Often, marketing and sales people tear out their hair trying to figure out what customers and prospects are thinking.

• Are they coming to a show?
• Are they thinking about purchasing at the show?
• Did they like last year’s show? How far did they travel?
• What do they look for in a booth?

So here’s a radical idea: Ask them.

Survey tools today are cheap, simple to implement, and sophisticated enough to gather some incredibly helpful information. There’s a really helpful article at idealware.org that outlines some of tools available to you that are free or cheap. The article also outlines a few features to look for:

Pretty much any good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then send your constituents a link to answer the survey online. But some offer more sophisticated functionality that can be very handy when you’re planning anything more than the simplest survey. What types of features might be useful?

• Flexible survey look and feel. A survey that has prominent branding for a survey tool rather than for your organization can be off-putting to your constituents and decrease response rate. A package that allows you to update colors, and font, and header graphics can help you match a survey to your website or organizational branding.
• Skip logic. As you design more complex surveys, it’s often useful to let respondents skip a whole section of questions that don’t apply to them. Survey skip logic allows you to define, for instance, that those who answer “no” to question 10 should skip to question 15.
• Piping. Piping allows you to pull answers from one part of a survey into another. For instance, if someone says in one question that they live in New York City, you can then ask them in a follow-up, “What’s the best thing about living in New York City” – filling in the name of the city from the previous question. More sophisticated packages allow you to combine skip logic and piping to customize surveys even further.
• Randomization. The order of a set of questions, or the set of answers to a given question, can often affect survey responses and thus the quality of your data. Features that automatically randomize the order of particular questions or answers will help avoid this issue.
• Website integration. While many of these packages create surveys in their own web page, some allow you to embed them into your existing website. This can be a particularly useful way to do quick, one-question surveys (called polls), or to gather opinions from web visitors in a longer survey.
• Data analysis. One of the primary differentiators between inexpensive packages and their more expensive brethren is their ability to help you to analyze the data and understand the meaning behind the results. Most packages provide simple reports summarizing the answers to each question, and many will let you download them into Excel or another tool for futher analysis. More advanced packages allow you to cross-tabulation to see the data relationships between different sets of questions, or to do complex statistical analysis.

Keep in mind that no software package can do the design work to ensure your survey will collect effective, high quality data. While it’s easy to slap together a set of questions, designing a survey that will capture the data you need in a rigorous way is complicated, and you’ll likely benefit from consulting someone who has experience with survey design.

The article goes on to give an overview of some of todays more popular free and cheap survey sites.  You can (and should) read it here: Link

For tradeshows, it would be good to survey before and after a show with the before coming far enough ahead that you can still plan toward the results.  While this kind of survey may not give you a totally clear picture, it can be effective in making decisions about booth design, position and even which tradeshows to attend.

This article from Terry Stanfield, outlines the basics of creating relationship via the telephone. It’s an interesting aspect of sales and generating leads that’s often over looked. While email makes communication fast, it is also very impersonal. Face to face meetings are always best but fuel costs can make some think twice before crossing the country…or even crossing town.

The good old fashioned telephone however, is intimate, cheap and very personal. The focus of the article on creating relationship is key. Afterall, most of our experiences with unsolicited phone calls is negative. Like all sales, the rejection rate must be horrific, yet the investment in time does build relationships with prospects that could lead to a sale. Depending on your product that could be either a phone call away or a meeting set up during the call.

Oddly (or not so oddly) this article along with many others on sales, stresses relationship building and listening. Is the ‘Always Be Closing’ rule going out of fashion or is it just ineffective? Has selling changed on the telephone and the tradeshow floor?

Kind of. The other point of this article is persistence. Maybe “Always Be Selling” is just another way of keeping at it, facing rejection, listening to needs, and responding to problems.

From the article:

“Teleprospecting is using the phone wisely, without doing any selling. However, when utilized properly, teleprospecting is the most effective tool in the lead generation program. It will deliver sales ready leads.

The reason it works so well is because of the human contact, one person talking to another person. Without human contact it is impossible to build relationships, which become profitable to customers and sellers alike. Human contact is the only way to get to meat of a situation, which means you must have lengthy and sincere conversations with the potential clients.

Every time you have a productive conversation with a potential client your knowledge of that potential client will increase. Think about it if you having a conversation with someone, eventually you can earn their trust. They will tell just about anything you want to know.

By the end of a couple of conversations you will know when this business will be ready to place an order. You will already be talking to the decision maker, so you will learn all about how the process works. You will have learned what the prospective client likes about the product and what he doesn’t like. You will learn who your competition is and what the potential likes and dislikes about them.

The leads generated from these telephone conversations will be ready for your sales personnel to make the sale. Your sales will increase significantly. Your sales department will be able to maintain a positive attitude, which is an important element when it comes to making sales.”

Read the full article here: Link