Don't Let Give-Aways Bury Interest From Real Prospects

Founders need leads and deals. Don’t pick give-aways that bury interest from real prospects. Have a real conversation and only exchange cards or scan a badge if there is real interest.

Fish Bowl Leads

You are back from a tradeshow and have 400 business cards in a large pile on the table.

Booth visitors had dropped them in a fish bowl you set out to request more information and win a chance at a cool device. Now the work begins–finding the good ones in the pile.

Out of the 400 cards there may be 20 or 40 who are really interested in your product. You have to find them in the pile before too much time has passed and they are on to their next problem.

The good news is that a few will remember you and follow up (and a few who didn’t hear who won the drawing may also call if you picked an especially valuable or hard to find device). Most of your follow up efforts, whether by phone or E-mail or postcard or prayer will go unanswered. This is true even for early adopters who are interested but also very busy. You will need to try a few times in different ways.

Give-Aways Generate False Positives

But the challenge of securing a second conversation is made much more difficult by the tremendous number of false positives you have generated: your real message at the trade show was “give us your card if you are interested in a free iPad or you would like to learn more about our product.” While it’s true that many of the folks who would like to learn more about your product would also like a free iPad, the reverse is not true: few of those who want a free iPad have any interest in your product. You have created a large false positive for interest in your product.

If only 5-10%–or even being generous, 20%–of the leads are actually interested you need to do five or ten or even twenty times the work to contact and qualify them. It’s a rare startup that has the extra bandwidth for the founders or the sales and marketing team to spend ten times the effort on follow up. Don’t fall into the trap of following what the larger firms are doing here. Startups do not have the time or the budget to waste trying to filter through hundreds of business cards. Startups are much better served using show floor time to qualify a hand full of serious prospects instead of wasting time afterward eliminating the prize entries.

Founders Track Leads and Deals

In larger firms the marketing folks may keep score on raw lead generation not revenue so they have a perverse incentive to do this. In a bootstrapping startup everyone needs to realize that revenue is what keeps the lights on and the dream alive. This disconnect between marketing and sales is expensive in a large firm but can be fatal for a startup. If you collect someone’s card because they wanted a cool give-away, but they fundamentally have no interest in your product (they are not real prospects), you are creating an hour or more of wasted effort per “unqualified lead.”

Use Give-Aways To Start Conversations

Instead use a give away to get people to stop by your booth and have a conversation:

Small individually wrapped candies
Setup a small espresso machine and give away shots of espresso or coffee
Chocolate covered espresso beans

Don’t ask for their card or a scan until you have had at least a brief conversation. Then jot down a few notes immediately to jog your memory later about each person you want to follow up with. Time stamp them as an additional reminder (“she came by Tue at 2:30 between this person and that person). Take 20 minutes before you go to sleep to reconstruct your notes.

As a startup you have to ruthless about prioritizing your sales efforts: this means you are asking as many questions of someone visiting your booth to make sure that they have a problem you can help solve or a need you can address as telling them about your product and your company. That way when you take their card or scan their badge you can make a note of the level of follow up that is warranted.

It’s much more useful for a startup to come back from a show with five or ten very interested prospects–real prospects–and a few dozen “warm leads” than hundreds of cards from visitors who wanted to win that iPad. In the latter case, if you haven’t had the time to have a conversation and understand your visitor’s situation and issues, you will have no idea of who is really a hot prospect and where to focus your efforts.