The trade show floor has become the new Times Square.
Everywhere you look, something is fighting for your attention. Bigger screens, bigger booths, bigger experiences. A campsite in one aisle, a tattoo parlor in another. Mustangs, photo ops, custom Nikes, out-of-this-world games, giveaways, and experiences designed to make you stop walking long enough to wonder what is going on over there.
Companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to stand out for a few days, and honestly, the creativity on the show floor is incredible. We’ve gotten really good at creating an experience that makes someone stop. We think about what will catch their eye, what will pull them in, what they’ll do once they’re there, and how to keep them talking after they leave. All while hundreds of other companies are trying to do exactly the same thing.
I don’t think the company with the biggest booth always wins. I think the company that outsmarts everyone after the event is the true winner. Because getting someone’s attention is only valuable if you know what to do with it once you have it.
So what does a good trade show follow-up strategy actually look like?
It starts before the event ever happens. The booth experience, lead data, Sales follow-up, Marketing nurture, and measurement should all be part of one journey instead of being treated as separate activities. And this is the part I don’t understand. We put all that time, money, and thought into getting someone’s attention, but somehow the plan for what happens after the event becomes an afterthought.
The booth comes down. Everyone gets on a plane. The leads get uploaded into the CRM. SDRs start working their lists. Marketing sends some version of “Thanks for stopping by our booth.” The people who don’t set a meeting with your SDRs or BDRs get put into a nurture, and everyone starts planning the next event.
Wait. WHAT?!!!
You just spent $100K, maybe significantly more, getting these people to stop and pay attention to your brand in a sea of other companies fighting for that same attention.
And that’s the plan for what happens next?
Getting the leads into your CRM isn’t where it stops
This is usually where things start to get messy. The spreadsheet gets handed to Marketing Ops with some version of, “Can we get these uploaded by 10 am?”
Meanwhile, your Marketing Ops person has to put out 30 fires before 9 a.m., has two meetings starting in 15 minutes, and a C-suite leader is asking why they can’t access their Salesforce report. Now we’re dropping an event file in their lap that needs to be cleaned, additional tracking added, the three separate event days merged into one master sheet, checked for errors, and uploaded immediately.
We like to think this is easy, but somehow every field shifts one column to the right, and suddenly your CRM thinks someone’s country is “200–500 employees.” No one catches that data error for months. It is not until you’re trying to build a campaign for all the people in Germany that you find out the import went crazy. I can’t tell you how many times I have found this in customers’ CRMs.
The bigger problem isn’t even the messy data, though. It’s what gets lost from event to import. Most event lead-capture tools today are pretty good. The booth team may have ten preloaded questions they’re answering during the conversation, which means you could have some incredibly valuable context sitting in that event export. What problem is this person trying to solve? Did they see a demo? What are they interested in? Did they ask for follow-up?
But then your team goes to import it and realizes those ten questions don’t fit neatly into your CRM structure. So what happens to them? They get condensed into a notes field. Someone removes a few. Or worse, they get deleted! Now you’ve taken a conversation that happened between two humans and reduced it back to a name, title, company, and email address.
Not every badge scan is a lead, and not every great lead has a great logo
Let’s say two people visited your booth. One works at an Apple-like company. They scanned their badge because they wanted that LEGO prize you are giving away but are not interested in your product. The other works at a company you’ve never heard of. They spent 20 minutes with your team, talked about a problem your product solves, watched the demo, asked good questions, and said they’re actively trying to figure this out.
Who is the better lead?
Obviously the second one, but that becomes a lot harder to see when the context from the booth doesn’t make it into the system.
Now an AE opens the lead list and sees an Apple-like company. Of course they get excited. I probably would too. It’s a big name, and dang, it looks good on your pipeline report.
The problem is when the logo starts carrying more weight than the actual intent. I’ve seen great leads sit untouched on AE lists while everyone chases the big recognizable accounts. There are good intentions behind it, but Sales has existing opportunities they’re trying to close, meetings, forecasts, and a million other priorities. So the big logo gets an email, maybe another one if you’re lucky, and six months later it’s marked unqualified. Meanwhile, someone who actually had a problem you could solve has been sitting three rows down in the spreadsheet and is completely ignored!
That’s not an event problem. That’s a process and ego problem that needs to be addressed before the show starts!
This process should have been figured out before anyone got on a plane!
When you sign the event contract six months out and start talking about the booth, that should also be the point where you start talking about what happens to the people who walk into it and what the process is afterwards. And I don’t think this belongs to one team!
Your Events person absolutely needs to be there, but so should your Demand Gen and Marketing Ops people. Sales (AE/SDRs) needs a seat at the table too. And dont forget your Field Marketing person, who should be thinking about how they can continue the momentum with things like regional events or lunch and learns.
Marketing Ops should know what data is being collected and plan for how it’s going to get into the system before the event happens. There should be a discussion about how the data gets merged, which teams own cleaning of the data, who validates it before import, and what is the SLA is for all team members. That’s very different from making bad data an “Ops problem” at the time of import.
You should also know what happens to the different people you’re going to meet. Who’s a high-quality lead that gets white-glove treatment? What makes them worthy of this? What happens to the person who only wanted the prize? What about someone who attended your session but never came to the booth? What happens to someone who had a great conversation but isn’t in your traditional ICP? Which team will own the follow-up? What happens if the AE gets busy? Who covers that?
