead of just winging it a little bit, because we’ve all been there on the winging it, maybe not you Kevin, but most of us on the call have walked into things and just winged it man.
Kevin Joyce: I still wing it and there’s times that you can’t do all of this perfectly by any means. But you start setting yourself with this vision to help out. And I came up with a real corny term once upon a time to really get the cats and the dogs together. The cats and the dogs are sales and marketing and these are one in the same, and if you can get in the head of a sales person and have them realize that the work that you do is money for them at some point in the future, you will have a very strong relationship between sales and marketing. But you’ve all heard the stats before, 70% of the content that’s created in marketing is never used by the sales force. Never. It’s one of the last bastions of inefficiency in the corporate world is the inefficiency of a marketing spend.
Kevin Joyce: Now it’s getting better and better, and it’s not because we in marketing, and I wear two hats, I’m a sales leader and a marketing person and I’ll never do it any other way because I got tired of salespeople telling me that the marketing investments were not worth it. But if you can actually have your investments be tied to their pipeline, you’ll be a hero inside the organization. How long is the sales cycle? I’ll give you another hint. How long is the sales cycle for your product? Take a look at a sales person’s pipeline. And in my experience in the broadcast industry, you will see that a salesperson only has a pipeline that’s very accurate, maybe 90 days into the future, and is very rarely forecasting beyond 90 days.
Kevin Joyce: Well, is the sale cycle for your product? 90 days? It’s probably longer than 90 days, in which case marketing is critical for that sales person’s pipeline in the future. But they’re not thinking about that. Marketing needs to think about that and the trade show and NAB is a massive opportunity to start beginning to have salespeople think about the way and have them see that marketing is really driving the show.
Cindy Z.: Yeah, I’m glad you said that. There are a couple things that just really jumped out for me on that, Kevin. And one is, when we’re doing marketing, it’s just good to remember who our audience is, or when we’re doing sales. That sounds so basic, but here’s why I’m mentioning that and underscoring what you said, Kevin, is when we’re talking to the salespeople, what they’re interested in are their sales numbers in the next 30 to 60 days, maybe 90 if you’re lucky, but usually it’s just the next month or two. And so anything we’re discussing with them has to focus on that. And the same when we’re talking with our customer or client or prospect, “What’s in it for me?” I mean them, they only care about, is it going to solve their technical problem, fit their budget, whatever. And when you’re talking to your sales channels, they’re only again looking at how they can increase. So each message has got to be different to the different player, if you will.
Kevin Joyce: Absolutely. That’s a good point.
Cindy Z.: So, you were just saying that, I was kind of underscoring it and so this is a little bit of an aside, but it ties into what you’re talking about. If the salespeople don’t like the marketing and they’re like, “That’s not helping me, it’s not helping anything.” And you’re thinking, “Uh oh, ROI, how do I do that?” One thing that I personally have found super successful and I would recommend everybody on the call is when you’re going to do any bit of marketing, whether it’s an email, maybe your pre-NAB emails, pre-NAB blog posts, ads, whatever, go to the sales person who you get along with the best and who’s willing to chat with you and have a beer or a coffee with them and say, “Tell me about the last sale you did.” And when they tell you that, you’re going to get a couple of key insights from that and you can roll it into the marketing and now, that’s going to make that marketing more helpful to the whole company, to the prospects, and the sales people will understand that you are actually helping them and then you can work together.
Kevin Joyce: I’ll add to that, Cindy, don’t go to the salesperson that you have the best relationship with. Go to one of the top three sales people in the company. Because they are, and not just the one who’s the top sales person for that month, but someone who is consistently the top sales person in your company year after year. Because they’re doing something different than the others and you’ll find that, depends on the size of your organization, but the same salespeople are at the top of the board all the time. They’re doing something more efficient and better than the other salespeople and they’re using the resources of the company far more efficiently than the rest.
