Tips for Successful Staffing Firm Tradeshow Follow Up Campaign

You determined which staffing firm tradeshow to attend, you put on a great show, you tracked the people through your booth and now it’s time to follow up. This is where most leads wither and die. Creating an overall plan for your follow up has to be on your high list of priorities. Successful follow-up plans include several touch points from calls, to emails, to LinkedIn reach outs, to continuing social media presence and more. How many times have you looked at your team and asked if they followed up on a staffing firm tradeshow campaign and heard, “Yes I have followed up”? Please keep in mind trust is earned. So, ask the second question. When I say the second question, I mean asking them what is follow up to you?

Defining the Plan
In order to define a plan you must recognize which accounts and contacts are going to which salesperson or recruiter. Once you have completed this, there must be a program for people to follow-up on. The plan needs to detail when you want them to do it and what you want them to do.

-Begin with a call one day after the event including the different touch points that you want them to include, in their conversations and voicemails.

-The second important tactic is creating an email for the entire team to use that they can edit but it’s to be sent 3 business days after the event.

-The fourth day after the event, have them try to connect via LinkedIn. Make sure to have your sales team utilize messaging from your email and the phone touch points.

-Seven days after the event write a mini article to appear in social media with some photos from the event and commentary of the value of the content of the event, as well as mention of the great interactions that you had with all the employees.

-Once this has been posted, have the individual sales people share this across their networks as well as direct message reference to the article to the contacts they are following up on.

During all of this time, there have been 2 or 3 more calls as well as a potential notecard (note: keep in mind that writing “great meeting you” is not worthy of a notecard, they should be referencing something from their conversation with the person).

Tracking
I say this a lot, but inspect what you expect. This means create actions within your CRM as well as reports to show you how everyone is doing against the campaign so that when you ask if they have done the follow up, you know the answer to the second question. Inspection is not necessarily a tool to beat up your sales staff. It is a tool to drive success and get them bought into the process.

No matter what anyone says, and feel free to attempt to prove me wrong, create a campaign that defines the steps from above, create tracking, hold your team accountable, and you will see results. Please notice the certainty in which I say this. You will see natural results that prove to you the value of doing staffing firm tradeshows as opposed to the discussion 3 months later of why we should we even attend this staffing firm tradeshow since we don’t know what we got from it. Happy hunting!

 
About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations.