A useful exhibition contact is more than a badge scan. Before booking a stand, decide which buyers you need to meet, what problem your team can help them solve and what action should follow the conversation. Build the participation plan, budget and follow-up around that decision.
Define success before booking
AUMA’s project management guide recommends connecting the choice of fair with its audience, objectives, budget and logistics. Write a short brief naming the target customer, product focus, meeting objective and follow-up owner. Include stand construction, travel, staff time, transport and any lead retrieval charges in the cost estimate.
Set targets from your own previous results and sales capacity. Treat booked meetings, qualified opportunities and sales as separate stages. If this is your first exhibition, use its results as the baseline for the next one.
Invite the right people and prepare the stand
Make a shortlist of relevant accounts and offer a clear reason to meet: a demonstration, technical discussion or review of a specific requirement. Give the visitor a contact person, location and proposed time, with space in the schedule for useful conversations that were not booked.
Ask the team to walk through the stand as a visitor. Can someone understand the product, approach a staff member and have a conversation without blocking the aisle? Plan demonstration space, a quieter discussion area and staff breaks around the actual layout. Set staff numbers from the meeting schedule, demonstrations and expected workload.
Use one contact record
AUMA’s lead management guidance calls for qualification criteria before the fair, consistent recording during it and targeted follow-up afterwards. A practical record should contain:
- Name, company and agreed contact channel.
- The visitor’s requirement and why it matches your offering.
- Role in the purchase decision and expected timing, when the visitor is willing to share them.
- Requested material, agreed next action, responsible colleague and due date.
- How the contact information may be used.
Ask open questions such as “What are you trying to change?” and “Who should join the next discussion?” Record unknowns honestly. Keep the exchange a conversation, not a compulsory questionnaire, and leave the budget blank if the visitor has not shared it.
Test capture and follow-up
Before the fair, confirm whether the organiser offers badge retrieval, its cost, supported devices, available fields and export method. Test a sample export into your customer system, duplicate handling and what happens when connectivity fails. Keep a controlled fallback record for any contacts that do not sync.
Prioritise follow-up according to the commitment: send a requested quotation or arrange the agreed demonstration by the date promised. Give each record an owner. For someone without a current requirement, agree whether further contact is useful instead of automatically adding every scanned badge to a marketing sequence.
Measure quality and profit separately
AUMA’s measurement guide recommends assessing contact quality and costs and benefits, then producing a final report. Track qualified opportunities, completed next steps and attributable closed sales separately. Use an attribution period appropriate to your own sales cycle; document the rule so that a later deal is not counted twice.
Google’s ROI guidance defines the general principle as net profit relative to costs and notes that calculation depends on the campaign goal. For an exhibition, apply that principle with this calculation: ROI = (attributable contribution margin − total exhibition cost) ÷ total exhibition cost × 100. Here, attributable contribution margin means attributed sales revenue less their associated variable costs, before deducting exhibition participation cost. Agree the cost treatment with your finance team and subtract the exhibition cost only once. Revenue divided by exhibition cost is a revenue-to-cost ratio and does not show profit; pipeline value is still an estimate.
Finish the report with a decision: repeat, change the offer or choose a different fair. Explain which audience and conversations justified that decision. For the booking stage, use the trade fair selection checklist.
