A NAB Show webinar series
In this webinar you will learn about ROI, Attribution, and Justifying Your Trade Show Spend.
NAB Webinar – ROI, Attribution, and Justifying Your Trade Show Spend with Lynn Elliott – 23 Jan 18 from Cindy Zuelsdorf | Kokoro on Vimeo.
Cindy: Hey, we’re coming at you live from the Telestream Studio in Nevada City, California. Today, we’re looking at ROI, attribution and justifying your trade show spend. Welcome, everybody. I think we’ll just going to jump right into it. You talked Lynn about three things that you look at when you’re tracking ROI, return on investment and justifying trade show spend. Can you tell us what those are?
Lynn: Yeah, sure. First, we look at, and I think the most obvious thing everyone looks at is revenue, revenue that’s generated from the leads that you see at your show. There are two other areas that we look at that I think might be a little more obscure and one is how much cost savings you might get from attending the show. Then also what kind of brand exposure. We try and measure that and come up with some benchmark numbers for all three of those areas.
Cindy: Okay. I love that. Those are three key areas. I know there are a ton of different benchmarks and metrics we could all look at, but those are the top three that you like to look at?
Lynn: Yeah, that’s what I like to look at.
Cindy: Yeah, makes sense. Can you tell us about the first one, about leads and how you look at the attribution and money around that?
Lynn: Yeah, absolutely. We have a lead scanner like many of exhibitors do. We capture leads. What we don’t do is we don’t have any contests usually or anything that’s bringing people in for any price generally, because I consider those contestants rather than leads. What we like to track are leads that have come into our booth voluntarily and are interested in what we have to say or demo or want to learn more. Once you get your leads, one way to measure that or to try and come up with a value for that is to estimate, or maybe you have what your close rate is. A lot of businesses like ours, sometimes our sales cycle is over a year long. It’s tough to estimate what the close rate is for leads coming in.
You can look, spot check your data and try and figure out how long, what’s an average from the time a lead comes in to the time that it closes, what’s an average time and what’s the average close rate for that. Then you multiply the number of leads that you get in NAB by your average close rate, and you get an approximation of how many leads you think might close based on your average close rate. Then you can multiply that by your average sales order value. From that, you can get an estimate of what kind of revenue you might expect.
When you’re looking at how much you’re spending at NAB, take a look at what your lead count has been and multiply that out by your average close rate and by the average sales order and you can play that against each other to see what kind of revenue you might expect to get from that.
Cindy: I love that. Now, our callers here, is anybody looking at close rate and just chat into the chat box. If you want to be private you can chat just to the panelist. Just wondering how many people are doing that right now. You’d bench in a long sales cycle, I’m just curious with everybody, do you find that too? I definitely do with the clients I work with who exhibit at NAB Show, sales cycles can be six months, two years, sometimes five years, right?
Lynn: It can get really complex too if you have a sales channel where maybe your leads, you send your leads to a reseller channel. You might not get that closed information right away.
Cindy: Right.
Lynn: It can get pretty complex for some, but on the other hand, we have another side of our business which is E-commerce and so we see immediately the person that comes in and whether or not they purchased online. That sales cycle is usually less than a month. It can go. It can span the whole gamut, so.
Cindy: Yeah. I was working with someone last week and their customer had downloaded an ebook two years ago and then the TV station just purchased last week. It’s so interesting to watch that and see all the things that happen along the way. They had visited at NAB Show, two of them in fact so we could see some of the touchpoints along the way in the sales process, so that makes total sense. I like that. What are we seeing in the chat box here? We’ve got people who have sales cycles a year or two years, so long time for that.
Lynn: Yeah, it is. Yup.
Cindy: Yeah, I think that’s typical.
Lynn: It’s tough when you’re trying to measure or evaluate whether or not you want to do a show, and I’m not talking about NAB in particular, but if you’re trying to evaluate how much you want to spend on shows throughout the year, and your sales cycle is two years long, how do you justify or how do you know whether or not a show is worth it until your two year sales cycle has gone? Those are the questions that we try and ask through numbers, or we try and answer through numbers and just by trying to estimate what the ultimate revenue is going to be.
Cindy: Yeah. How many trade shows per year are you guys doing? Just curious. We’ve got some smaller regional trade shows and larger super just big trade shows as well. We see we’ve got three to four per year. How about you? You’ve been at Telestream awhile now.
