Tradeshows – Conferences – Users Group Events – May the religious wars begin. Sales loves them, marketing thinks they are cool as they make for a lot of creative fodder – CEO’s like the fact that their company is a player in the industry – businesses, at least high tech ones spend 25% or more of their marketing budget on events; to give away t-shirts and build “brand”. My view is that if you are a mid-sized business, the only branding you want to hear about is the one used to mark and track cattle.

Here’s another 90% WASTE statistic I heard about from Sirius Decisions – less than 10% of trade show leads are followed up by Sales. So what happens to the rest?

What are the best practices for reducing the 90% waste without all the rhetoric about branding – “was worth it because of the branding?” I get it, awareness on the business is important but why throw out the baby with the bathwater?

My view, as always, is to step back take a deep breath and think about this:

Why did sales only follow-up on 10% of the “leads”?
What was the makeup of the “good leads” or Glengarry leads?
Were the attendees (the companies) they came from a good fit?
Did you come back with the right company but wrong contact names (the IT Admin was at the event but our economic buyer is someone else that we want to target)?
How do we define the right company and filter them against those criteria?
Who is the right person/people at the company you want to reach out to?

Now that you have the answers to the question above, it’s time to turn the 90% waste into HIGH octane leads for marketing and selling. The yield will not be 100% but even if you end up yielding 1/3 of the 90%, you will be at 300% of where you are today with event leads.

Don’t let the data you collect from a tradeshow sit around – mobilize it to create actionable leads in your business. Take it from sludge to high-octane data!