Greater customer satisfaction with quicker response
Pragmatic and comparable measurement of the success of every trade fair participation is vital. At print technology provider Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, visit reports are crucial to this.
Companies that take part in trade fairs get noticed and talked about. Those that don't show up are in for a hard time. People may stop talking about them altogether," so Ludwig Erhard, German chancellor, said in 1965 when opening Hanover Fair.
Forty years ago one of the main objectives of participating in a trade fair was certainly to raise the company's awareness level. These days that is not enough to justify the cost and effort involved.
In a company's overall marketing mix a tradeshow appearance is one of the most striking and elaborate options. Pragmatic and comparable success measurement at every fair is therefore vital. At Heidelberger Druckmaschinen in Heidelberg performance controls revolve around visit reports. These consist firstly of the orders taken at the fair, the number of qualified visitor contacts, or leads, and of course the hot leads, as well as the visitor and staff surveys conducted after a major event, such as drupa in Düsseldorf, the biggest and foremost trade exhibition in the print media industry.
For drupa 2004 Heidelberger Druck developed an exhibition system to support the company's marketing and sales unit in its success measurement and customer care processes.
This has established itself exceedingly well and is used unchanged to the present day. It has enabled many processes to be standardised. The focus of its implementation was on the sales structure, flexible user administration, simple user guidance, a standardised customer and contact database and a clearly arranged product data structure. With this system, branch offices of Heidelberger Druck can take care of and control their events, open houses and trade fairs online the world over in respect of lead and complaint management, incoming orders and the entire tradeshow reporting.
Before the fair all the company's global customer and contact data were fed into the system, amounting to some 400,000 customer datasets that employees could access at all terminals.
Orders taken during a trade fair are recorded on a standardised incoming order form. Clearly structured, it can be filled in by hand at any time. On this form an order can be defined as a
- soft order (not yet signed and sealed)
or as a
- firm order.
The same pragmatic process is always used at every fair.
With a standardised order intake process, different order statuses and the systems support, results can be viewed and tracked just in time. Ongoing lead management is an important, optimising and integral part of sales preparation and sales promotion measures and another success measurement activity at trade fairs.
Lead management is defined by the process of contact making and the documentation and qualification of leads. At Heidelberger Druck a ‘lead' is a registered contact with a customer or prospect, irrespective of who initiated the contact, and an ‘opportunity', a qualified business opening, is a so-called ‘hot lead'.
The aim is quickly to record and qualify in a central system all customer / visitor contacts made at the fair. Queries and requests from prospective customers and clients are entered in detail into the Lead Management Database, where they are available to be passed on and processed as well as evaluated. This means that exhibition success measurement can be carried out on a daily basis and the number of leads and their quality announced to the exhibition team at their morning exhibition briefings.
To keep a record of leads at trade fairs Heidelberger Druck prefers to use the paper lead form, finding it the ideal way of documenting dialogues with visitors or customers. Wishes can be noted explicitly and, most importantly, anywhere and by anyone. The lead form is also used to file complaints, which is why a free text field is indispensable.All leads are recorded during and after the fair in the trade fair application. The LM system gives Heidelberger Druck a competitive edge by drastically reducing lead processing times. The company uses a system based on internet technologies that can be accessed from all over the world and passes on lead data swiftly and efficiently. Instead of investing valuable time and resources to distribute customer inquiries manually to the respective markets, the leads are automatically dispatched.
Integrated reporting results in rapid success measurement directly at the fair. A host of different evaluations, adapted specially to Heidelberger's needs, are available in the exhibition application.
It is important to coordinate these inquiries with all business units in the run-up and to use them at every fair to guarantee event comparability.
To summarise: a corporate exhibition appearance is successful only if the leads before, during and after the fair can be pursued and worked up systematically. That involves close cooperation between marketing and sales units and an intelligent system to support this on an ongoing basis.
Petra Schneeberger-Pfeiffer
m+a report Nr.2 / 2006 vom 24.03.2006
m+a report vom 24. März 2006