A three-day exhibition can put hundreds of people in front of your stall. What separates exhibitors who come back with business from those who come back with a bag of business cards is not the crowd — it is whether the conversation was recorded while it was still fresh.
Capture less, but capture it consistently
The instinct is to collect everything: company, address, GST number, budget, timeline. In practice, a stall is a bad place for long forms. People stop for two minutes, and a form that takes longer than the conversation loses both.
Capture five fields, every time:
- Name — the person, not just the company.
- A way to reach them — phone number is the one that survives in India; add email if they offer it.
- What they asked about — the specific product or price point. Not a category label.
- How warm they were — asked for a quote, comparing suppliers, just browsing.
- The next step you promised — "send the rate card by Friday" is a commitment you can be held to, and it makes follow-up automatic.
Everything else can be asked in the follow-up, when you have their attention for longer than two minutes.
Ask for consent in plain words
A phone number is not permission to message. If you plan to send offers later — WhatsApp broadcasts, SMS, email — say so at the stall, in words the visitor understands:
"May I send you our rate card and occasional offers on WhatsApp?"
Record the answer as a yes or no, with the date. Unticked-box defaults and silence are not consent, and a list built that way is a liability rather than an asset: it gets you blocked, reported, and eventually blocked at the platform level.
A simple rule that works: capture the lead whoever they are, but only message the people who said yes.
Do not let the lead die in a notebook
The most expensive failure at a trade show is not a bad conversation — it is a good conversation that nobody followed up. Two things prevent it:
- Capture at the counter, not at the end of the day. Write the note while the visitor is still standing there. Reconstructed notes lose exactly the detail that made the lead valuable.
- Set the follow-up date before you leave the stall. Anything marked "next week" without a date becomes "eventually", and eventually becomes never.
Sort leads by what you promised, not by how friendly they were
A practical triage for the day after the show:
- Quoted — you gave a price. Follow up within 48 hours; these decay fastest.
- Promised material — a catalogue, a sample, a delivery date. Send it, even if it is late, because silence reads as disinterest.
- Comparing — they are talking to three suppliers. Send one clear reason to pick you, not five.
- Browsing — add to the consented list and stop there. Do not call.
Give the follow-up a job
"Just checking in" is not a follow-up. Every message should either deliver something you promised, answer a question they asked, or offer a specific next step with a date. One useful message beats five reminders.
Measure the stall by leads that were worked, not by footfall
At the end of the show, count the leads you captured, how many you contacted within a week, and how many turned into a quote or a meeting. If a large share of captured leads were never contacted, the problem is the process, not the crowd — and it is fixable before the next exhibition.
Where JODNA fits
JODNA's counter app captures leads with a QR code at the stall, keeps the consent answer with the record, and keeps the notes attached to the sale or enquiry they belong to. The free plan covers 100 bills a month and a public stall page; the Counter plan raises the limits and adds exports. Nothing about lead capture is paywalled — the consent controls and the record of who agreed to what stay available on every plan.