Kevin Joyce: Some cases the best salesperson is overusing the resources, that’s a whole other session for another time, but get to the top salespeople and find out from them what tools are they using? What resources are they using? And what do they believe could help them even sell more? And have that be the beginning of your market research on where marketing should focus moving forward.
Cindy Z.: We are getting to the bottom of the hour, but I do want to circle back to something you said earlier. You said, I think, that you felt NAB had contributed to 40% or more of the sales pipeline and how do you track that and are things like MQLs and SQLs, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified lead, are those a part of that discussion?
Kevin Joyce: Sure, sure. Yeah. What I said was 20%.
Cindy Z.: 20%, thank you.
Kevin Joyce: 20% of the pipeline that I’ve seen in the last 10 years for the different organizations I’ve worked with has been attributed back to NAB, which makes sense because if you look at the budgets for a lot of companies it’s probably at least 20% of the marketing budget. But the way that we track that is measurement of the pipeline prior to the show and then we continue to measure the pipeline continually after the show. And what you start to see is a spike in the value of the pipeline.
Kevin Joyce: Typically it takes about a month for the pipeline or the activity of the organization to digest the leads that turn… A lead has had some kind of activity, you get much more qualified leads at a show typically because there’s a face to face with they sales person and they might skip jail or whatever, forget it. And just put it right into their pipeline. But you just measure that pipeline. After the show measure the pipeline every single week and within 60 days you should see that your pipeline is 20% more valuable 60 days later after. So some time in June your pipeline will be worth 20% more than it was in the beginning of April because of NAB.
Cindy Z.: Nice. Do you think website activity or you mentioned about marketing campaign engagement, where do those fit into everything and how could someone track that or look at that in a simple manner?
Kevin Joyce: Yeah, sure. I mean website is really at the core of all of this in this day and age because regardless of your marketing activity, whether it be a show, marketing automation, contact management, PR, it’s going to result in somebody going to your website to learn more about you. And so I think website activity absolutely should be tracked hand in hand with any marketing event that you have and you should see blips in that website activity, down to the day and you should be able to correlate the marketing activity or investment that you made prior to that blip in your website and be able to track it back. And by the way, that should be how you start to prioritize the marketing investments you make in the future, which is based on the success that you’ve gotten by website activity.
Kevin Joyce: And I’ll give you a reference from another industry, the car industry. The average number of visits to a car dealer right now is 1.5 visits. That’s down from seven visits 10 years ago. Why is that? Because people do the entire buying process online and then they go to the car dealer only one and a half times on average anymore. And it’s the same thing for our industry. I don’t care if you’re selling routers, switchers, multiviewers, probes, they’re doing most of that research online and that is on your website. And so that’s where you should be tracking it.
Cindy Z.: Nice. Nice. Well, we are getting to the bottom of the hour, so I want to wrap up with a final question and then we have a Q&A time for everybody. And we also have NAB staff here. So with that in mind, Kevin, some of our audience might be just getting started on return on investment, ROI tracking and it’s their first time or people may just want to up their game. What one thing would you say, “You got to do this one thing”?
Kevin Joyce: Understand the sales people’s quotas and the number that they’re trying to get towards and then work your way backwards on, how can you help improve the value of their pipeline?
Cindy Z.: Nice. Nice. All right. What questions do you guys have? Go ahead and put them in the chat. And can I welcome Maddy from NAB show? Maddy, can you say hello? And… Yeah.
Maddy: Hi, everybody. I’m Maddy Sanders. I just recently joined NAB and I am the Exhibits Services and Operations Coordinator.
Cindy Z.: Yeah. I love working with Maddy, so we’re just thrilled that she’s on the call today.
Maddy S.: Yeah. Thank you for having me. So I’ll be here to answer any questions that you might have regarding NAB and the show potentially coming up.
Cindy Z.: Nice. If people want to reach out to with any questions, what’s the best way?
Maddy Sanders: The best way to reach me would be with my email. So it’d be msanders@nab.org.
Cindy Z.: Okay. We’ll put that in the chat and also on the show notes at the end too. Nice. What questions do you have, folks on the call here for Kevin? For Maddy? Just put them in the chat. We would love to be helpful to you. Fallon, did you see any questions that we had?
