Five reasons why trade show exhibitors need a CRM

Trade shows events are great opportunities for elevating your sales game. 81% of trade show attendees have buying authority;  which means 4 out of 5 people walking the aisles are potential customers. However, the question is, how to capitalize on these opportunities?

There are very fewer possibilities for closing a sale during the event. You’ll hardly find someone who would be ready to purchase on the spot. Anyone would think before investing their precious dollars, which is understandable. But that doesn’t mean they will never buy.

Yes, some people visit a trade show only to explore the product and build new networks. But amidst them, you’ll even find entrepreneurs who are trying to find a solution for their ongoing business problems.

They are your high potential prospects whom you need to nurture and convert gradually. The best way to do it is by taking the help of a customer relationship management (CRM) software.

CRM software – The sales support for trade show exhibitors

“How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.” -Bill Gates

Trade shows are lucrative events where you collect large amount of information that if used wisely can help in increasing your business sales.

Your real task begins when this event ends. With a CRM software, you can handle your post-trade show activities efficiently to maximize your trade show ROI.

Here are five reasons why as a trade show exhibitor you need a CRM software:

1. Keep the trade show contacts organized

From creating visually appealing booth to handing out interesting giveaway, you’ve done everything you could to attract the audience and collect the contact information of your prospect.

After all the hard work you surely can’t afford to lose those valuable contacts. With a CRM, streamline those contacts in a centralized repository to avoid mess and confusion.

• Easily access your contacts from anywhere
• Maintain a record of interactions you had with each contact
• Filter and prioritize the contacts as per your specific requirements
• Perform various activities on multiple contacts together
• Get a unified view of the contact and all their activities

2. Gain control over your sales

In a trade show, you’ll meet people belonging to different sectors of the same industry. To stay on track, you can create multiple pipelines for each sector in the CRM.

This would ease your sales management task and render better visibility of your sales cycle. CRM helps in monitoring each step of the prospect in the buying process to take the right action in real-time.

With a CRM you can –

• Manage the health of your sales
• Easily create deals in the pipeline and track their progress
• Receive timely updates about each stage of the sales pipeline to push the deals forward quickly
• Set win probability and rotting period to ensure you don’t miss any opportunity

3. Schedule meetings and receive alerts

The short meeting at the event booth isn’t enough to convey the value proposition of your product. You will need to spend more time with the prospect to explain the benefits of the product.

51% of trade show attendees requested that a sales representative visit their company after the show.

Most of the time when you have too much on your plate there are chances to forget about the meetings scheduled at the prospect’s office. Consider using a CRM system, to ensure that it doesn’t happen.

With a CRM software, schedule meetings and get reminded about them without fail to ensure you don’t keep your prospects waiting.

4. Follow-up promptly after the event

This is perhaps one of the most important post-trade show activities that exhibitors shouldn’t ignore. But sadly, 80 percent of event leads are left unfollowed. Every deal in your database is valuable. So, immediately after the trade show, make sure you build a connection with each prospect.

During the trade show, prospects receive multiple brochures and flyers so there are chances they might not read your product brochures. To be on a safer side, send it again through emails. Follow-up sincerely. Call them to discover their needs, expectation, and goals.

With a CRM you can –

• Set workflow and automate your emails to engage the prospects
• Record your sales calls for gaining a better understanding of the business challenges.
• Automatically distribute deals to your sales team so that the prospects are approached in real-time.

5. Track your activities and measure results

Track your every post-trade show activity to improve and grow. Using an event CRM system, you can track your emails to find out if the prospect is opening and reading your emails.

Most of the times the prospects are interested in a product but are not sure about the investment. They open the email multiple times but do not respond. Approach such prospects at the right time by tracking the emails and clear their doubts.

Besides, you can even track your sales call with a CRM having a built-in calling functionality. This will help you in finding out what’s working and where do you need to put in extra efforts.

Focus on getting better with a CRM system that helps you in analyzing your overall sales process and keeps you up to date with vital sales insight. Using its reporting functionality, create detailed sales reports for measuring results and refining processes.

Most of the best CRM systems also give you the flexibility to customize your reports so that you can get what you exactly need.

Wrapping up

Trade shows acquaint you with a wide number of prospects. You need to take the right steps to convert trade show leads into sales. Maintain the same enthusiasm you had before and during trade show event.

Concentrate on forming lasting customer relationships. Find out your prospect’s business pain points and help them overcome it. Make the most of the CRM software to streamline your sales process and improve the bottom line of your business.

Ensure you choose the CRM for trade shows that is easy to use and has all the necessary features for excelling in sales. Salesmate is one of the best CRM software that has been recognized as the best value for money and ease of use by Capterra.

Try Salesmate for free to explore all features and understand how can it help in winning more sales.