The leads are in, but how do you sort them?

The above image easily demonstrates my state of mind right now upon returning from Construct Canada late yesterday evening to sort through the leads I got. Right now I am sorting through to organize the leads into a few categories:

1) Subscription Requests
2) Information Requests
3) Media Guide Requests

From the three categories I am now listing them in order of how likely I feel each one will do. I will then be setting up a tracking system to see what comes of each lead and for the next year track other trade shows. I want to see if I get the same people returning to just "kick the tires" of buying something or if after meeting them again and further developing a relation ship turns a lead into a sell.

Further down the road I will weigh the costs involved with me getting to the show and seeing if I can find out what the true cost for each lead is. Once I understand the "true cost" I will see if there is a way to increase my results while decreasing my failure.

One of the several things I tested this year was not given out my business card unless I exhausted a few other ways to get contact information from people asking for more information. I always asked for the person requesting information that they provide me their card. In some cases people did not have them and offered to write out their information. The reason I did this was to qualify the person a little more to see what their real interest was. If they would not want to write out their email and contact information they would not be very likely follow up to the information I would provide.

The other thing I tested was asking people to fill out a subscription form for the paper so I could send them additional information and set them up with a subscription. I had five people either fill out the application themselves or provide me a business card to do it for them, 4 others took the form and 3 said they would just take a paper and call me. Again if someone is really interested in advertising they should like to get the paper on a regular basis.

Overall from the show I seem to have a good list of leads that contain new subscribers, previous contacts who are interested in having another feature article done a few others looking to start running some advertising in the next few months. I hope to be able to crack the code of what process of getting peoples contact information leads to higher results in converting them to sales and also understanding what the cost for each lead is.

Stay tuned for more updates on this in the next few months.