After spending a week in Vegas at the SAP Manufacturing Conference, I’ve found that there are clearly 2 different ways of handling the vendor booth. Swag or no Swag.
The first is “Swag”. Now if you’re like me, the term Swag is new. It simply means the toys, candy, or random cups that you collect from any vendor. Now, having swag is great for attracting people. Everyone comes around, allows you to scan their badge, and then takes their swag. Scanning their badge gives you their email address and all the contact information.
The alternative is no “Swag”. Now this means that only the people that are interested in what we have to offer will stop by our booth.
Now, the debate that I’ve been having in my head is… do we go for fully qualified leads… or do we go to build the email list, hoping that the continuing emails we will send will ultimately lead to familiarity with our company, and perhaps get forwarded to someone that might actually buy our stuff…
so, with all that said, what’s your take???
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike
That is an interesting dilemma. I’m not a sales guy, but from a finance perspective, there’s two ways to meausure your ROI on that spend – cost per lead and cost per close, right?
So you go and spend a couple thousand dollars on the booth, T&E, etc. add in your Swag, etc. divide your cost by those two numbers and you get your metric. Here’s where it gets interesting though….your company is young….your product lines focused. Let’s say you and your partner come up with a great idea in a slightly new market segment….without the Swag your back at ground zero and have to start collecting leads for SAP shops.
So that’s why I threw out the $/lead number. If by adding the Swag, if you add an additional 5% cost/per lead, then it’s not a big deal – but if it’s 50% more / lead….that’s something to take into account. Your biggest expenses are going to be the booth and the T&E…..so I say go for it – worst case you can always sell your leads to someone else and try to re-coup the costs.
One thing is for certain though – you had better put out Slinky Toys 🙂
That is similar to what we decided… and absolutely, we’re pricing out Slinkys with our log on already =)
Curious though – you using any CRM tool to manage your L&O, contacts, and priorities, or are you just using spreadsheets/access databases? There are a lot of pretty decent open-source tools (Sugar CRM comes to mind) for managing these activities and contacts. We used Sugar at RIMG for about 3 years before finally putting in SAP CRM to integrate L&O, campaign manageent, S&OP, with quoting into a single system.
It’s php based, so your website just needs to support MySQL and php. That way you just give it a new sub-domain, run the install process, and import your data.
I have to admit the swag thing mostly confuses me. Everybody seems to want it. They chase around all these business events with special bags to try collect more of it. And then do what with it? It’s (almost) all landfill junk that shouldn’t have ever been made in the first place.
Not arguing against spending marketing money and trying to connect with new potential customers. I just have to wonder if free junk is drawing the people you really want to talk to. Maybe as a starting point, it comes down to picking swag that actually supports your company’s / product’s story instead of random trinkets.
Of course, having said all that, Paper Street Slinkies just make sense on a whole lot of levels. 🙂