Lead Generation Debate: Quality vs. Quantity

A colleague and I were recently chatting at the Spider House Cafe and ballroom in Austin, Texas over coffee about an age old debate for marketing and sales teams.

When you attend an event, is it about returning with QUANTITY or QUALITY leads? There are several schools of thought.

1. My colleague told me the story of how at one trade show her company went to, they gave away three mini tablets a day for three days. Every entry was lead scanned. They returned home with 2,000 leads, of which only 100 ended up being a sales-ready lead. Finding those 100 took tons of hours of segmenting and then cold-calling leads.

Turns out that their giveaway (a huge crowd attraction) swarmed their booth with a highly interested consumer audience that actually ended up blocking their target audience of business executives from coming to the booth. (Naturally, in the following year at that event, they adjusted their prize giveaways accordingly.)

= Quantity.

2. Attending conferences or exhibiting at shows is the most expensive marketing endeavor. Between purchasing floor space, using an architect to build your booth design, ordering the swag, having lead retrieval software and paying roughly $1,000 / day / person in travel expenses adds up really quickly.

Recently, another of my colleagues sent a team to a tradeshow with 4,000 attendees. They assumed that spending more on the booth would mean attracting more quality leads to generate sales and end in a net profit. However, the event team returned with only 100 leads scanned.

Upon their return, their office staff was furious. How could they have spent SO much money and returned with so few leads captured? The event sales folks argued that they were “pre-filtering” their scans. They would only scan folks with whom they had a potential sales-ready lead.

= Quality.

So, what’s the answer?

Is scanning a higher quantity of leads more important? Should you scan away and figure out the sales-ready leads after the event? Even if only 10% of your total scans are actually sales-ready, the rest of the scans can be put into marketing automation systems to begin conversations. It stands to reason that the larger your quantity of leads scanned, the more leads will be in your pipeline.

OR…

Do you only scan quality conversations and truly interested leads? Should you “pre-filter” your scans to save time back at the office? You wouldn’t have to worry about segmenting through a massive amount of scans to qualify only a few as “sales-ready” after they are already uploaded into your CRM (customer relationship management) system.

For me, the answer is both.

It’s important to scan as many badges as possible at events. If you have invested in exhibiting at a trade show, you have paid A LOT of money to be there so you definitely want bring a significant quantity of both sales and marketing leads back to the office. However, you should never spend time sorting through leads or business cards after an event. Too much time will pass and your leads will grow cold; too much time will be wasted trying to remember information after the conversation that happened. Information, time, leads and sales will be lost.

In order to scan as many leads as possible AND avoid losing anything after the show, you should use a pre-qualifying strategy when you scan. You should be able to scan a badge and immediately qualify a scan as “sales-ready” or not. In addition, you should be able to customize a survey with the products you are exhibiting, and add notes, to further segment your leads collected. A few taps on your custom lead retrieval app would allow you to take advantage of BOTH quantity and quality lead generation.

With Captix:Scan, a custom lead retrieval app, you can do it all. The argument is completely moot with the tap of your finger.

Done.

Captix is event software that manages leads with a few taps of your finger on a mobile device. Sounds much easier than fishing business cards out of a fish bowl and hand-typing them into an Excel spreadsheet, doesn’t it? *Shudder*

Captix is a great “go-to” lead retrieval solution for many trade show exhibitors because they can qualify leads with the tap of a finger on their own mobile devices.