What to do with trade fair contacts: a 30-day follow-up

The fair ends on a Thursday and by Monday the office is full of overdue orders. The business cards stay in a box, the lead-scanner file stays in an inbox, and by the time someone finds a free hour to write, three weeks have gone by. The contacts have not stopped being valid, but the conversation has gone cold. This guide explains how to organise what you collected and how to write over the next 30 days without it turning into one more endless task.

1. The first 48 hours: sort before you write

Before sending anything, put everything in one sheet:

The official lead-scanner file (if you rented one) and the business cards.
The sign-ups from your form or QR code, if you had one at the stand.
Your sales team's notes: what each person asked for, even if it is one line.

Remove duplicates (the same person scanned twice), fix obviously misspelled emails and add two columns: what they asked for and how we got the contact. The second one matters: it changes what you can write and under which permission.

2. Segment by type of visitor

Not every contact wants the same thing, and one message for all usually serves few. A simple split:

Asked for a price or quote: the warmest contact. A person should answer, not a sequence.
Asked for a catalogue or information: gets the material requested and one simple question.
Distributor or possible reseller: needs terms, territories and margins, not the same catalogue as an end customer.
Specifier (engineering, design studio, consultancy): interested in datasheets, certificates and case studies.
No clear interest: curious visitors, competitors, students. Keep them on file, but outside the sequence.

3. A 30-day sequence

The sequence is not a barrage: a few spaced-out messages that stop as soon as the person replies. A reasonable structure, as an example:

Day 0 (same or next day): what they asked for at the stand, nothing more.
Day 2: a short message from a named person on your team: “Great to meet you at the fair. Would you like me to prepare a price for what we discussed?”
Day 7: useful content for the segment (a datasheet, a case study, distributor terms).
Day 14: a closing question on whether this is still a topic for this year.
After that: if there is no reply, the contact moves to your general list with their permission, with no further chasing.

Example of the day-2 message (fictional company):

Hi Marta, this is Jordi from Talleres Ejemplo. We spoke at our stand about the B-series pumps. I am sending the datasheet and delivery times. Would you like me to prepare a price for three units?

Two practical rules: the sequence stops by itself when someone replies, and a person answers, not a generic mailbox.

4. Permission: be careful what you write

Someone handing you a business card at a stand does not always mean they agreed to receive a sequence of commercial emails. The most solid approach is to ask for permission on the spot: a clear checkbox in the form or the stand's QR code, with simple wording (“I agree to receive information from this company about what I have asked for”) and an easy way to unsubscribe in every message. If you already have cards without that permission, decide with your adviser how to write to them and always offer a simple opt-out. This is not legal advice: the rules (GDPR and the e-commerce law on commercial communications) depend on the case.

5. What to measure at 30 days

A follow-up without a report is forgotten. At 30 days, note down:

Contacts captured and contacts that entered the sequence.
Replies received.
Meetings or calls booked.
Quotes sent and orders closed that come from the fair.

With that single page you can answer the question almost nobody answers: what did this fair give us, measured in quotes and orders and not only in stand square metres and visits.

Common mistakes

Waiting “until work calms down”: every week that passes, the contact remembers less.
The same message for everyone: a distributor is not an end customer.
Sending the 80-page catalogue in the first message instead of what they asked for.
Not recording what each person replied: the next fair starts from zero.
No visible opt-out: besides the legal risk, it is bad manners.

What you can do and what we can do

All of this can be done by hand with a spreadsheet and plenty of discipline. The hard part is doing it the week the office is overwhelmed. That is why we built a trade fair lead follow-up service: we prepare the before, capture contacts at your stand with permission, and run the 30-day follow-up with a final report. If you are already back from the fair, there is a follow-up only version: you send us the cards or the scanner file and we set it up. You can also read what a trade fair really costs and how to find distributors without relying on fairs. For manufacturers, this is how we plan customer acquisition for manufacturers.