Month: June 2007

Categories
Lead Generation The Marketeer

Last day on the show floor

The conference is wrapping up today (at least the expo floor). As usual my feet and back are ready for a break – conferences all come down to good shoes.

We’ve been using greeters to scan badges, that has proven to be at least 20% more effective in getting names.

One interesting thing – for lead gen collection most shows use a mag stripe card reader. For this one we were given a pocket PC with a barcode scanner. The lead comes up on the screen and we can rank them hot/warm/cold. There’s also a box for text entry from the blackberry-style keyboard, and better yet a record button to take a voice memo. Pretty impressive, now the next step is to try and talk other shows into using the same thing.

Back to the shop for tomorrow…

Categories
Lead Generation The Marketeer

Trade Show Wars

I’m off to set up the booth. This is like the lottery in reverse – you go to the show floor and open the cases and see what’s broken or missing. Best case scenario is that everything is there and working and you breathe a sigh of relief. In a lot of ways it’s a pain but it does get to test your MacGuyver skills to the fullest.

Last year at this show I opened the case and found that the wrong lights had been shipped and they wouldn’t fit into the booth. Thanks to GPS I was at the nearest Home Depot in about 15 minutes buying an assortment of plumbing supplies, tools and a hacksaw to make my own parts. I wouldn’t want to repeat that experience, but it does make for a funny story. Let’s see what today has to offer…

Categories
Lead Generation Productivity Booster

These leads are crap

As a marketeer, I have never heard these words.

Just kidding, I get it at least twice a month. This is the age old struggle between sales and marketing, and with marketing being the creative side there are thousands of responses: “The sale begins at ‘No’, you order taking monkey”, “I give the good leads to closers” etc.

It’s all in good fun, kind of like complaining about cafeteria food, you do it regardless of whether the food is from the best chef or a can. If you are hitting your numbers everyone is happy, if not everyone is pissed off.

But there are things you can do to improve your leads. I’ve been working on our process to screen leads via a survey on SurveyMonkey (a web-based survey tool), and it’s working wonderfully. You get a new list, send them a few questions and you manage to filter out maybe 20%: 5% look a lot better than average and 15% is crap the sales guys don’t have to eat.

Keep in mind I can give a sales guy a hard time, but that’s because I share their goal – they should be able to blow their number out before the 3rd month of the quarter so they don’t have to come in to the office for the last month if they don’t want to (and I don’t have to listen to them). They should really never have to work Fridays, and Mondays should be exclusively for golf. This is the path to a happy workplace.

For more great info on lead gen I turn to Brian Carroll, he’s a thought leader in this space. Here’s some more info on Sales and Marketing playing well together.

Categories
Geek Stuff

Nike’s Coach Bob is Leading the Pack

I usually save gushing about Nike for the podcast, but I was reading Coach Bob today and it just blows me away how good this blog is. If anyone thinks that conversational media won’t become mainstream, you really need to sit down with Coach Bob. I can almost smell the track when I read his column, and as soon as it pops up in my newsreader I go straight to it.

Call me a fanboy, but Nike+ is the coolest thing that has happened to running in the past 10 years. The worst part of this is I can see the potential and I’m just sitting around waiting for the brains at Nike and Apple to put it together. I really want to use it on my full size iPod b/c I like to watch “Heroes” on the treadmill (I’m confident enough to go to the gym before my morning shower, but to look like a slob AND have 2 iPods running at the same time seems too dorky for even me).

I have no doubt there’s a heart rate monitor right around the corner for it, and how cool is that? Your song fades out a bit and Lance Armstrong tells you you’re slacking and better turn it up a notch. GPS is asking a lot at that form factor, but I’d pay extra for that too – completely accurate distance stats.

Enough with the gushing, I’ve got to get back to work, but some cool stories brewing…