Westby Creamery Sales Team Uses a Tool to Measure Success

Jan 06, 2020 (Westby, WI)

By Emily Bialkowski, Sales and Marketing Manager at Westby Cooperative Creamery

Sales and marketing folk sometimes get the stink eye from peers regarding trade show attendance. There’s an image out there that trade shows are nothing but long parties, but I can tell you they are hard, expensive work. These shows can cost thousands of dollars to participate in due to travel, registrations fees, sample costs, marketing signage and booth design and set up. It’s only fair the Creamery wants to know what type of results we gain from attending. How do we know the expense is worth it?

Plus, with Westby Cooperative Creamery set to attend at least seven trade shows in 2020, we really need to answer that question.

I use a simple formula for determining a trade show’s effectiveness, or lack thereof. It’s the 60-15-1 sales rule. The rule simply says that for every 60 leads you receive, on average, 15 of those will be actual prospects. Of those 15 prospects, only 1 will convert. That’s the cold hard truth of sales. It’s why we have happy hours. We’re told “no” 59 times for every 1 “yes.”

The chart above demonstrates the 60-15-1 sales rule with actual results the sales team achieved at a trade show in 2019. In the example you can see we fell short on attaining 15 prospects, but in this instance the quality of those prospects was very high. Because the quality of the prospects was so high, I set a higher-than-average conversion goal.

This information is shared with the general manager and Creamery’s board of directors. The transparency it offers them, along with the chance to share ideas, is appreciated and negates the need for stink eye.

I look forward to sharing our 2020 trade show results in future blogs. To make sure you get all of the Creamery’s monthly updates, be sure to sign up for our newsletter below.