If you are a sales professional, business manager or entrepreneur who attends trade show or a monthly association meeting events as a business development investment you are investing of your resources of both time and money.

You invest your time;

• researching various trade shows and evaluating whether the event will attract the right target market for your business
• your time attending

You invest your money;

• trade show registration/booth fees & staff time
• travelling costs

Attending events helps to raise the visibility of your business in the marketplace and generates prospect leads for your business. These leads come in 2 forms,

1. attendees you met and with whom you started a conversation and
2. the attendance list which includes attendees you did not met and with whom you could start a conversation.

Back at the office, the questions are;

• how do you maximize your attendance investment by following up with the highest number of prospects and driving that traffic into your follow up sales funnel?
• what are the next steps to follow up and
  • continue the conversation with attendees you met?
  • start the conversation with the list of attendees you did not met?

In the past, for trade show follow up marketing, we would mail out sales literature and then try to get prospect on the phone, but follow up methods are changing.

Today, I help my clients utilize the technology they currently have, to build their next follow up steps.

• First, database set up to centralize all of the prospect leads, a CRM Customer Relationship Manager such as ACT, Maximizer or Goldmine.
• Second, set up an email blaster such as Swiftpage with ACT to send out emails.
  (Swiftpage can also work without ACT)

The great thing about this newer methods is that we can collect statistics, for example, about delivery. Depending on your follow up next steps, you may also be able to track the additional traffic your follow up drives to your website.

If you are interested in learning more about how to follow up and maximize your trade show or networking event attendance, I offer several options.

2 hour sessions Follow up – Discover Your Next Step and a session about taking action and implementing the follow up steps in your business Follow Up – Take Action. This session is about database set up, database maintenance and outbound cold calling.

Follow Up Training - Set The Stage For Follow Up and Automate Your Follow Up Process. Attend yourself and bring this business training for your office. You will learn how to build a Follow Up System that maximizes your business development investment and help get you past that 1st contact to the 2nd and beyond to the 5th contact where 80% of sales are made. You will save time, stayed organized and drive more traffic to your business!

Questions? No problem. Contact Cheryl Scoffield, Follow Up Specialist.

One of the first things to consider is a suitable Email Service Provider (ESP) to provide you with the online system to manage your email marketing campaigns, to send personalized emails to your list, manage subscriptions, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.

When choosing an ESP, ask yourself these two questions:

1. Do I need to handle multiple opt-in lists?
2. Do I need a sequential auto-responder?

This will narrow down your choices significantly. If you’d like to have people sign up on your website/blog/facebook to different lists and offer them different automated sequential messages (also know as auto-responders) then my choice would be iContact.

For the ultimate in ease of use, try MadMimi.com, I recommend them to those who would like to create and send their email newsletters by themselves.

MadMimi has the most easy-to-use interface of all the ESPs I’ve tried over the years. They even offer a fully-featured free account for those just starting out. Read this article MadMimi Brings the Fun Back to Sending Email “Blasts” to learn more.

Boris Mahovac R.G.D.
Web Developer and eMarketing Mentor

P.S.
To see how one of our members, Jason Stevens, uses MadMimi, arrange a visit to his Oakville studio, and while he’s explaining to you how easy it is to use MadMimi to stay in touch with clients and prospects, get a professional business portrait done to complement your business card on this blog.

Invest 3 hours and I guarantee I will teach you how to:

	Attract Contacts (Generate Leads) creating a powerful online presence what makes a good web site: basics of design, layout and content search engines: basics of SEO or how to build a Google-friendly site web site is not enough – what else you need online attracting visitors (contacts) with relevant and useful content blogging article writing participating in online forums, etc. online networking (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter) entice visitors to sign up to receive more information about you and your services or products with discount coupons special reports or whitepapers on your topic of expertise regularly published email newsletters how to integrate all your online efforts
	Build Relationships (or, How to Get Prospects to Know, Like and Trust You) follow up with automated and semi-automated messages, delivering your expertise via email create communities, followers and friends engage with your audience in a meaningful conversation once they know, like and trust you they’ll be ready for the final step
	Close Deals (or, How to Convert “Friends” to “Raving Fans”) use gentle email marketing tactics to introduce your services or products to your contacts close deals on line or off line – depending on your business model finally reach your business goals in 2009 – regardless of the state of the economy

As a member Oakville Networking click here to SAVE 30% OFF the tuition