I came across one reason trade shows have not been giving good ROI to many IT companies.  I was speaking to the organizer of an IT trade show in New York.  He told me that he gives every exhibitor at his show a list of the attendees.  He also told me that he virtually never gets a follow-up call to this list from any exhibitor (he seeds the list so he knows if people are using it).  So it seems exhibitors at trade shows get the list of attendees as part of their package but they never use it. 

Presumably exhibitors are calling the people who come by their booth at least? Maybe and maybe not.  When I was an IT sales executive we had the typical experience of calling the list of people who came by our company's booth.  We called and found that the list contained no hot prospects.  So guess what?  The next time a list came from marketing from the latest trade show, we carefully avoided calling anyone on the list (or we begrudginly called a few names to keep our managers at bay).  Since we knew this activity was not going to help us meet our quarterly (or even annual) sales quota.

What's the point?  The "gap" here is that companies are not putting the names they gather from trade shows into a lead nurturing program.  These names are either not being followed up at all or they are going directly to the sales force when they are not "sales ready" (and hence the sales force is not following up on them effectively). 

If companies want to get ROI (let alone maximize it) from the thousands of dollars they spend to exhibit at trade shows, they should make sure they use all the contact information they have paid for; otherwise, they will just be adding to the huge pile of 70-80% of leads that are lost.