Like many of the readers of this article, for more than 25 years now I have been working with and struggling with sales leads. From the late ‘80s and ‘90s when ISHN and others sent you the “bingo card” responses from the magazine by snail mail (is that still a phrase?), then fax, to electronic lead flow process today we’re all still trying to close leads. Regardless of if you’re a brand or manufacturer exhibiting at national or international shows or a distributor exhibiting at local or regional shows, the struggle is the same: “How do I turn leads into revenue?” or Lead 2 Revenue “as I like to call it.
In the past we collected business cards, then later scanned cards into machines and now we have QR or bar-code readers. We end up with big lists, well hopefully big lists, from the shows and events we attend, and the story is the same, isn’t it? Our sales support or marketing team sorts the database by salesperson, independent rep or agent, etc., and the lead is sent by email or from a CRM of some sort. We hope and pray that they get it to the distributor partner and something eventually happens and someone in the food chain notifies us.