And most importantly, what happens to everyone Sales doesn’t convert immediately? You know the ones.. “NOT READY”.
Because that’s where I think teams are losing a lot more value than they realize.
The plan can’t just be how we get people to the booth, capture their information and get the leads into the CRM. The plan has to include what happens next. Who owns them, how we follow up, and how we keep the experience going long after everyone gets on the plane and goes home.
And please don’t spend $200K on an experience and follow it with “Thanks for stopping by...” email.
Think about what your prospect’s inbox looks like after a major conference. They didn’t get to pause all the other non-event emails, and they didn’t just stop at your booth and go home. They stopped at yours and 20 others, and then Monday morning rolls around, and everyone sends essentially the same email.
“Thanks for stopping by our booth.” Okay. And?
You just spent an enormous amount of money creating an experience designed to stand out from everyone else at the conference, and then your follow-up looks exactly like everyone else’s. Give them something useful and not another random act of marketing.
Maybe it’s a white paper that actually relates to what people were talking about at the conference. Maybe you recorded an exclusive interview. Maybe you extend the fun of the event itself and give people an opportunity to earn an after-event prize by engaging with content, connecting with you socially, or taking another meaningful action. I don’t really care what the tactic is. I care that someone thought about it before the event happened.
The experience shouldn’t suddenly become generic because the person walked out of the convention center and the event is over.
You worked incredibly hard to get them to stop by your booth at the event. The follow-up should give them a reason to keep the conversation going with you after it. Otherwise, why did you go to the event?
And then there are the other 85%
Let’s say you leave the event with 100 legitimate leads. Sales connects with 15 of them, and there are some meetings, maybe an opportunity or two, and everyone feels pretty good about it.
What happens to the other 85?
This is the part I keep coming back to because I think there is so much opportunity sitting there. Usually, Sales tries to connect with them, doesn’t get a response, and eventually they get handed back to Marketing. Marketing puts them into a generic nurture, and at some point they become just another name in the database, getting the newsletter or whatever generic cadence happens to be running at the time.
And then we forget about them. But didn’t we meet those 85 people through a human-to-human connection? Why are we treating them like form-fill leads? We spent a lot of money creating an atmosphere where they chose to interact with us. Some of them saw THE DEMO! Some even talked with your team. Don’t forget about those who chose to attend your session instead of maybe four others. Some told us exactly what they were struggling with. Why would we throw all of that context away and treat them exactly like everyone else in the database?
What if you created a nurture journey that connects back to the conference and gives them a reason to continue engaging? One that takes what you learned about them and connects in a meaningful way. I don’t think that nurture should belong exclusively to Marketing either! The nurtures that work best are the ones where Marketing and Sales actually work together.
For example, the marketing automation sends out an email with the latest white paper and then pushes a notification into your CRM, which triggers your sales outreach tool to follow up with the lead directly. Maybe something as simple as, “Hey Jane, our marketing team just sent you a copy of the latest white paper. I think you would enjoy it, as it talks about X from the Y conference. Let me know if you have any questions about how it could work for your team.”
For all I care, automate it! But make it relevant and connected!
And the salesperson should not treat these leads like they have never seen a demo. Because yup, your booth notes already said they did, and you have their pain points. This approach is just your reason to reach out and ask if those pain points are still valid.
Putting in this tiny bit of effort feels completely different from your competitors, who sent the “Thanks for stopping by” email. You’re not restarting the sales process every time someone moves between teams. You’re continuing a conversation!
Guess what?! Across most of the companies I’ve worked with, I’ve seen this kind of continued follow-up convert roughly another 20% into meetings. This is what I call the second win.
The first win is easy to see. It’s the person who comes out of the event ready to meet with Sales. The second win is buried in everyone else. It’s the person who wasn’t ready on day three of the conference but keeps engaging because you kept giving them relevant reasons to. Then, when their timing changes, Sales isn’t a stranger showing up six months later.
And that’s why I don’t think we can decide whether an event worked based only on what happened in the first few weeks after everyone got home. Some of the value from that investment is sitting in those second wins, and if we stop paying attention after the first round of follow-up, we’ll never see it.
Maybe we need to stop measuring the event and start measuring the journey!
I still want to know how many leads we generated. I want to know how many meetings came from it, how many opportunities we created, and eventually how much revenue we can connect back to the investment of being at the event.
But I also want to know whether the system around the event actually worked. How quickly did clean data make it into the CRM? Were the SLAs met by all teams? If not, why? Did the high-intent leads actually get worked, or are they still sitting on someone’s list? Did people engage with the conference-specific nurture? Did we create additional engagement from people who weren’t ready for Sales the first time around? And how many second wins did we get?
Because if we’re only measuring the handful of people who converted immediately after the event, we’re ignoring a huge part of the investment we just made. That’s the part I think companies really need to rethink.
Keep building the incredible booths. Do the ridiculous things that make someone walking through a sea of vendors stop and say, “Okay, I need to see what this is.” That’s part of the fun of events, and it works. But bring that same level of creativity and planning to what happens after.
The event isn’t one team’s responsibility. It isn’t three days on a calendar. And getting the leads uploaded into Salesforce doesn’t mean you’re done. Events, Demand Gen, Marketing Ops, Field Marketing and Sales all have a role in continuing the journey.
Because you already did the really hard part of getting them to stop and pay attention. Don’t waste it.
