Going to conferences attended by members of your target market can help you meet prospects and, ultimately, generate sales, says Allison Graham, founder of Elevate Biz in London, Ont.

The key is to follow up after the event, getting in touch with those you met at the conference and taking steps to develop a relationship.

Graham offers the following four tips for following up after a conference:

1. Make a list
During the conference, go back to your hotel room every evening and retrace the steps of your day, making a list of everyone you met and intended to follow up with.

“We need to speak up when we’re at a conference by connecting with other people,” Graham says. “And we need to then follow up, because that’s how we create relationship momentum.”

2. Evaluate your leads
Determine who on that list is worth connecting with further by ranking each prospect on a scale of 1 to 10. A rating of 1 means that this contact won’t contribute to your business; a rating of 10 means you have just met your “ideal client.”

3. Make a connection
After the conference, return to the research you did before the event and ask yourself if you introduced yourself to the people you had intended to meet there. If you achieved your goal, then you should follow up with your connections. If there is someone you were unable to make contact with at the conference, you can still make it a priority to build a relationship with that person.

Contact your connections ¬— or your missed connections — by picking up the phone or starting a conversation on social media. Graham recommends researching their interests to see if they share anything in common. You can then plan a lunch or host an event that directly aligns with their interests, such as a wine tasting or an educational seminar.

4. Evaluate the event
Ask yourself whether the conference was good use of your time and, more important, if you should attend that conference again.

“Sometimes, people automatically assume they should go back if they have the opportunity next year,” Graham says. But you should do an evaluation and determine whether it was it worth it.

If you’ve built an ongoing connection with prospects, then the event was successful.

This is the third part in a three-part series on networking at conferences.