Lynn: 10 years, yeah.
Cindy: Over that 10-year period, what have you seen in terms of the number of shows and has it changed? Just curious about that.
Lynn: We do a lot of shows and that’s one of our biggest line items in our budget is trade shows. Because we have a lot of products that span a lot of target markets. We often end up in shows that broadcasters aren’t. For example that would be completely different from NAB. In fact, we’re at FETC this week, which is the Florida Education of Tech, Education, and Tech Conference. I think that’s what FETC stands for.
Cindy: That sounds like it.
Lynn: That’s an education show, and so we have products that target that market. Gosh, off the top of my head I want to say we do about 30 shows and they’re ranging from 10-foot booths to, our NAB is probably our biggest booth, which is I think a 40 by 50 or something like that.
Cindy: Okay. I had a meeting on Thursday last week with a company, and they were eight, I think they’re eight or nine people, and they were looking at 10 trade shows this year.
Lynn: That’s a lot.
Cindy: Some of them are small, tabletop, 10 by 10 thing or just a couple meters – small size and then others are bigger – NAB Show, ISE, InfoComm… Depending on the size of the company, that can be such a huge impact. Yeah, what do we say, 20 to 25 shows we’ve got people, 20 shows, so a lot of shows. We’re on a good topic. Let’s go to number two, item number two that you talked about meetings and cost savings and we meet people we already know at a trade show sometimes. How does that tie into it all?
Lynn: Yeah, so we look at the cost savings. At NAB, we end up having I don’t know, hundreds of meetings. Not to mention we also have a reseller meetings through our channel. We have a meeting that brings together all of our resellers, as well as some internal sales meetings, because our company is spread out all over the world, this is one of the places where and one of the times a year where all the sales people get together. That is significant cost savings for us. If we were to try and do these meetings one off, then it would cost a significant amount more than what we’re paying for all of us to attend NAB. The fact that we’re in Nevada City, California, which is fairly close to Vegas.
Yeah, an hour and a half plane ride, yeah, makes it even more cost-effective, but we’ll take a look at what we’re trying to do is take a look at the meetings that we’re having in the booth. We assign or I would assign some average cost per meeting based on just throughout the year, how much does a sales person pay to go visit somebody in their office. Just take that amount and multiply that by how many meetings you have to get an approximation of how much you’re saving by having everybody just go there. That can be deducted from your total costs as something that you would and maybe you wouldn’t have all these meetings otherwise. There’s a little bit of art to it. It’s not all just math. It’s not computerized. You’ve got to put some common sense into it as well, but you can play that against what your cost is for NAB to try and justify the total expense.
Cindy: Of our folks on the call here, does anybody look at meetings in that way? Do you guys actually calculate it out and how many meetings you have? Is that a technique that you use for your revenue calculations and attributions? Just curious what everybody is doing. Your third point was around building a brand. Can you talk about that aspect of marketing? Is there really a way to calculate that? I can see on the call we’ve got a wide range of companies. Is that brand building, branding just for large companies? Does it even apply to small companies? What do you think?
Lynn: Oh yeah, totally. I think it applies to everyone. This is what a lot of people think as the fuzzy part of marketing. I think that you can apply some metrics to it. If you think about if you’re buying online ads, so you’re paying a cost per thousand for every impression that you’re getting. Maybe it’s $5 per thousand impressions or something like that. Now, think about it in terms of NAB, and you’ve got your booth there with your logo. There are thousands of people walking by. How is that different? These are interested people. It’s almost just like having somebody come online. The benefit is if they’re really interested, they can come in and talk to somebody, but I consider that an impression.
I would pay whatever I would pay for a thousand impressions in a magazine or online publication that is targeted towards my audience. This is the same thing and so you have to consider that, that not only what kind of brand are you building and how much would you be willing to pay for all these impressions. Also, on the opposite side if you’re not there, what message is it sending to the people who are there? You can maybe put some metrics to that as well. That’s a little tougher, but definitely, you can look and see what you’re paying for in a typical magazine or online publication, what you’re paying per impression and then I would take a look at the entire NAB audience and try and estimate what you think might be walking by your booth.
There might be other ways to reach them too like the MyNAB portal and banner out, or sponsorships, or speaking submissions. If anybody from your company is speaking, that’s a great impression right there. That really helps to build your brand. Take all of those and try and estimate how many people might be seeing you and be conservative. Then multiply that by what the cost per impression you would be willing to pay in an online publication or what you’re typically paying. That could be a budgetary expense that you would normally spend on brand building outside of NAB, but that can help justify the cost of NAB as well.