Cindy Z.: All right. Well Kevin, I think you must’ve explained everything 110% amazingly, so we do have a question about your CRM, customer relationship management software and what do you use, Kevin?
Kevin Joyce: We use Salesforce, a SAS based Salesforce. I can tell you that it doesn’t really matter which one you use. I think there’s a lot of good ones out there right now. It’s always a pain in the neck, it goes through scope creep and my, my only advice is pick one that works for sales and marketing and adhere to the philosophy of crawl, walk, and run. Start out with very limited goals that you can achieve, which is just having the sales force put the most basic information into whatever mechanism CRM that you’re using and then start to show them the value that they get by the time that they’re investing and putting that information into the CRM. But we currently use Salesforce.
Cindy Z.: Nice. I love that. And our company Kokoro Marketing, we work with a lot of different sized companies. And for a lot of folks we work with, we use Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign as both the CRM and the marketing automation piece. In some cases you could maybe pair those with Salesforce or other tools out there. And I’m with you, Kevin, it doesn’t matter the tool, it matters what the goals are and stuff. And so most important is to either get out the whiteboard, the Excel spreadsheet, or the CRM and enter the people who are interested in buying and put a little data in there about the amount of the sale and the percentage that you think it will be in terms of the close rate and track it and do it. So there’s a lot of great tools out there and yeah, circle back with either one of us if you want more detail on that.
Cindy Z.: Maddy, I want to ping you on this. There’s a question about buying NAB attendee lists. I know I get emails all the time saying, “Would you like to buy the verified NAB attendee list?” The ones I get are not from NAB. And so-
Maddy S.: Yeah, it would come directly from NAB in order to purchase that. And to purchase that, I’m not entirely sure since that’s not my role here at NAB, but I’d be happy to take down anyone’s email and I could direct you in the right direction.
Cindy Z.: Got you. So here and then I’ll just, my experience with it is I don’t think, I’m not sure, but I don’t think NAB sells its attendee list. What they recommend, I think, and Maddy jump in if there’s any more on this, is using the Experient portal and sending emails out of the portal. When you log into the portal, depending on your level of engagement that you have with Experient, you get to send out emails and you can do a search on job title and vertical industry, that kind of thing, and then you can send an email out. I don’t believe they show you the email unless the person has added you to My NAB Show, and so those are-
Maddy S.: Yes, that’s all correct.
Cindy Z.: You could be a total guerilla marketer, which I am kind of into, and you could look at that list and then go find and connect with those best prospects on your hit list on LinkedIn and start marketing to them that way. I totally think that’s a great way to do it. And the third party people selling the email lists, I think they’re not allowed to do that.
Maddy S.: No they are not.
Maddy S.: We’ve been having some difficulty with that. But yes, I would not obviously purchase it from anyone.
Cindy Z.: If you do purchase a list like that, just watch out in your email software that you’re using because there’s a lot of changes in email deliverability over the past 12 to 24 months. It’s constantly changing. So a lot of email deliverability depends on the big three, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google and they look at your domain reputation and all kinds of things around that. So if you send an email out under your domain and you get a lot of complaints, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo will start putting emails of yours into your recipients’ spam right away.
Cindy Z.: So I have a concern around deliverability, so if someone was going to buy a list, I’d say be really careful how you send it out. Think about that and maybe just do segments of it. Probably not best practice, I mean it might serve you better to hire an agency to make phone call appointments for you, try to engage people that way or do a lead magnet where you can get people to opt in. Those are, I think the money’s probably better spent that way, my two cents. Anybody else want to weigh in on that? Anybody on the call or any of the panelists?
