A fishbowl of business cards
Your trade show is where member firms and suppliers meet buyers for the year. At the end of each day, stand staff pack up a fishbowl of business cards, some notes on the back of a price list, and a phone full of photos of badges. Back at the office, someone types it all into a CRM. Half the cards have no context. Nobody remembers which visitor asked about what.
Exhibitors ask you every year whether there is a scanner. Some hire one from a third party, which works for them but not for anyone else, and whose data you never see. The rest make do. And after the show, your team gets asked for 'the visitor list', which you cannot hand over because visitors did not agree to that.
Why exhibitors leave with so little
- Visitor badges show a name and company, with the registration data locked away in the registration system.
- There is no shared way for stands to capture a visitor, so every stand improvises.
- Visitor consent to share details with exhibitors is not recorded per exhibitor.
- Stand staff notes are separate from the visitor's details.
- After the show, leads reach the exhibitor's sales team days or weeks later.
What the lost leads cost
Exhibitors judge your show by the business it brings them. If they cannot show their own management the leads they gathered, rebooking gets harder, and stand sales for next year suffer. Your team fields requests for visitor data it cannot share. And you miss useful information, such as which stands were busiest, to help sell next year's floorplan.
Third-party scanners add their own problems. An exhibitor that rents one gets a spreadsheet in that supplier's format, with whatever fields the supplier chose, often only after the show. Visitors are scanned under a consent statement you did not write. Your team has no idea who was scanned where, so the show's own data about its audience is incomplete. And small exhibitors, often the member firms you most want to support, cannot justify the rental and go back to the business card bowl.
Meanwhile your visitor registration already holds the job title, company, sector and interests each visitor gave when they signed up. That is exactly what exhibitors want. It simply never reaches the stand.
Badge-scan lead capture on your registration data
We build lead capture around your visitor registration, so the data and the consent come from one source.
- Each visitor badge carries a QR code linked to their registration record.
- At registration, visitors see a clear statement that scanning their badge at a stand shares specified details with that exhibitor, under your privacy policy, which your adviser reviews.
- Stand staff use a web app on their phones, logged in as the exhibitor, to scan badges; no app store download is needed.
- A scan shows the visitor's details that are cleared for sharing, and staff add a rating, notes and interests from a list the exhibitor sets.
- Scans work with patchy hall wifi, syncing when a signal returns.
- Exhibitors download their leads as a spreadsheet or push them into HubSpot, Salesforce or their own CRM during and after the show.
| Party | What they get | What they cannot see |
|---|---|---|
| Exhibitor | Details of visitors they scanned, with their notes | Other exhibitors' scans, the full visitor list |
| Visitor | A record of which stands scanned them, if you choose | Exhibitor notes |
| Your team | Scan counts by stand and hour | Nothing beyond your privacy policy |
If your registration platform already offers lead scanning, we will say so, and connect it to your member and exhibitor records rather than build another.
The show, as exhibitors see it
Stand staff scan a visitor's badge and type a quick note. By the evening, the leads are already in the exhibitor's CRM or a download. After the show, you can tell each exhibitor how many visitors they scanned and when their stand was busiest, and you can see which areas of the hall drew traffic, which helps when selling next year's space.
Do your exhibitors complain about leads?
- Exhibitors collect business cards and paper forms.
- Some exhibitors hire their own scanners and others have nothing.
- You are asked for the visitor list after the show.
- You have no data on which stands were busy.
- Visitor consent to share details is not clearly recorded.