Cindy: Got it, so you’re talking about the people walking by the booth of the stand and comparing that to the CPMs, the cost per impression that you’d pay. Maybe it was InBroadcast, Broadcast Bridge, NewBay, TV Tech, Broadcast Beat, Streaming media, any of those and comparing and putting those on the same playing field, if you will.
Lynn: Yeah. I’m saying if you’re willing to pay this and part of the cost of doing business at NAB or having a booth at NAB could be attributed to brand building. That cost, it comes out.
Cindy: Nice. Oh good. Does anybody think about building a brand in that way? I think it’s really a great way to compare the numbers and check for value, because sometimes you feel like, I’m at the show. I have a feeling about how it is, but how do you really look at the numbers? Feel free to chat and let us know what you guys are doing because this is for you and we’re looking to interact here with you guys about it. Oh nice, okay. We have a comment and saying, “Hey, yeah it’s a great idea. I’m going to put it to the CFO at the company. I like it.”
One thing you said Lynn and we talked about this the other day as well, is you mentioned that marketing feels like an art sometimes and then there’s a science piece of it. Can you talk about that, how can we get the data we need and is there an art piece and a science piece?
Lynn: There is totally, yeah. In fact, I’m reading this book by Michael Lewis called, “The Undoing Project.” We were talking about this. It’s about Daniel Kahneman who is all about confirmation bias. The fact that you can look at all the data coming in, but our perceptions are so clouded by or the data that’s coming in is so clouded by our perceptions that I’m surprised often when I actually look at the hard numbers, how wrong I can be or how my impression of something is. An example of this is we have a product that we’ve shown at a trade show for years and years, and that demo station is always packed. When we looked at the numbers finally of revenue, they came that actually came from the show, it was not even worth the amount that we were spending.
That’s helping inform us of how we want to distribute the demo stations within our booth at NAB. I had talked before about the fact that numbers are numbers and they do really tell a story, but you can’t just take them at their face value when it’s something like this. You really have to infuse some of your own perceptions as well even though they may be a little bit biased. You’ve got some knowledge in there that will help tell the story with the numbers, and the numbers don’t always know the full story. Like I was saying with the brand impressions or you just have to try and do your best at guessing sometimes. That may not always be exactly right, but if you can at least set a benchmark, then you can start measuring from there, and that’s a way to start.
Cindy: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because it can feel like, “Gosh, I’ve not done this before or what I’ve done before doesn’t seem that helpful. I’m just going to give up or not do it. I don’t know where to start kind of a thing,” and what you’re saying is pick a benchmark and get rolling and take a look.
Lynn: Yeah and the revenue and the leads, that’s going to be the easiest to measure long-term. The brand impressions, that’s hard to measure. That’s where it gets a little fuzzy, and you’re just doing a best guess at what you think people might be, how many people might be seeing you and what that might be worth. If you can set a goal, set a goal for yourself for how many leads you want to get and work out the numbers before you even get to NAB. Then you can measure that after the fact and see how close you are and use that as your benchmark. Then you can keep on improving and optimizing that.
As you learn and as you gain more experience, you’ll get better at, and you’ll hone in on some of those numbers that you have to estimate like maybe your closed rate for example.
Cindy: Yeah, that makes sense. I like that. All right, just checking the question box here. If you’ve got questions, we’re using actually the chat box, we’re not using the QA, we’re using the chat box, so just put your questions in there, and we’ll take them as we can or else at the end. What was the name of the book that you mentioned?
Lynn: It’s called, “The Undoing Project.”
Cindy: The Undoing Project, okay, because I love that Daniel Kahneman the, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” and like you were talking about the confirmation bias or the what is it called, loss, a version like people are more, they don’t want to lose something more than they want to gain something, right?
Lynn: Exactly yeah.
Cindy: I think about that with the graphics in the booth. It’s like people are more worried about losing something, and they’re away buyers, if you will than toward buyers, because I want to be positive and say, “This is the benefit that actually people are worried about going off air more than they’re worried about some benefit or something good that’s going to happen.” You guys might want to check those books out there, really interesting I think perception and all that.
Lynn: Yeah.
