Why You Should Not Let Sales Work the Booth at Tradeshows!

Unless they are in sync with your event goals.  It is kind of hypocritcal that I write this post given my actions as both a direct sales contributor and sales leader working tradeshow exhibits.  I say these things in repent knowing that I was wrong in my actions and ask for forgiveness from my previous co-workers.  I used to manage a large sales team for a $120 million company in Seattle; we sold a large enterprise application with an average sales price of $125,000.  I had a total of 25 sales reps reporting to me from three regions and was one…

It’s budget time! Was your marketing budget cut?

 As a former sales leader and direct sales contributor, I have been on the receiving end of leads for many years.  Throughout I have seen firsthand the challenge marketing teams have in articulating their value to a CFO.  By value, I mean revenue production.  If your marketing budget was $4 million, what revenue impact did your company receive through this investment?  These are the types of questions that typically come up:   1)      How many deals did we land through the 40 tradeshows we attended? 2)      How much revenue was driven from our user’s conference?  3)      How many leads came…

Ever wonder how much you spend managing leads collected from Trade Shows?

A case study of Validar eating its own dog food at Dreamforce 09. Validar just returned from exhibiting at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual Users Conference in which we generated 148 leads in three days.  This event is the biggest gathering in the world of Salesforce.com users which is a target market for us.  Salesforce.com users can leverage Validar Lead Import with our Lead Capture product suite to get the complete marketing picture which includes the elusive ROI calculation.   Overall it was an absolutely great show with excellent content and smart people attending.  The downside for us, it was very expensive to be…