In the age of COVID-19, lead management is more important than ever. Uncertain trade show attendance, hybrid show models, and social-distancing restrictions are all new variables that can have a profound impact on the success or failure of your exhibit-marketing program. While I'm betting that overall show traffic will likely be down, keep in mind that every attendee walking past your booth will be there with a purpose and will be looking for solutions to his or her pain points. What's more, in the current business and social climate, our customers want to know that we genuinely care about meeting their needs and are paying attention to them.

If every potential lead is a valuable asset, then how you plan to attract, engage, qualify, and follow up with these prospects is a process that cannot be an afterthought. To that end, here are my top tips for nurturing each precious lead that finds its way into your exhibit.

Factor social distancing and lead collection into your booth layout.
COVID has forced us to rethink traffic flow in our booths in general, but have you also considered how lead management factors into these plans? This is important in terms of both the physical components of your exhibit and how booth visitors will navigate your space. If you have a large island stand, take a step back and consider the customer journey. If there are fewer touchpoints due to social distancing, where does it make the most sense to, say, scan attendees' badges, conduct demos, qualify prospects, etc.? Perhaps with your previous floor plan it was standard practice to scan badges right before ushering visitors to a presentation area. Now that your in-booth theater is probably on ice, does it make sense to get attendees' info as soon as they step into the exhibit or before they watch a short video midway through their journey? Think about traffic flow and where to place at least one designated lead-collection touchpoint.

Exhibitors with in-line booths face a different challenge because there isn't as much space for your visitors to move through. Per the International Association of Venue Managers' Crowd Density Standard formula for maximum occupancy (square footage ÷ 28), roughly three and a half people can safely be in a 10-by-10 at once. So unless you plan on cutting a sales rep in two, this means either two booth staffers and a customer or one booth staffer and two customers can stand in your space at the same time. In other words, finding ways to quickly and efficiently engage and qualify as many attendees as possible is a top priority. Maybe you could place a monitor near the aisle (keeping height restrictions in mind) that shows your product presentation, thereby educating attendees before they set foot in your booth. If they enter, they've essentially qualified themselves and will likely merit a badge scan.

If you can think of ways to integrate lead collection directly into the attendee experience, all the better. Have you considered creating an in-booth game where booth visitors need to provide their contact info in order to participate? Or perhaps you could have attendees take a questionnaire that is equal parts silly and serious. For example, in addition to the usual questions about purchase time frames, buying authority, and key problems, ask booth visitors about their Zodiac signs, favorite candies and colors, etc. While the just-the-facts questions will help you qualify your prospects, the irreverent queries will allow you to surprise each visitor with a personalized giveaway. The idea is to identify organic ways to collect attendees' contact information that will be less clunky and more enjoyable for both booth visitors and staffers than a "Hi, how are you?" followed by a badge scan.

Train your booth staff on how to listen – and how to disengage.
Due to budget reductions and social-distancing requirements, many exhibitors will likely be sending fewer staffers to each show. If you're in this group, you'll need a crew that knows what its doing regarding collecting and qualifying leads. And that means conducting some staffer training.

In my experience, the most crucial lesson to impart is the importance of listening to each attendee instead of starting every conversation with a spiel about your product or service. As I said earlier, trade show attendees in the year ahead are more likely to be serious shoppers than casual looky-loos. And being showgoers on a mission, each of them has a specific problem that needs solving. By simply asking booth visitors "So what brings you to the show today?," you can get to the root of their challenges without wasting time telling them about things that they aren't interested in, which will help you find your qualified leads more quickly. Bottom line: Staffers should be encouraged to spend more time hearing what attendees have to say than the other way around, especially during initial conversations. Selling can come after trust and the foundation of a relationship have been established.

Additionally, because of the shift in how many people can be in a booth at any given time, it's especially important to get visitors who aren't qualified leads to move along. Yes, you want to ensure that staffers make everyone feel important and that they've received personal attention, but reps shouldn't be spending too much time with someone that is unlikely to become a customer.