Cindy: Gosh, so in some companies, we touched on this the other day, the marketing department might be right in the sale and know what’s happening exactly and what the drivers are and what those things are that people are afraid of losing and the whole away buyer thing. In other companies, the marketing department is big, and they’re almost a step or two away from that complete sale. I don’t know, I just want to get your perception on that and your experience over the years that you’ve had here.
Lynn: Yeah, in Telestream, we have two sides of our company, and we’re trying not to act like there are two sides, but they are two sides. There’s the E-commerce channel, and then there’s the more what we call the enterprise side. The enterprise side tends to be the longer sales cycle. We have an outside sales channel and also direct sales channel. Through the years, we’re always striving to get better numbers and get closer to the sales cycle and more information about the sales cycle and trying to close that loop always. It’s always a struggle, and it’s still a struggle, but we keep on getting closer.
In fact, I just had a breakthrough this week about how to track leads and marketing qualified leads and how to track those through our sales force instance and be able to report on it a lot better than what I’ve been doing in the past. I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and it’s still a struggle. With all the technology out there, there are so many different things that do one particular thing, but maybe not everything that you want to do. Maybe you don’t have the budget for everything, but you have to figure out and cobble together.
Technology makes our lives harder, but it also makes our lives easier. When it’s not working the way you want it to, you struggle to get the information that you want, but it’s a lot better than what we used to have. It’s like this love-hate relationship I have with technology and trying to strive. Like I said, we’re always striving to get better. I’m sure there are companies that are a lot better than we are, but we do what we can, and we do our best with the information that we have, and that’s all we can do.
Cindy: Yeah. Folks on the call, Lynn, you mentioned salesforce, and that is one of the tools that people end up using on previous shows. We’ve talked with folks who use HubSpot, Marketo, a whole wide range of things. I use Infusionsoft with most of the clients I work with, and then we’ve got people who use excel spreadsheets and pipe drive and all kinds of things to look at that, and those are all tools. I guess I want to take it down one rung just for a second and say, if someone was just thinking, “Okay, what benchmark or what one or two benchmarks should I be looking at or what one or two numbers should I look at?” I don’t know. I was thinking about-
Lynn: Where to start.
Cindy: Yeah, where would I start? It’s a little bit like we were talking about yesterday, so let’s just even jump to that. If we were going to reach out to people on the call and say for people who’ve never done any calculations before or for people who want to up their game this year at NAB Show, what are one or two things that you would say, okay, here’s what you should do. Take a look at this.
Lynn: I would say that I’d say set a goal and start with the lead and revenue metric. Start with setting a goal for how many leads you want to capture and good leads, not contestants, but people that are generally interested in coming in and talking with you at your booth. Try and set some estimates of what that closed rate might be for you and your average sales order. Work through that before you even get to the show. Maybe have a couple of different scenarios. You can base your leads on what you’ve done in the past. The other thing is you can sit there and wait for people to come to your booth, but there are also ways that you can get people into your booth by promoting and marketing beforehand. Taking advantage of things like myNAB for example, which we use to help reach people, we do some advertising on myNAB for category sponsorship to try and just pull out people and build some brand exposure for some of the products within certain categories.
Sometimes we’ll do some promos. We might do some promos that drive people to a booth that, to our booth and have to give us something. It’s not so much a contestant type of thing, but it’s more of us being able to measure how effective that promo is in driving people traffic to our booth.
Cindy: Like the old school direct marketing dial this particular 800 number-
Lynn: Something like that.
Cindy: … but the current day version of bring this in or-
Lynn: Bring us in and yeah.
Cindy: … tell me the secret, code word or something. Yeah. Then I know you did this.
Lynn: Something to help measure whether or not people are seeing whether your money is well spent on some of this pre-marketing activities if you can. I would say set a goal, pre-market, and just get started.
Cindy: Just get started, right. To recap, you talked about leads as one of the categories that you look at in terms of measuring ROI and justifying your trade show spend. Then you also mentioned about cost savings and meetings, and then about brand building. Those are three. Are there others that you callers have, other areas that you look at in terms of measuring your ROI with NAB Show and other trade shows? I’d love to hear it as well, because we just picked three that we thought were super important and awesome.
Lynn: Yeah, I’m sure there’s others out there.
Cindy: Yeah, definitely.
Lynn: That’s what I use.
Cindy: Definitely. All right, chat that in if you have any others for us. I think we’re ready to go to Q&A.
