salesforce Archives

June 11, 2018 By Denis Oakley

Two Types of Strategy: Attrition and Guile

There are two types of strategy. You can have strategies of attrition. You can have strategies of guile. There really aren’t any other approaches. This really simple distinction helps to bring clarity to many business decisions – especially when you think about your marketing strategy and competitive positioning.

Attrition as Strategy

The first type of strategy is Attrition. This goes under a large number of names. It can be brute force, frontal attack, advantage in numbers, overwhelming strength. The core idea is that you have more X than your opponent and you can use it to overwhelm him.

This could be money, time, manpower, market position or reputation. Let’s have a look at each of those in turn.

Examples of Attritional Strategies

Google has a strategy of attrition to its competitors, or rather the small startups who could be its competitors. It buys them. If may do something with them or it may not. It’s wall of money means that it is easier to take an offer and give up than fight against a company that can deploy billions to outcompete you.

In 1812 the Russian empire used time against Napoleon. With nowhere to helter from the Russian winter and no supplies Napoleon needed to reach a place of safety to survive. The whole strategy devised by Kutusov was designed to use time against Napoleon so that General Winter could cause massive human and morale damage.

Market position can also be used as a strategy of attrition. As a market leader you can trade market share to protect your revenues, force a competitor to over expand or overpay for customers. Many FMCG companies, such as Procter and Gamble, use this strategy with cash cows as part of their portfolio management technique.

The use of manpower as an attritional strategy is often associated with the Great War and particularly with the Battle of the Somme. It’s also a facet of many political campaigns. Both Barack Obama and Tony Blair used an attritional strategy with millions of supporters in the campaigns outpacing the opposition at a grassroots level.

Reputation is also a source of strategic power. The Pope used his reputation to generate money from the sale of indulgences to pay for St Peters. In more modern times we see people in authorities positions using their reputation to achieve their own goals. Elon Musk has used his reputation to finance Tesla motors. With car production low (in June 2018) that reputation is at risk if he does not deliver and needs to raise more capital at disadvantageous terms.

Guile as Strategy

The second of the two types of strategy is guile. This is looking at your enemy and thinking.

I am going to get too badly hurt if I go mano a mano with him. I need to do something different.

So a strategy based on guile, or cleverness avoids the direct approach and looks to find a way of achieving the same objectives without overwhelming the enemy. Make no bones about it though – the enemy, or competitor, is intended to end up face down on the ground.

Odysseus is the poster boy for this approach to strategy with the big wooden horse in the Trojan War. Sun Tzu in the Art of War put it another way –

Be Like water

and

When the enemy advances retreat. When the enemy retreats advance,

Examples of Guile as Strategy

Some good examples to using guile include word of mouth, viral marketing and straight out disruption

Word of mouth is the classic guile tactic. Here you focus on showing customers that you care. Tony Hsieh did this at Zappos with a total focus on delivering an amazing customer experience. He did not go head to head with the existing shoe brands but instead built an experience that made people want to buy shoes from him. Delivering Happiness is a great read.

Both Dropbox and Gmail used Viral marketing to avoid having to spend billions of dollars acquiring customers. In each case they offered something that was essentially free – a free product subsidised by advertising for gmail – and – a freemium service with a few paying users supporting a basic free service for dropbox. Users were encouraged to give the ‘free gift’ to their friends and because it was so good the CAC (cost of customer acquisition) was incredibly low compared to paid acquisition.

Disruption is another form of guile. Marc Benioff realised that he could not go head to head with Oracle or SAP in CRM. They both had a huge installed base of users and could throw a wall of money at any direct attack that Salesforce made. Instead he changed the game and said

No more Software

With that reframing of the enterprise CRM market into Dinosaurs and Salesforce he disrupted the market and made many of Oracle and SAPs competitive advantages liabilities instead.

What Type of Strategy to Use

Guile as strategy is normally the only type a startup should EVER consider using.

Startups are constrained by limited resources. If not they should often be as the story of Samuel Langley and the Wright brothers shows. The startup is faced with a world where it is challenging large incumbents who have far more of every conceivable resource than they do.

Going head to head is like me fighting a gorilla. It may make an awesome three second gif but it doesn’t have a happy ending. Entrepreneurs have to look for smart ways to achieve their strategic goals. The more known those ways are, the more often that they will be attritional. An example is Facebook advertising. Five years ago it was a cheap way to buy an audience. Now with so much advertising money switching to digital when you buy attention you are competing with the world’s largest brands. Can you win? This is the whole premise of growth hacking

However there are exceptions. If you are in a new category, you have traction, funding and are in land grab mode you go full out. A good example of this is the ride sharing war between 2012 and 2016 with Uber, Lyft, Grab and Didi Chuxing all spending billions to build market share and establish a strong position before they got swamped by new entrants.

How are the Two Types of Strategy Useful to Entrepreneurs

For entrepreneurs a guile based strategy is almost always the best of the two types of strategy. The quick test that you have to ask is

Who else is doing this?

and

Do they have more money than me?

(Swap money in the above for any other relevant resource)

If an incumbent is using a similar approach, content or marketing channels then the conclusion is that you should really be looking at doing something else.

Use an attritional strategy when your competition is weak.

Use a guile based strategy when you have limited resources and cannot afford to lose.

If you’d like help discovering the best strategy to use do reach out and book a free call – alternatively do signup to my newsletter so that you never miss my strategic insights.

June 25, 2015 By Denis Oakley

Dynamic Workflows in Business Process Automation

Note: Dynamic workflows do not as far as I know yet exist in any business process automation software or solution

A dynamic workflow is, very simply, a workflow that is automatically created and destroyed by the business automation software.

In traditional business process automation software solutions, such as Salesforce, you automate a business process by analysis the process and then coding it into the software. It is launched when one or more conditions are met and completed when all the actions associated with it are completed. Conditions can be based on any structured data that the software has access to and actions can be anything that the software can do itself or trigger in external applications through connectors.

An example would be to send a customer an email automatically on his birthday.

Problems with Traditional Static Workflows

This is great and it has enabled businesses to massively increase their productivity. There are a number of problems with this approach.

It suits businesses with well known and well mapped processes
It is time consuming and often tedious, difficult and expensive to implement (or all three)
If the business changes a lot of the automation has to be reviewed for relevance and effectiveness
It can increase the costs of organisational change

Creating a Static Workflow

An example is a small change that I made to a Salesforce instance recently. In this case there was a certain category of opportunity that was automatically generated on the system which needed to be passed to a partner. You simply had to tell the customer what was happening and pass the details to the partner.

Clone an existing email template to the customer and update wording
Clone an existing email template to the partner and update wording.
Create two new email alerts
Create the workflow
Test
Deploy.

All in it took about 90 minutes and it will save about 2 minutes every time that it is triggered. So you get the pay back pretty quickly. The trouble is as you work through a sales process and increase the granularity you find that there are hundreds and thousands of these small requirements. At some point the opportunity cost becomes too high and the Salesforce admin revolts.

When you use dynamic workflows in contrast you are able to see patterns of emerging demand for workflows through patterns of user behaviour and implement them automatically.

Creating a Dynamic Workflow

So to use the above example again.

Think of the sales person working through her email in box. She replies to an email and forwards it to a partner. A few minutes later she repeats the pattern of behaviour. The dynamic automation software sees this and looks at the emails, the recipients, the opportunities that they relate to and the text of the original email and the salesperson’s message. Critically it then goes back through much of the salesperson’s email history to validate the patterns it finds

It then suggests to the salesperson that a new workflow rule should be created. The response of the salesperson then helps train the system.

Depending on the scale of the organisation you apply this on a general basis or an individual basis. People have different styles of working so in much the same way that you may have different page layouts for different profiles you could well have different workflows for different users. These would be constrained by a general automation architecture that would place limits on both what is acceptable behaviour by the user and on their changes to the way the CRM is automated.

The key benefit is that, depending on how you set your system up, you are able to capture and automate a very significant part of user’s daily administrative work. It’s likely to achieve 80% over time with the remainder being edge and emergent cases that require more thought.

You are able to do this across the whole organisation, at once, continually, and as the organisation changes the workflows will adapt. So, if you get the architecture right, that’s not a small if, you will have a much more robust business process automation system that reacts quickly to the changing market with far fewer requirements for expensive integration consultants

Scaling at the Organisational Level

An alternate approach is to use dynamic workflow creation to generalise best practice across the organisation. So for example when you have 5 or 10 sales people in a large team repeating patterns of behaviour – even something as trivial as editing data or selecting products – you can identify that behaviour and then modify fields, layouts and workflows for the organisation as a whole to enforce the best practice again automatically.

A final example; consider a team, of sales people sending out customised proposals by email. By looking at the information that is sent to the prospect and how it is presented and then data on the prospects behaviour you can extract best practices that are then fed back automatically into the template for a process of continuous improvement.

Now there is no way that I am suggesting that any of this is easy. Ignoring for the moment the engineering problems in developing systems flexible enough to do this you also have a problem with the business process automation software which suddenly has to have another meta layer of complexity added to it. No fun at all for system admins.

The promise though is that using machine learning and other algorithmic tools you can start to reclaim much of the 60% of a salesperson’s time that is not spent selling. You are essentially shifting complexity from the human arena to the machine. By doing so you have many more tools to manage it effectively.

Some Thoughts on Creation of Dynamic Workflows

You need to have a confidence level. This can actually be set fairly high because a lot of the time the pain has to be fairly high for users to push for a positive change (as opposed to complaining about bugs). I find that when a user has to do a trivial task dozens of times a month they start agitating for a workflow.

Activation: Could this used unwisely trash an organisation? Sure. One trash case would be having emails hacked and used to send malicious messages. This could then trigger a dynamic workflow and thus perpetuate the hacking. So you need checks and controls in place. Mostly though normal management controls should be sufficient to control negative dynamic workflows. After all if staff use of the email and CRM system is non compliant with your procedures you probably have pretty big problems to worry about.

Senescence. People change. Organisations change. Certainly with Salesforce instances bloat over time as obsolete code is deactivated but not removed. It requires constant admin focus to keep it lean. If you are dynamically creating workflows based on user demand then you build in graceful senescence. If a workflow is not used over time it is deactivated and eventually archived.

Data size. Now this is interesting. One of the big trends of the last 5 years has been the rise of big data as Google, Facebook et al struggle to extract value from the torrents of data that they gather. Most businesses are relatively small, and even for larger businesses relatively small numbers of people use the same processes. Large multinationals may have hundreds or thousands of Salesforce seats. Rarely tens of thousands and never hundreds.

Further as you move from the traditional computer domain to the human one you see an increasing use of unstructured data. It can be analysed but more complex problems on smaller data sets are harder to solve with confidence. This is why the combination of email with the CRM system is so powerful.

You can look at the unstructured email data and match it to the structured data in the CRM. Depending on the organisation training will take a shorter on longer period of time. but it can be done.

Conclusion

I’ll say again. As far as I know know one is doing this at the moment. We’ve started experimenting at the edges seeing what’s possible. There’s definitely an opportunity there. Some of the bigger speculations? You’ll have to start reworking a lot of Salesforce architecture from the ground up to get this to work for example. Enabling user specific workflows as a subset of organisational workflows is a big change in itself and probably not on the SFDC roadmap.

But we are starting to get the tools and the experience in using machine learning that now makes this a plausible approach and one that could if successfully implemented provide massive value to corporations and the job satisfaction of individuals

June 25, 2015 By Denis Oakley

Why Technology Will Change the World, but Hasn’t Yet

In some respects computers have been disappointing. Whilst the internet, smartphones and spreadsheets have had huge impacts on many peoples lives and have made billionaires out of many entrepreneurs the impact has been small.

U.S. Total Factor Business Productivity — From The Economist

Data from The Economist and the FT shows this clearly. Since 1970 the growth rate of the US and many of the developed nations has slowed significantly which seems strange given the huge changes that advances in computers and technology have brought.

Put simply, if computers, and technology more broadly, were having a large impact on national productivity, one would have expected faster economic growth

This isn’t the case. One explanation is that whilst technology is responsible for some productivity growth broadly most people do most jobs in a similar way that they did in 1950 or even 1900.

The Steam Engine and the Electric Light

Let us step back a bit further in time for a minute and consider two key inventions: the steam engine and electricity. James Watt patented the steam engine in 1781 but it was only in 1850 that the UK started to the massive growth in productivity that is seen as the start of the industrial revolution. Similarly whilst Edison got his patent for the electric light in 1880 it was only in the 1930’s that the US and UK created national grids and offered cheap, universal and reliable electrical power to their entire populations.

Both of these inventions took approximately half a century of improvement and massive innovation before they had a real impact on the economy. My argument is that the impact of technology has been similar to that of the steam engine and electricity in these gestation periods.

There are, I think, three aspects to consider when looking at technological change. Ubiquity, substitution, and enhancement.

Ubiquity, Substitution and Enhancement

By the start of the industrial revolution steam engines were ubiquitous, just as technology is today. Without ubiquity there simply are not enough people spending enough of their lives thinking about how to use the technology to make money. There needs to be a critical mass to generate the innovations and improvements that create the ‘killer apps’.

For much of an innovation’s early life it is a substitute for another way of doing things. The classic expression of this is the 10hp rating of Watts first steam engine. One steam engine substituted for the power of 10 horses. Or to use a more modern example. One ENIAC substituted for the power of 9,000 computers (mostly women) at Bletchley Park.

But for it to break through to make a massive change in society it must go significantly beyond substitution to enhance productivity. The steam engines and its successors have gone unimaginably far beyond the limits of what could be provided by any number of horses. The same is true for electricity and it’s perceived ‘killer app’ the electric chair.

Most People – Including You – are Glorified Clerks

So where does this leave us with computers and technology now?

One test is for change is the impact on people’s lives. At it’s simplest the steam engine meant that you didn’t have to work as a farmer but could find more rewarding work in the cities. Electricity meant that you had 24 hours of daylight each day.

Computers will change the world by removing clerking. Clerking the administrative duties that need to be done in order to enable the real work to be undertaken. One study showed sales reps only spending 22% of their work week on actually selling but almost 65% of their time on administrative tasks.

These tasks exists across almost every job and in almost all cases the educational, experiential and skill requirements to complete them are far below the person’s pay grade. Using the figures from above it is as you you are paying a salesman $100,000 but 65% of it could be done by someone on a salary of $20,000. That’s $52,000 of unnecessary expense.

And there’s No Escape

But, as is well known, these tasks require personal involvement. They can’t be done by someone else. Far less can they be done by a computer. Many of the activities require detailed background knowledge of the job and the tasks undertaken as well as an organisations SOP and procedures. It often takes months to onboard a new starter to being fully productive for just this reason – even if they are technically capable of the role

And this is one of the fundamental reasons why technology has not impacted productivity growth.

As an aside, one of the other reasons is that whilst some professions have improved productivity massively – think of the 20,000 Google engineers at Mountain View – others have barely changed; for example the 20,000 cleaners in Birmingham and every other city in the world. The impacts of the Googlers is swamped.

Programmatic Automation is Fragile

So we are at a cusp now. Companies such as Salesforce and Nintex have products that enable some of the admin work to be automated. However it is slow, it is expensive and it is fragile. If the business changes, if the way that you work changes many of these laboriously code workflows (and it is laborious even if it is point and click) have to be rewritten as they are now a cost rather than a benefit to your productivity. They make an organisation more efficient at the cost of sclerosis; a difficult tradeoff in a world where companies must be increasingly agile.

Machine Learning will be as Ubiquitous as Sellotape

The answer is going to be in how we apply machine learning and all the associated tools of artificial intelligence, deep learning, big data etc etc. For now these are being applied to data on a massive scale – think Hadoop – to handle things that are pretty trivial to economic productivity – information search and social popularity.

Where we will see a genuine revolution is when they can be applied simply and easily by individuals and small companies, with no technical skills, on many small unstructured data sets.

How can we redesign and apply these tools so that individuals can take them and apply them to their own jobs. Not all jobs are office jobs but all require administrative tasks that add little value to the individual (but great coordination and control value). How do you take that 65% of time wasted on administrative tasks and start automating it, taking it all away?

Incremental Improvements

There is not yet a solution. Nor will there be one for decades; but we can now start working at the problem at the edges. There is no reason why filling out expense forms should be anything more involved than taking photos of receipts; maybe not even that.

Managing and responding to email, arranging meetings, planning a day or a trip, keeping your boss informed, coaching new staff, responding to customers, reception duties, updating records and making notes. None of these things – and thousands more – should we really need to do

And in the decades to come we won’t

I see a world where businesses and individuals buy automation software. It plugs in to their lives, watches, learns and slowly takes the load away.

Dynamic Creation and Destruction of Automation Workflows

We see a world where business automation dynamically creates and destroys workflows in response to the way that people work within a culture. A world where based on your own writing style, your customer base, their historical engagement behaviour across multiple channels and the best performers within your organisation, the software suggests the emails that you write to your customers. Dynamically. Real time. Always improving.

June 11, 2015 By Denis Oakley

How to Use Salesforce Premier Admin Effectively

Salesforce offers a premier admin service to go with all licences. The cost is usually 15 – 25% of the total licence cost each year added onto the monthly bill. The lower rates enable you to receive premier support – you get better and faster support on cases. The premier admin service gives you access to a team of salesforce admins who will undertake a variety of everyday tasks for you. This article is about how to use Salesforce Premier Admin effectively.

You can check out the details on the Salesforce site here and a full set of features here

Full disclosure: I’m a Salesforce customer and I am the Salesforce Malaysia User Group Manager but I receive no compensation from Salesforce.

Salesforce Premier Admin is Cost Effective

For small businesses with less than 50 seats I think that the premier Admin service is a no brainer. The fewer the seats you have the more cost effective it is. Here’s why:

In the US the average salary of a Salesforce Admin is $65,000. On a freelance site such as Elance you can find reasonable quality Indian Salesforce Admins and developers for $20/hour. If you are on a 5 person force.com licence you get unlimited premier admin support for $20/month. If you have a five person enterprise licence that becomes around $100 per month.

There’s an immediate cost advantage for you over hiring on an ad hoc basis or having an in house admin. Salesforce’s support model is predicated on the fact that most of the time most people will not be giving their admins a heavy work load.

The other advantage is that by using a dedicated outsourced resource you get more knowledge. In one company that I worked with ($100 million annual sales) the IT manager looked after the SAP implementation, Salesforce and all other systems with just one sysadmin to assist. So every time he needed to do something he headed off to the help pages to learn how to do the task – or refresh himself. Costly and expensive.

For larger instances it can work as well. A lot of the admin tasks in Salesforce can be repetitive or time consuming. Think of going through multiple layouts to add a new field or updating profiles after a process change. So it can be better to hire a developer/project manager and then have him offload much of the grunt work to Salesforce admins thus ensuring that you get maximum value for his time.

Downsides of Salesforce Premier Admin

Of course there are some things that you must appreciate when using outsourced Salesforce admins.

Based in India or Philippines
Don’t know your Salesforce instance
Don’t know your business model
Not working for you full time?
Sometimes poor English
Agents can be misallocated beyond their level of experience

How to Maximise your Return from Salesforce Premier Admin

I’ve used Salesforce premier admin now for 4 years and these are the ways that I get the most benefit from it

Do the project management yourself.

Split everything up into small tasks that can be completed in one or two hours at most. Then make each a separate case. This gives you a high chance of getting the golden outcome of submitting the case, getting the acknowledgement email and then getting the case closed email all in an hour or so.

One case where I didn’t do this was when I had set up a bunch of processes in the new process builder. They were fine when I tested sandbox but when they went live we got flooded with Apex errors. The reason was that process builder doesn’t do any bulkification and we were hitting SOQL limits. There was no work around and so every process had to be deactivated and redone as a workflow and also use a managed package to deal with cross object updating. The specification was very clear but the whole thing took weeks before I abandoned the case and started over. Then it got done in hours as 10 much smaller cases.

Spend more Time on the Case Description.

I can’t stress this enough. Explain the use case and why you are doing the project. Provide the context and then set out very clearly, just like you would to a new graduate exactly what you require. Take this all; the way down to what you want fields to be named as, what goes in the description box, where the validation messages are etc. Firstly it makes their life easier as they don’t have to worry about your intent and can just get on with the job. Secondly you have far fewer problems as you have spent more time getting exactly what you want clear in your mind.

Use Templates.

Depending on what you use the admins for it can often be worth developing templates for use when you submit a case. These can make it a lot faster to put a high quality case together and it makes sure that all the little things that you do yourself, or would do if you weren’t so lazy/stress (delete whichever doesn’t apply) are done. Generally I uses them for workflows and dashboards as these save the most time.

Respond Quickly.

If they email you reply back as quickly as possible as they will get back to work on the case straight away if you get back within an hour. If you leave it longer you’ve delayed it by 24 hours normally

Don’t use the Phone.

State explicitly that you don’t want to use the phone in your case. If you don’t you will get a call pretty soon after the case is allocated. The guys are nice but call quality and accent can subtract from value. More importantly I’ve rarely found the unsolicited calls to add much value. They just interrupt my workflow. Salesforce SOP is always to refer to the case by their reference number rather than your case description which is incredibly annoying.

Don’t have too many Cases at Once.

Case management ability in SF for an admin is poor and so you often end up managing via email which only works with a couple of cases. Far better is to maintain a list of prepared cases and flow them through the system as the previous ones complete

Don’t ask anything too technical.

These guys are admins not developers. There are further tiers of support behind them but if you need something technical doing its usually better to get a dev. This is especially true when you remember that the admins won’t touch triggers, apex or VF. They are best used to do the easy time consuming stuff and free up your time.

Be Polite and Treat them with Respect.

The guys and girls are great. They constrained with scripts and things that they have to do once you get past that they will really make a big effort to help you

I hope that these tips and tricks will help you get far more out of Salesforce Premier Admin and help you improve your business

June 10, 2015 By Denis Oakley

How to Maximise Trade Show ROI from Business Cards

Sorting tradeshow leads is time consuming and comes with an opportunity cost

In this article I’ll cover how to process trade show business cards in order to maximise trade show ROI

I spent most of last week talking to people at the oil and gas exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. Turnout was a little down compared to previous editions but I still ended up with four hundred business cards at the end of the show.

One of my favourites thoughts is the 1% rule. If you do everything 1% better you see dramatic changes in your business. It’s easy to go through business cards and make a quick judgement call on which will be valuable. It’s easy to throw lots away as they don’t fit some criteria.

Like anyone I’m fallible and I make mistakes – especially after standing up all day talking to customers. A far better way is to use behavioural filtering. You let customers, or potential customers, or even non-customers exclude themselves.

This isn’t the easy way though. It means that you have to get the business cards into the machine and then giving them stimuli to generate a response that allows you to score their behaviour.It doesn’t really matter what the machine is – salesforce, infusionsoft or your excel list of leads. They need to go in and be chewed over by your marketing processed and then like the sorting hat in Harry Potter be classified into Hot, Warm, Cold and No Value by their activity.

That part is all fairly straight forward with drip marketing campaigns and and measuring opens, clicks, views and dwell time. Whats not so easy is getting the business cards onboard.

Problems Processing Business Cards from Trade Shows

I’ve looked at a number of approaches over the years and these are the main issues that you face

Some are existing customers. Some are not. They need to be treated differently.
Some have specific actions that have to be undertaken as a result of the conversation at the booth.
Processing software is accurate up to a limit
Doing it yourself wastes lots of time and comes with a huge opportunity cost.
Outsourcing again requires checking
Business cards display the same information in so many ways that its very difficult to be efficient
Asian, or international, names and addresses can flummox many processors
Senior staff can gather lots of insight about business development opportunities from the cards.

With that in mind and with dozens of exhibitions under my belt this is an efficient way to get a fast timely and relevant response out to trade shows visitors

Split the pack to Maximise Trade Show ROI

All leads aren’t created equal and they don’t need to be treated equally.

First grab all the ones from your existing customers. If the contact exists already in Salesforce you can make your updates super quick.

If the Account exists but the contact doesn’t the fastest thing is usually to clone the contact. Then you make the amendments required.

These you do yourself. You can get a lot of value from this, and these are typically the cards that will have some action associated with them.

The next tranche are the likley prospects. Here it depends on numbers. If you don’t have too many the fastest thing to do is to switch off validation rules and chuck them onto Salesforce with a simple account name, contact name and email address – and whatever field you use to trigger the exhibition drip marketing campaign.

Then use the Salesforce dataloader to export all these and hand that output over to your data processor to complete the fields and reupload. You’ve responded quickly, you’re engaging and yet you’ve spent as little of your precious time getting in touch – and they are in Salesforce. So they exist 🙂

The remaining two groups are the real trash and the marginals. Marginals get sent straight to the data processor and minimal data capture is undertaken. The ROI is small for each individual but in my experience as much as 50% of the ROI from the whole exhibition comes from these. It’s just too difficult to identify the gold from the dross at this stage. So you put it in cheaply and then as they show positive signs you reinforce success and upgrade their priority.

Data Processing of Business Cards

When I talk about a data processor I usually use an outsourcer. I find it’s best to maintain someone in the $3-5/hour range on Elance or Freelancer for this type of work. You need to give careful instructions and do some data quality management when you get it back – but it is the most efficient way of getting it done – and you can make sure that it complies with your validation rules before being uploaded. Automated systems normally take longer to do for the relatively small volumes that you get from trade shows. If you want to know more about doing this send me an email. This simple process helps to maximise trade show ROI by keeping costs and time low

This leaves the trash. Even here there can be gold. We capture first name and email and blast them with a simple question

“Do you you know anyone who buys our product and service? We’ll give you X if we make a sale”

Again you get a bit more gold and depending on the typical LTV of your customers this can be hugely successful

Summary

To make the most of attending an exhibition or tradeshow you need to reduce the cost of processing the business cards and maximise the chance of converting a lead.

Segmenting cards and processing them differently based on value and then responding to positive behavioural cues boosts your trade show ROI

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