To do this gently and politely, staffers can offer to connect with attendees after the show and end conversations by exchanging business cards. If an attendee wants to chat at a future date, he or she may indeed be a viable lead who just needs some extra handholding – which reps can give when they're not confined to exhibit-hall hours and social-distancing rules that severely limit how many showgoers they can meet with. But if some chatty booth visitors won't take the hint, staffers may need to simply excuse themselves to assist attendees standing along the perimeter of your booth (who hopefully have received a knowing nod or wave from a staffer to indicate they haven't been forgotten).

Don't feel obligated to use the show's official lead-retrieval system.
I used to be a firm believer that the best solution was to go with the show-provided lead-retrieval system unless your exhibiting program was so vast it required a custom solution. But technology has come a long way, and thinking out of the box might offer you other means of collecting the info that your sales reps need.

There are great benefits to ordering the official lead-retrieval system, including on-site support and full integration with attendees' registration data. But these show-provided systems can be costly, and small exhibitors' budgets may not have the wiggle room for a $400 software license. Take heart in the fact that the easy option is rarely the only course of action. It's true that the Quick Response (QR) codes or barcodes on attendees' badges hold a treasure trove of information, but remember that you have the ability to collect their data in other ways. Gathering prospects' info via a tablet-based activation, such as the aforementioned game and questionnaire, for example, sidesteps the need for a badge scanner entirely and frees up a few hundred dollars than can be allocated to other areas.

Inquire about what lead information will be collected from digital visitors.
The industry seems to be adopting a "hybrid is the new normal" mindset, so marketers will need to determine how robust of a digital presence they'll want to adopt at trade shows with in-person and virtual components. While the jury's still out on the reliability of return on investment from virtual exhibiting, I believe it makes sense for most exhibitors to leverage a hybrid event's digital platform to some degree. But determining how much to invest in your virtual presence should largely depend on what attendee info show management will share with you, so pepper your show rep with hybrid/digital lead-management questions early in the process. Will you get lead data for everyone registered for the show or only those who visit your virtual booth on the show's platform? Will you get attendees' full data profiles or just their contact information? How and when will this info be shared? What data will you receive if your exhibit is hosted on a third-party server? If you discover that spending $20,000 for a bare-bones, webpage-style "exhibit" will only get you the names and email addresses of attendees who visited your digital booth, I'd strongly encourage you to rethink that investment.

Consider revising your methodology for following up with leads.
Meet with your program's stakeholders and make sure that your lead follow-up processes don't allow any prospects to slip through the cracks. Start by asking some key questions, such as: How and when are our leads distributed? Is lead follow-up a sales or marketing function? If it is a sales function, is the sales team accountable for reporting back to the marketing team and vice versa? How will we follow up with these leads? Will sales resulting from leads collected at this show be attributed to this event? It's likely that some of your historical practices may warrant revision due to COVID. For instance, maybe it's standard for your company's marketing department to send a general thank-you email to all leads within a week of the show. But a trade show rife with qualified prospects may mean that leads should receive a highly personalized follow-up from a sales rep and an invitation to a Zoom call to discuss their needs.

Also, reassess the timeliness of your follow-ups. Speedy contact indicates that your prospects' needs are important to you. Most online-marketing tools allow users to stage email campaigns and launch them as soon as lead info is uploaded. I generally recommend that my clients import new email addresses and hit "Send" on their follow-up missives at the end of each show day. That might not be appropriate for all audiences, however, and if you feel it's better to give prospects time to settle back at their desks, that's fine. But keep in mind that you want to strike while the iron's hot and get in touch with your leads before they forget about you.

In most cases, leads are the lifeblood to your face-to-face marketing program. So take the time to tweak your lead-management strategy and optimize it for doing business in the new normal. This will not only help increase your company's revenue, but also validate the importance of trade shows to your stakeholders. E