Lynn: Okay.
Cindy: Yeah, let’s do that. All right.
Lynn: Looks like there are some questions.
Cindy: We’ve got some questions. All right, let’s take a look. The best cost-effective method you find to book meetings in advance and have pre-set meetings. I can comment on that. What do you guys use here at Telestream for booking meetings? What’s your thought on that?
Lynn: We use Outlook internally, and so we create a special Outlook calendar for each of our NAB bookable spaces. Anybody who wants to book a meeting has to go in and book it within the calendar. Then we have those calendars available at the show at the reception desk as printouts and then also online so people can change meetings on the fly, or see if a meeting is booked.
Cindy: You have meeting rooms and meeting tables at your show. I know I’ve been to a couple meetings and you’d have a booked table number three and IBC on the top floor or something like that. I’ve never gone to a meeting there. You have a different Outlook calendar for each meeting location and then anybody from the company-
Lynn: Can book that.
Cindy: … anybody from the company can book that, yeah.
Lynn: Yeah.
Cindy: Okay, that’s good. I can speak to it as well. I work with often some smaller size companies that might have 10 or 50 people in them. We’ll do something as simple as set-up a Google Calendar where like you were talking about, people can access and book it. Then there’s this one or two people they’re booking with instead of spaces. That’s a good way. Then you can send reminders to the client, which is great. Then you can take it the other way. I use ScheduleOnce. That’s a product that I like to use and that integrates then with your CRM software if you want it to, so with Infusionsoft or with Salesforce or whatever CRM you’re using. That will send out meeting reminders and SMS so you can get a message on the phone, “Hey, in 15 minutes you have a meeting with Lynn at this booth.” That’s a great way to do it as well. I’ll use a booking link.
One of the companies I work with in Southern California uses that very heavily for all the shows, and they’ll make a special landing page for each show. If it’s NAB New York, they have a landing page. If it’s CABSAT, they have a special landing page and then people book on that. We send out an invite, “Hey, book a meeting with me here,” specifically to the top 50 or hundred people that we want to see at the show.
Lynn: Right. We also have a form on our website. When we send our pre-marketing banner or when we drive people to our website, we drive people to that NAB page with the form on it, that they can book a meeting and we’ll contact them, we’ll have somebody contact them and make sure that it’s legit.
Cindy: Yeah. Sometimes I had a lot of success with this one campaign where we’ll just run a quick email out to everybody that says, “Hey, are you coming to the show? Click yes or no.” That’s it. Super easy, low barrier to entry and they just click the yes or the no. Then we have three scenarios afterward. If they click yes, obviously we send a booking link. Then send to the sales person too. If they don’t book within one week, send to the sales person, have them call them, so that’s all automated. If they click “no,” then we go, “Hey,” and like the day the show opens, “Hey, we don’t see you here, but just wanted to let you know this is what’s happening at the show.”
Lynn: Oh, I like that.
Cindy: Yeah. Then if they do nothing, we also have a similar email, “Hey, not sure if you could make it, but here’s what’s happening.” We still have few spaces open if you want to meet. We do the three scenarios.
Lynn: I like that a lot.
Cindy: Yeah. Anyway, hopefully that answers your question. If you have more questions about booking meetings, shoot them back to us, but there that gives a good range of stuff. Let’s see what else we have here. What about the cost of not doing a show when the industry expects you to be there? You touched on that earlier. What are your thoughts about that?
Lynn: Yeah, that’s definitely a consideration, and that’s one of those fuzzy things too. How do you evaluate what not being there is hindering your brand versus what being there is adding to it. I think there’s going to be a lot of art in that one. I think that you have to look at the metrics in the past and see how much revenue are you getting from the show. How much exposure do you think you’re getting from the show and how much cost savings are you getting from the show. If it’s borderline, you can consider, “Okay, yeah maybe not show up.” Try and create some, I’m trying to think of how you might measure that on the fly. I’d have to think about that a little bit more.
Cindy: Yeah, it’s a great question.
Lynn: It is a good question. I’d love to hear what other people think about that too if you have some ideas.
Cindy: Yeah, bring it back to us.
Lynn: Off the top of my head I just think it would be more, what would be the hindrance to your brand. How many people would have seen you that didn’t, and give it a minus score somehow?
Cindy: Yeah. I know some people will take that money that they were going to spend at a particular trade show and then do a roadshow instead.
