First, choose one product or one service to work on. Choose the thing that you sell the most of or the new thing that you feel has the most potential for sales.

Use the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) to decide. In this case we might say that 20 percent of the products we have make up 80 percent of our revenue.

And although you're just working on one product for now, once you dial in the four steps, you can repeat for other products. Also, you could tweak this and focus on a persona, or avatar, instead of a product right now. (If you want more info on personas, ping me.)

Now write down the typical steps in the buying process. Here's an example of what that might look like.

1. We meet someone at a NAB, find out exactly what they are interested in.

2. Secondly we send some kind of helpful information to them about the technology, the benefits, that sort of thing. This is very successful because if someone reads or downloads info on very specific topic, they have just qualified themselves as a prospect. In most cases, if a person wants detailed info about ATSC 3.0 or loudness, they are a prospect.

3. Next a demo, a data sheet, or a webinar might be typical.

4. Finally prospects meet with a sales person.

This is just a sample. Yours may have more steps. Then again, there’s no need to over complicate things, it’s fine to keep your journey simple.

It's true that everybody doesn't follow a yellow brick road of buying, but it's good to have a plan in place.

With step two defined, now you can go ahead and create a plan for all the supporting bits and pieces. This is where your trade show follow up plan is crucial. You can make a plan now, before NAB, for your top 3 products, for example.

List out the assets you already have that will work for the campaign. Data sheets, webinars, videos, demos, ebooks, white papers, checklists, articles.

List any assets you need to create or locate. If you can use what's on hand, that's great. You can iterate your campaign later.

Write the emails you need for the campaign. If you don't know what to say or how to start, check out my short video here: www.yourquickmarketing.com

Now you can take the amazing system you designed and make it repeatable. You don’t want to manually send out these emails and check on who’s click what. By adding automation to your marketing machine, no leads will fall between the cracks.

We sometimes hear that sales people will call a lead once after a show and then might not call again if they are too busy. If we call a person every few weeks for a year, they might be annoyed. But if we email them truly helpful info on a regular basis, there’s a huge upside. When you do call, they may well want to talk with you, plus if they are ready for a demo or for the next step in the process, your marketing automation system (Click here to see our demo of Infusionsoft.) is going tell you! And that is awesome lead follow-up!