Your trade show effort is not complete until you have a plan in place for the following up of the leads generated from the trade show. If you are a small company, and like most small company everyone wears at least two hats.  If this is your company, you have to be forceful, demanding, threatening and detailed oriented to make sure that these leads are not lost in the day to day business cycle.

In some small companies the President takes the entire A” or hot leads and gives 1 or 2 leads, depending on the number of hot leads they received, to each member of the management team with the following edict, “Contact this person or persons today, and see what we need to do to get the order. If you, or the prospects, have any questions please contact me, I want a report back on this before noon today”

The President of the company has made these leads a priority. Everyone is accountable. With this type of follow up the President will be able to determine if this trade show was worth while, how much did each lead cost, and how much it will cost to close these orders.

The problem in large companies’s is the bureaucratic game of structure and accountability many times gets in the way of getting business. Everyone is so worried about do what is company correct they loose sight of the fact that in our very competitive world today if someone requests information from a company regardless of their size and if they don’t get what they requested in a timely fashion they will be looking at some other company regardless of how big you are. Major organizations, realizing this have taken departments and made them into a company within a company relying on accountability and profitability as key rather than structure and redundant effort.