How to provide exhibitors with lead-capture that’ll make them love you

If you have exhibitors, regardless of who they are and what they do, their goal at your event can almost certainly be summed up in just one word: leads.

Exhibitors invest a lot of money and time to have a booth at your event. They do this, of course, because it’s a great chance to connect with potential buyers, partners, and influencers.

They want leads.

Yet, despite this manifest truth, one of the things we hear time and again from event organisers is that they struggle to offer their exhibitors a simple, cost-effective mechanism to capture, qualify, and follow up on leads effectively.

Why is that?

Well, organisers of major trade-shows have the volume to invest huge sums in staffed solutions with deployed hardware and software on-site. But what if you have a reasonable sized exhibition (say, 100 booths) attached to your conference, for example?

Then you need an easy-to-deploy system that enables exhibitors to use their own hardware (smartphones and tablets) to scan badges and collect leads. You need it to be easy to set up and use, and you need it to be cheap (or ideally free).

Exhibitors expect results without any hassle. And when they achieve measurable ROI from participating in an event, they are far more likely to return year after year. Offering them a seamless, efficient, and data-rich lead-capture solution not only enhances their experience – it adds tangible value to your event brand.

In this post we’ll explore how you can provide (and monetise) high-quality lead-capture functionality at your next event, without renting any equipment, setting up any complex integrations, or incurring any additional costs.

We’ll unpack what exhibitors really need (and what they don’t) from event lead-capture systems, and how you can configure and deploy a solution that delights exhibitors while improving the attendee experience.

Why efficient lead-capture matters to exhibitors

When you exhibit at an event, every second counts. Booth personnel need to be able to find out what a visitor is interested in, get the prospect’s information and move on to the next interaction smoothly and quickly.

This is especially true when the exhibition is attached to a conference – and 90% of the booth traffic is arriving during lunchtime or a couple of 30 minute coffee breaks.

The ability to scan a badge and, in doing so, capture most of the salient information about a prospect’s company, job-role and contact information is much faster than manual methods, allowing staff to capture many more leads in the same amount of time.

A good lead-capture tool also allows for real-time notes, tags, or ratings on prospects that make it easier for exhibitors to qualify leads on the spot. This helps them prioritise which leads to follow up with first, focusing on those most likely to convert.

By capturing leads efficiently, exhibitors can follow up while the interaction is still fresh in the prospect's mind.

Of course, efficient lead-capture doesn’t just benefit exhibitors, it’s good for attendees too. Scanning a badge or QR code is quick, non-intrusive, and replaces the awkward exchange of business cards. It allows attendees to receive immediate follow-up information, brochures, or thank-you emails – leading to more useful interactions overall. Which is why everyone’s at your conference in the first place.

Doing lead-capture well also reflects positively on your event brand, showing that it’s modern, digitally savvy, and exhibitor-focused.

Essential features of a great lead-capture solution

Not all lead-capture systems are created equal. To truly serve exhibitors and demonstrate value, event organisers should look for solutions that include the following essential features:

1 Ease of use

The number-one priority for exhibitors is simplicity. The system must be intuitive enough for booth staff to use without significant training. This includes:

• Easily adding booth personnel to the exhibitor’s account.
• Simple badge-scanning functionality.
• Easy note-taking and contact consent options to qualify leads.

Basically, the user needs to be able to just wave their device at an attendee’s QR code and have the app take care of the rest. If the tool is too complicated, exhibitors won’t use it consistently – and that means lost data.

2 Integrated

Ideally, your lead-capture tool should be a fully integrated part of your event management platform. You want the same software which registers attendees, captures their data and assigns their badges and QR codes, and which manages your exhibitor data, to handle bringing all this information together.

If you have to bring in a third-party tool just to handle lead-scanning, you’re inevitably going to have the headache of integrating it with your registration system, and it’s unlikely to be fun for you, or your exhibitors.

3 Real-time data access

These days, exhibitors expect instant access to their leads. A cloud-based lead-capture app should sync data in real time, allowing marketing and sales teams back at headquarters to see new contacts as they’re collected. This real-time visibility enables same-day follow-up, which can make all the difference in converting interest into opportunity.

4 Team collaboration

Larger exhibitors often have multiple team members collecting leads at the same time. A good system allows:

• Multiple users under one exhibitor account.
• Centralised dashboards for lead monitoring.
• Role-based access and permissions.

The team should be able to see all the leads for their account, as well as the name of the individual staff member who scanned each one. This helps marketing teams coordinate better and ensures data consistency.