Lynn: Oh yeah, exactly.
Cindy: Because then the interaction is really, really tight with the people and you have their attention. That said, you got to bring the traffic. It’s two pieces of that.
Lynn: Right and you have to think of it as an opportunity cost, because by doing that show, which perhaps may not be the right show for you, that’s taking away potentially from another opportunity that you could be, so you could do it as an analysis between what you might do with that money otherwise and what the benefit would be for that versus what the benefit would be for doing the show or not showing up.
Nick: Hey, Cindy.
Cindy: Hey, Nick.
Nick: Hey.
Cindy: Welcome. We have Nick from the NAB Show here with us.
Nick: Hey. I know you guys have some more questions to get to, and I just wanted to chime in and if anybody on the current panel here in the group here have any questions regarding your booth, any logistical questions about the show as far as moving or you need booth design tips or anything along those lines, please let me know. I know that Fallon has been vigorously putting in the chat very nicely all the information for our blog as well as our LinkedIn group, all of the webinars are going to get replayed on the blog. We have great articles from NAB staff from Cindy, from some other trade show experts on there as well. The LinkedIn groups are a great way to get in touch with us at NAB, also a great way to get in touch with your exhibitor advisory committee representatives.
If you want to go on to the LinkedIn group and say, “Hey, this is my hall. This is my booth size.” Your rep will get in contact with you. They can give you some veteran show tips, some do’s and don’ts if you’re new to it, but it’s not just a resource for first timers or new comers, it’s a resource for everyone. Of course, Fallon’s put it in the chat and hopefully Fallon can do that again on my email, my phone number as well if anyone has any questions for NAB specific show questions.
Cindy: Thank you, Nick. All right. Stay with us. We’re going to go through these questions. All right. Mary is asking, what are the top three most effective marketing techniques to get that pre-set meeting? I think we went through a little bit of the technique of actually booking the meeting. You’re asking here like the actual-
Lynn: How to get people to want to meet with you. We have a big mail list. We send emails to our mail list and ask them to click and book a meeting with us. Like I said, we do myNAB and so we do through that we will connect with people and send emails to the people that have requested information or have indicated that they’re interested in our product. We do, do some ads like we do the NAB Show ad, which is more at the show so it’s a little too late to book meetings.
Cindy: How about LinkedIn and having an actual set of people dial for dollars?
Lynn: We do have an inside sales team that does that. I don’t know that we’ve ever used them to dial for meetings, so that’s a great idea. We do LinkedIn ads. It’s more targeting through advertisements in myNAB and email for us. We do have a very large list of people who are leads and not necessarily customers. Although we do a lot of our meetings are with customers as well, and then the other thing you have to consider is that, which I didn’t even talk about is multi-attribution, multi-step or multi-touch attribution, which is a lot of these people we’re talking to, because it’s such a long sales cycle. We may have met with them first at myNAB 2016. Meeting with them again at 2017, and so where do you attribute that revenue? We look at both. We look at both first and last-
Cindy: First and last touches, yeah.
Lynn: … touches. We don’t have a great way right now of doing multi-step, multi-point, why can’t I think of that?
Cindy: Multi-touch.
Lynn: Multi-touch, thank you.
Cindy: Yeah, attribution.
Lynn: Multi-touch attribution. We have a couple of reports that will show us that, but we don’t put a lot of weight into that right now, but I know a lot of people do that.
Cindy: Yeah and some people just throw in with one or the other. You could just go, “Okay, I’m going with the first touch as the biggest attribution points, or I’m going with the last touch.” I can see either one, so those are ways. LinkedIn, I know that I worked with some people who do chat right on LinkedIn or looked to do book meetings there. Then the sales people and a lot of companies are assigned, hey the top X percent in your territory or the top 20 or the top 100 people you need to call them, and it’s your responsibility to book that meeting for the show. That is for sure a way.
Lynn: A lot of times, we’ll do promos for the show that would be, maybe little discounts or incentives by, before the end of April. The sales people will call out and use that as an excuse to try and get people in and meet with us while you’re there so we can finalize this.
Cindy: I’ll run simple campaigns using marketing automation where there’s just a really easy field where someone can type in when they want to meet. If people don’t want to spend extra money on tools, they can just, “Oh, Tuesday morning is best for me. Check the box and then type in 10:00.” It can be an inexpensive tool that automates that meeting, booking, and follow-up. The question I was rolling into the next question was about top follow-up tools. I’m not sure if that’s around the meeting, booking, which we touched on there or if you’re looking at follow-up tools in terms of sales people calling, demos, and automated marketing funnels. If we didn’t get enough on your follow-up tools question there, do come back. Okay, so yes post-show. All right, you want to talk about what you do for post-show?
Lynn: Yeah, so we generally try and scan leads, and we have a little questionnaire on our leads that tell us what products they’re interested or what solution they’re interested in. We will follow-up with depending on what product they’re interested in, we have a series of automation funnels that we send people through, whether they’re a customer or not customer. We do a lot of scrubbing of the list beforehand, and then we’ll send them through these automation funnels, which might be for one of our products that tells them a little bit about the product and has some case studies and some videos, and prompts them to contact us again.
We also have an inside sales group that will be following up, and our sales people will be following up directly with them as well. The inside sales and sales works as a unit. We have two-pronged approach where we’re contacting them via phone, but then we’re also emailing them and keeping ourselves top of mind, if you will.
Cindy: Sure.
Lynn: With the information that we think that they’d be interested in hearing that will help further them along with funnel.
Cindy: Nice. A lot of the folks I work with literally take notes at the show. Instead of a tablet or something like that, they take notes, because in sales it’s easier to look at the person and take notes than it is to type on a device. It’s just another approach. Then have a database entry person either on site or back at the office entering that and scoring the leads maybe hot, medium, not a fit right now, and that would differentiate the post-show follow-up as well. Those are ways that we do that.
All right, so we have some questions here and Nick, we may hit you up for this about the Experient list. There are a couple of different ways to run the Experient list. Would you like to touch on that, Nick or if you put me on the spot, I can go for it, man.
Nick: Yeah. It’d be really best to email me with that. We have several contacts at Experient. Woman to reach out to is Georgia Martin. I can put her email address in the chat as well. Yeah, we can, individuals, exhibitors can rent last year’s list of entrepreneurial … that’s a really effective tool from Experient. They’ve been a third party resource for us for a long time with all of the registration efforts as well as the badge and leader table standards. Yeah, so there’s a lot of great information that you can go on from that absolutely.
Cindy: I have worked with folks who went in and used the email tool where you can choose the different target markets and send an email out. It does come out of Experient’s email tool, and so there are limited metrics on that. Definitely, if you’re going to use that tool, be sure you can see what metrics there are available for you and be sure it fits your needs. In addition to Experient, one might consider doing account ways marketing and LinkedIn, because you can see a lot of metrics there and actually choose the companies you want to go to. A lot of different choices around that as well.
All right, what are we seeing? The chat is just full. I want to be sure we’re answering everyone. Let’s see, we’re looking at a conversion rate at the show coming out of my NAB Show portal. The question is do we have any methods to increase the percentage from the actual … So, What I think the question is is, “Hey, someone clicked on the myNAB Show and either showed interest or even added into their calendar and said they were coming to the booth.” Then the conversion rate you’re seeing of that read from myNAB show to actually turning up on the booth as 11% and you’re looking to grow that. Okay, got it.
Lynn: Yeah. I think what you’re saying is that you’re reaching out to them with personalized emails after they have come through the portal and expressed interest, and so you’re asking for above and beyond that. That’s what we did.
Cindy: I think they’re wanting to see more people. They’re wanting to see more of the people who said they were coming actually come.
Lynn: Right. I don’t know what our actual conversion rate is off the top of my head, but I know that we do send out personal emails to all the people that we can with information about some of the products. I would start with that, start looking at your email and see if you can optimize that and do maybe testing maybe and see if, try two or three different types of emails and once you get the people coming into your booth, see and try and tie that back to which email you sent and learn something from it.
Cindy: In terms of getting the people who said they’re interested to actually come to the booth, depending on your company size, to me it’s hundreds of dollars an hour, thousands of dollars per hour to be at the NAB Show. We can calculate it. I always would do that when I was doing that part of the business and go, “Okay, it’s costing us X thousands of dollars an hour to be here.” Because it’s so important, anybody who says they’re coming to visit me via the myNAB portal, I would ask a sales person to call them and book a meeting. It’s just that important.