Kevin Joyce: Well, I think the days of buying a list and then simply being lazy, sorry to be obnoxious, and just sending an email out based on the list that you purchase, those days are gone. You need to do analysis on the lists that you buy and really trim it down and try to make a connection between your value proposition and what it is, what value you can add to that person. And I think it needs to be far more custom, far more personalized. Yes, you’re not going to send a message to each individual person, but there are ways of categorizing the list that you have and have it be more targeted. And the tools are available to help us do that much more in marketing and there’s a lot more responsibility that we have within marketing to be smart and respectful of when we reach out to engage somebody, we have to bring something to the table or we will become spam.
Cindy Z.: I’m going to give you guys an awesome thing that works really well. So, if instead of spending the money on that list, here’s another way you could spend around the same amount of money that I found works really well. So we do this with our clients all the time so I’m giving you some gold here. You can hire one of the magazines like for example, TV Technology magazine or Broadcast Beat or whichever one you want that does e-blasts and hire them to do an e-blast to your segment that you’re trying to hit. And here’s the important part, do not just e-blast out, “Visit me at my booth.” The important piece of this, this is the gold, is you want to give them an opt in.
Cindy Z.: And what I mean by that is you’re going to pitch, not your product, you’re going to pitch some awesome info. So maybe a guide, a checklist, a webinar, something like that so that you send that out and say, “Hey, if you’re having problem with X, Y, Z, we put this really cool info together and sign up here to get it.” And when they sign up with their email address, now you can start marketing to them and they raised their hand and indicated that they’re interested, so it’s cool to start a conversation with them and everybody’s happy and benefiting each other. So that’s my two cents on that one.
Cindy Z.: All right, here’s a great one about encouraging the sales team to add contacts into the CRM following up and immediately after NAB. I’ll speak to that and I’ll come back to you, Kevin, on how you do that as well. So one way to do that is during the show you can pull leads daily from Experient or maybe you’re using your phone and an online app to scan people’s business cards directly into your CRM, that’s a really good way to do it as well. Bring that in every day or at minimum on Thursday at the end of the show. And then get with your sales team who have taken notes at every demo and you’re going to have maybe a high school student, an admin, the sales development lead person, somebody’s going to type those in and put those into the database with them so that when the salesperson picks up the phone, they’ve got the notes and go, “I see you have budget, you have a station going on air in November and dah, dah, dah.”
Cindy Z.: So that’s how I suggest you do it. I think it’s super important to take those notes and then, if you can assign a person at the booth to go around with the salespeople, so maybe one person per two salespeople, for example, if you can, if you have the staff, and that person maybe is going to take notes if the sales people just can’t manage to do it themselves and then that person’s going to get the data into the database. And I’ll throw it over to you Kevin.
Kevin Joyce: Well I think what you said is good practice for sure. The biggest challenge that I have found with adding contacts into Salesforce, not Salesforce, CRM in general is that very quickly the database gets polluted and you get multiple contacts and then you have to end up through this deduping exercise. So I would just say be be very disciplined on who enters contacts and how they enter contacts and just be careful about that. The notes and everything, there are endless approaches that people have, but certainly protecting your database and being sure that you’re very disciplined on what you add to that because it is your gold, it is how you’re mining for opportunities and value in the pipeline, is really critical to to your future.
Cindy Z.: Awesome. Thank you everybody for being here. There’s notes in the chat about where you can contact Kevin or contact me or Maddy if you have any questions. We’ll have the replay of this webinar up shortly as well as the show notes. And the resources page has info about a quick ROI checklist you can use today and some of the other info we just talked about. So thank you everybody. Thank you Kevin. I appreciate you. Thank you so much.
Kevin Joyce: I want to say one last thing. Of course, you know I can’t stop without saying one last thing. As a marketer, I would love us all to never use the word, ‘marketing spend’. All the other organizations in the company make investments. But for some reason it’s, what are we spending in marketing? So anytime you’re talking to anybody about what you’re doing in marketing, have it be an investment and the investment has an ROI and you can measure that ROI. And that language will start to turn into a culture and marketing will be seen as a powerful asset and investment in the company and not a cost center. Thanks for the opportunity and happy marketing, everybody.
Cindy Z.: Thanks everybody. See you next time.