5 Access control

Some events will want to provide all exhibitors with lead capture functionality for free. Others will include it as part of an enhanced package or sell a ‘lead capture licence’ as an add-on. It depends on your business model.

Your lead-capture solution needs to make it quick and easy to enable the app for all exhibitors, or individual accounts on a case-by-case basis.

6 Lead enrichment with registration data

In registering attendees for an event, organisers often collect a treasure trove of valuable data about that attendee, their organisation, and what they’re interested in.

If the event is free-to-attend, there will often be qualification questions on the reg form covering not just the vertical, but the attendee’s purchasing authority and purchasing intent.

This data is hugely valuable to exhibitors, so why not provide it to them as part of the lead capture process? The AttendZen lead-capture module lets you map individual fields from the registration form directly to the lead capture app – so that when an exhibitor scans my details, they’ll also learn the relevant data points I provided about myself and my company when I signed up to the event.

Best of all, you can control which fields are shared with exhibitors / sponsors, and which remain private to you.

7 Offline functionality

Let’s face it, event venues don’t always offer the most reliable internet connectivity. Exhibitors must be able to collect leads offline and sync the data automatically once a connection is restored. This ensures no data is lost and users aren’t dependent on Wi-Fi availability.

8 Data security and compliance

With GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations, compliance is non-negotiable. Event organisers should ensure that any lead-capture solution:

• Provides attendee consent tracking (especially important for B2C events).
• Offers secure data storage and encryption.
• Is transparent about how data is used and shared.

Trust is essential, and non-compliance can damage both the exhibitor’s and the event’s reputation.

Having talked about the things you need to have as part of a lead-capture solution, here are a couple of cool-sounding things that vendors believe you should pay for, and which 9/10 organisers never even touch.

1 Customisable lead forms

Stand-alone lead capture apps typically boast that they let the exhibitor create their own custom fields withing the app. In other words, a series of custom questions and categories which the booth representative is presumably meant to ask the attendee about as they scan their badge. Sounds sensible.

But when you think about it, this is a silly idea. What exhibitor in their right mind is going to require a prospective customer to stand there at the booth, during a busy coffee break, while they run through a regiment set of pre-prepared questions on a tablet – like one of those poor researchers that gets paid to annoy you at airports.

You need a notes field to take a quick record of what they’re interested in. That’s it.

2 CRM and marketing automation integration

Normally we’re the first people to persuade you to set up an integration between your event platform, your CRM and rest of your marketing stack. It saves time, improves accuracy and we’re really good at it.

But for this?!

Let’s say you have 100 exhibitors. How many different enterprise CRMs will those 100 companies be using – Salesforce, Dynamics, Hubspot, Copper, Zoho? 10? 20?

How many leads will each exhibitor collect during the event? 30? 50 maybe?

So now we have to deal with enabling a secure API connection to 100 different CRM accounts – across maybe 20 totally different CRM platforms, because uploading a spreadsheet with 50 names on it is a massive burden?

This is something that sounds like a good idea and really, really isn’t. It’s actually a world of pain.

Here’s how AttendZen handles lead capture for customers

Step 1: Pre-event setup

We help organisers to set up access to lead-capture for their exhibitors – either for everyone, or on an account-by-account basis. Exhibitors are sent an email with a link to download the app (a simple PWA) to their devices, and a one-page guide on how to scan leads.

Step 2: Onsite lead collection

During the event, exhibitors use the same attendee mobile app as everyone else to scan badges. But because their app is specially provisioned, it automatically takes them through the lead-capture workflow. No switching between multiple apps.

Each attendee’s badge contains a QR code linked to their registration data (name, job title, company, email, etc).

When the exhibitor scans the badge:

• The attendee’s data instantly appears on screen.
• The exhibitor can add notes, score the lead and secure consent to email / phone the prospect.

This process should take less than 10 seconds per lead – minimising disruption and maximising engagement time.

Step 3: Review and download your leads

At any point, exhibitors can view the leads they scanned and download them all (including any enrichment data) to a CSV which can easily be imported into any enterprise CRM and field-mapped within seconds.

And that’s all she wrote.

There are lots of other AI-enhanced, crazy options out there vying for the attention of event planners, but fundamentally, what exhibitors want is to capture leads quickly, without breaking stride, so that they can have as many meaningful interactions with as many attendees as possible in a short space of time and follow up on them fast.

At its core, efficient lead-capture is about making human connections more measurable, actionable, and valuable. Exhibitors invest in your event to meet people who can help their business grow. By equipping them with the right tools to capture and convert those interactions, you help them succeed – and in doing so, you elevate the reputation and ROI of your event as a whole.