Their contact info is there. Just throwing that out there. If you just say, “I can’t. It’s too many.” Okay, then pick 10%. Go through and cherry-pick the vast ones, because that would be a way to move that 11% up. If it were me, that’s the approach I would take. All right, let’s see what else we have for questions. Then some of these questions too, feel free like some of you guys are asking what other members on the call are taking, jump on to the LinkedIn portal and let’s actually, or the LinkedIn group and let’s actually start a conversation in there. If you guys comfy talking with each other, I think it’d be awesome to bump that community into a place where we’re helping each other all year round, which should be great.
Here’s a question. Do you calculate customer acquisition cost when evaluating the performance and events? Do you think exhibiting can actually inflate those numbers? Is that something you want to touch on?
Lynn: Yeah, we don’t do that right now although I know that that’s a very valid metric and a lot of people probably use that. I don’t know actually if that would … because we’re not calculating it really, so I don’t know if that would be different for shows than other metrics. Do you have any experience with that?
Cindy: I don’t work with people who are calculating that right now. Interestingly, I do calculate that for my own company. I went to IBC and it cost me X dollars and I saw this number of my clients there and I have the pleasure now of working with two new clients, and I can look at customer acquisition. I do it, but also I would say that the clients I work with have long sales cycles and don’t necessarily look to trade shows in terms of hack number as well. [crosstalk 00:43:52]
Nick: Hey, Cindy. One thing I wanted to mention as well for folks that are interested in the attendee list and perhaps increasing that brand at the show, I think a great way to do, great way to think to do would be to acquire that attendee list, sort through it, and then go into your exhibitor dashboard into your portal, access your guest passcode, which is on the top right hand corner of the screen. Then you just copy and paste that guest passcode into any emails you want to send. You can put up on all your social media accounts and you can invite the selected attendees instead and say, “Hey, come to the show for free. Come visit us at whatever your booth is.” Then you can start the relationship there, perhaps book a meeting before they come out, but then you’re the one that gets them free access to the NAB Show. I think that that’s a really great tool where it’s super easy to use, but not everyone’s doing it, and I really hope that people can start to use that guest pass so that every exhibitor is entitled to use.
Cindy: That’s a good one, Nick. Thank you. We do have a question in here about shortening sales cycles, which is always a fun topic. It really ties in here well, because we’re talking about the multi-touch attribution and multi-touch marketing. Do you want to talk about shortening sales cycles?
Lynn: Sure. What we’ve done in the past and I think I mentioned this before is that one of the tactics we use is promos at the show. We’ll do in that show promo for people that are, already know our products. They’re already in the sales cycle, and so we offer some incentive to close early or to close it by the end of the month or by the end of the show. That seems to work, and we track that through sales force so we can see how many people actually took advantage of it and what the close rate was. That’s generally what we do. Yeah, do you have any ideas on that?
Cindy: I do. Actually, one thing to think about is the customer journey, which sounds all markety, but I do. It’s like, okay what do they do first? The first thing someone does is go, “Oh, this is really bothering me.” Oh, there’s a product that I can use to fix this or a software, something I can use to fix this. I look at that. Then the next thing I look at maybe is go to the other one, right before they buy, what do they do? Right before they buy, they do a demo or download. After whatever the thing is that they do and then just take that first thing and that last thing and then maybe map out a couple other steps in there.
They ask for a brochure, this is very simplified, but you’d get the idea. They ask for a brochure, they ask for a demo, they talk to the sales person, they get a quote, they actually do the trial or demo and then hopefully do the purchase, and look at that, and how much time is in between each step, and how much time should be in between each step. Is there anywhere where we’re falling down that we can be better? That’s a way. If they get stuck at this particular spot, is there some piece of info that we can be of service and be helpful to them? They’re like, they need to know something about a piece of technology, or they’re worried about whatever the budget or the money, whatever the concern is right there, address it.
If it’s bogging one or two people, it’s probably a concern for all these other folks as well. That’s how I would look at sales cycles. Do you have a process someplace or you’re really looking at those steps. Just something to think about there. All right, I think we’ve hit all the questions in here. Thank you for all the interaction, everybody. It was super great to have active chat today. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Fallon. Most of all, thank you.
Nick: Thank you, guys.
Lynn: Yeah, thanks for having me. That’s fun. Good luck everybody. See you again.
Nick: Thanks, everybody. Let me know if anyone needs anything. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you, Cindy. Bye-bye.
Cindy: Bye.
