You’ve decided to get involved with exhibiting at attorney conferences. You purchased your booth, set everything up on site, collected business cards, took notes about likely cases, and carried everything back to your home or office.
Schedule Post-Trade Show Follow Up On Your Calendar
Don’t blow it now. Make immediate contact your HIGHEST priority when you return to the office. Use your calendar to block out the morning you return to the office to complete sales follow up. Think of new attorney contacts like really good French baguettes. By tomorrow they’re stale.
Before going through the mountain of mail, the volumes of voicemail or the never-ending email, tackle your trade show follow up.
You may need to hang a sign on your office door saying you are unavailable (just as you would be if you were out at a meeting). Following up after exhibiting at attorney conferences is essential.
Hire a temp (or have an assistant on hand) to help you handle the extra workload. Sound expensive? Compare it against the income you could earn from one case. You could easily make $$2,000-$4,000 or more over the lifetime of a case, especially if you are an expert witness.
There is a flow to new business development and new business relationships. Keeping the momentum going and delivering what you promised, when you promised it, is a critical component to successfully adding new clients to your roster.
If, for some reason, you cannot send the information, the sample reports or have the phone call when you promised, make sure to COMMUNICATE. A simple email letting someone know when you will fulfill your promise fills the bill. Then, be sure to adhere to your promised timeline after exhibiting at attorney conferences.
Don’t get fooled by people who say following up quickly is a sign of desperation. Not true! There’s a difference between “Please meet with me…please, please, please!” showing your desperation and “I am calling to follow up on our conversation this past Monday.”
Prompt response and follow up is respected by decision makers.
It conveys that you are interested in their businesses and lays the foundation for relationships of trust. In a detail-oriented business, demonstrating your ability to deliver the details matters. This is not the time to play hard to get.
Some people want to wait for a few days to give the decision maker time to “dig out from under”. Why? Isn’t that one of the best times to catch the prospect at his/her desk? The long discussion may need to wait for a few days but you can certainly ask for a time on the calendar for a meeting or conference call.
A few people strategically lump trade show contacts with other prospects they are pursuing and then call in priority order. With this line of thinking it could take weeks to follow up with a new contact. Revisit the French baguette analogy. What will it look like weeks later?
Watch the replay of a fast-moving webinar by Pat Iyer and Gary Bronga – on getting the most from exhibiting at trade shows: Time Tested Tips for Tradeshow Exhibiting. This is part of our Marketing Course. See our marketing course: How to get All the Clients You Need. You won’t look at exhibiting at attorney conferences the same way after you get this online training.