Marketingandsuch: Sales & Marketing, events, tradeshows tips,video and humor

Faulty badge scanners lose critical prospect information

Posted on 20. Sep, 2008 by p syrek in Tradeshow tips and tiffs

Have you ever wanted to throw your badge scanner across the show floor, or throw it to the ground and mercilessly stomp on it?  If you have NOT then you’ve never used one or you’ve had no visitors to scan at your booth.

Today, most of the lead retrieval systems marketers heavily rely on to gather booth visitor information are hand held (often wireless) badge readers.  Attendees sign up with the show and submit their profiles, the show creates a badge with a readable bar code, and exhibitors use their lead retrieval system to scan the badges of attendees visiting the booth. At the end of the show exhibitors get a nice, neat database of all of their leads to refer to. Is it really that easy?
  
In theory this is a perfect system.  Better than the old days when you had to get a business card or take notes on visitors and go through the pain staking process of documenting that info.  BUT there is one problem.  If your scanner/scanners fail to function properly, you end up getting business cards or notes anyway.

The scanners of today, for lack of a better word STINK!!!!!  It’s always when you have a load of attendees at the booth and the scanner will just not read the badges.  You go with the standard problem shooting steps:

- Shake the machine
- Aim the scanner beam on various locations of the badge.  You go side to side, you pull the scanner back away from badge, then towards the badge then repeat and repeat and repeat.
- Often times the badge is in a plastic covering.  So you take the time to take the badge out and try and scan.
- The law of averages: In denial, you just keep pressing the scanner button.  You press it harder and harder each time, figuring it eventually has to give up and read the badge.
- You drop to your knees and scream “why God, why?  Help me!”

Now when all of these things fail you, you then have to go to the place where you obtained this beast.  Now the lead retrieval companies are very helpful, they are aware that their systems are terrible, but there are often further downsides.

When you’re at a big show, it always happens that your booth is always on the opposite side of the exhibitor service area, where the lead retrieval people are.  So you have to take a mile walk to get to them.  Often you get there and there is a line of other frustrated exhibitors cursing their machines and waiting for help.  Then there is always the chance that the lead retrieval people are on lunch.  Extremely frustrating.

Let’s stop the whining!  We don’t want to miss leads.  Here’s some solutions for when badge scanners go down or are just being temperamental:                                                                                                                                      
- When necessary go back to old school way and request business cards or have plenty of note cards for clients to write down their details.
- Designate a laptop with excel open to take down details.
- Ensure you order one or two extra scanners as backup.  I know this may seem like a wasted cost, but what is the cost of losing a prospect’s details?  That prospect could have been the big one.  
- Scan badge as soon as prospect arrives (if possible).  Many times we speak to clients and as they leave you try to scan them.  At that point, when it does not work, you go into a panic as the prospects want to leave, they are done talking.  If you scan at the beginning, if it scanner does not work and needs to be worked on, you have that time while in conversation to do so. 
 

Tags: badge, conferences, faulty, lead.retrieval, readers, scanner, systems, tradeshows