After the fair
Collecting and following up leads
Uğur Yılmaz · Brand & Visual Communications Manager · 3 min read · Last updated:
Short answer
How are leads collected at a fair?
Every conversation gets one standard form, completed the moment it ends. The form carries five fields: person and company, the product discussed, how urgent the need is, the next step, and who will take it. The business card is attached to the form, never used instead of it. Records are entered into one file or the CRM the same evening, because anything left to the next day is entered incomplete. What you have at the end of the show is a list that can be sorted, not a pile of cards.
Why a card is not enough
By the third day, nobody remembers which of the fifteen cards in a jacket pocket belongs to which conversation. A card tells you who you met, not what you discussed. The follow-up email then turns into a generic thank-you that the recipient cannot tell apart from thirty others.
The record has to carry the substance. Which product was asked about, which technical detail interested them, which competitor they compared you with, when they expect to buy. Those four sentences are what make the follow-up personal.
The record is also the raw data of measurement. As set out on our exhibition stand services page, the stand’s job is to stop the visitor; the form is what captures whatever happened after they stopped.
There is a third benefit, and it is for the team. Someone who wrote down what was discussed does not restart the conversation when the same visitor comes back the next day. By day three the difference is obvious.
One form, one language
The form must be short or it will not be filled in. Five fields are enough: person and company, product discussed, urgency, next step, owner. Use a simple three-level scale for urgency, because numerical scoring does not survive contact with a show floor.
Whoever fills it in should use the same words. "Interested" means something different to everyone; "asked for a sample" does not. That shared vocabulary is agreed in the team briefing and demonstrated with examples.
Digital or paper, either works. What matters is not the tool but that entry happens the same evening. Teams working on tablets enter faster, though looking at a screen mid-conversation costs you the eye contact. Notes during, record afterwards, is the balanced routine.
The form has a language side too. At a fair abroad the record is kept in English, because whoever reads it may not be the person who had the conversation. Company names are copied from the card for the same reason.
Same evening, same order
The team is tired when the day ends, but entering the records takes twenty minutes, and left to the following day it takes an hour. The second benefit of evening entry is preparation: the person who asked for a sample today is handed one tomorrow.
Once the show closes, the list is sorted. High-urgency records are called within two working days, the middle group receives an email inside the first week, the rest go onto the newsletter. Sending everyone the same message on the same day produces the same result as never sorting at all.
The follow-up message should be short and refer to the conversation. One sentence returning to what was discussed on the stand makes it memorable. How we run the first week afterwards is the same order we follow as a team after every show.
Sorting the list also carries a data obligation. Contact details are used for the purpose they were given for, and mailing a newsletter to someone who did not agree to one on the stand cancels out the value of that first contact.
Should we hire a badge scanner?
Useful, but not sufficient. A scanner brings the contact details, not the substance; without a note field completed, the record is still incomplete.
How many records is a good number?
It varies by sector and stand size. The better question is not the count but the share: how many records were complete, and how many named a next step.