scenario kits · booth to follow-up
Trade Show Lead Kit.folder
A booth is a lead furnace with a leak — heat all day, most of it escapes the moment you stop looking. This kit closes the loop: one scan, three questions, fifteen minutes of triage, 48 hours of follow-up.
// QR stand cards, qualifying questions, scan SOP and a 48-hour triage deck · 30 min per show day · print & run · scenario kit · no rental scanners
Vendor lead-retrieval hardware rents at $200–500 per device per event, and the business-card bowl still dies in a drawer on Monday. This kit runs the cheap stack instead: a printed stand, a dynamic QR, one form — and the discipline the rental was supposed to buy you.
Every conversation ends in one scan. Every evening, two humans spend fifteen minutes grading A/B/C against a written definition. Within 48 hours the tiered messages go out with names on them. The post-show report is three numbers: scans, A-count, meetings booked.
the run sheet
// this is the guide file, word for word — read it here, run from it here. the .md at the bottom of the page is the same text, offline.
Folder:
trade-show-lead-kit· Category: scenario kits · 2–6 booth team · 30 min per show day · offline + online · print props · scenario kit License: CC BY 4.0
A booth is a lead furnace with a leak: heat all day, and most of it escapes the moment you stop looking at it. This kit closes the loop — a stand card with a QR that never dies, three qualifying questions every booth human can ask without thinking, an end-of-day triage that takes fifteen minutes, and a 48-hour follow-up with owners and dates. Built for trade shows, conferences and expos — anywhere the business card is still the currency and the pile still goes unread.
Objectives
By the end of the show, the booth team will have:
- Every conversation routed into one place — a single scan, not a pocket full of cards — with contact, context and the one thing they cared about attached.
- A triaged lead list the night before the show ends: A (call before Monday), B (nurture with a date), C (thank and close) — decided by two humans, not by whoever collected them.
- A 48-hour follow-up already written, split by tier, with names on it — plus the numbers for the post-show report: scans, A-count, meetings booked.
When to use this kit
- You exhibit more than once a year and the business-card bowl still dies in a drawer afterward.
- Your booth staff range from “great with strangers” to “physically pained by strangers” and you need one play that works for both.
- Lead-capture scanners get rented per event at $200–500 a device — and you have three events and a spreadsheet.
The economics, honestly
- Vendor lead-retrieval hardware prices per event, per device; the rental is often more than a year of a QR hosting subscription. This kit assumes the cheap stack: a printed stand, a dynamic QR, one form.
- The QR on a printed sign has one fatal flaw — static codes die when the link changes. The kit’s answer is a code that points at a page you can edit after the print shop is closed (the folder’s QRCard block); if you won’t host anything, print fresh stands each show and accept the waste.
- Most leads are lost to speed, not to fit. The 48-hour rule is the whole game; everything else is preparation for it.
Setup
Space: the booth — one stand card at the counter, one at the demo table; a quiet corner for the end-of-day huddle.
Materials per booth human: one badge or lanyard card with their personal QR (name + the form), a pen, the three qualifying questions memorized (they are on the card faces, not in a binder).
Materials for the stand: printed stand cards from trade-show-lead-kit-prop-cards.pdf (QR faces) sized A5 or table-top; the lead form live and tested on the show floor Wi-Fi, not just on hotel Wi-Fi.
Grouping: 2–6 booth humans on shift; more staff than that needs a shift rota, not a bigger huddle.
Roles: greeter (opens, qualifies, routes), demo host (deep conversations, scans), closer (books the meeting, owns the A-list). One person can hold two roles at a small booth; nobody holds all three during a busy hour.
How to run it
| Time | Phase | What you do | The booth team does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before the show | Set the loop | Build the form (5 fields max: name, email, company, the one thing, next step). Test the QR on the floor network. Print stands and badges. | Memorize the three qualifying questions; agree what an A lead is, in writing. |
| 0–15 each morning | Shift huddle | Name the day’s one goal (meetings booked, not cards collected). Assign the three roles. | Walk the booth once as a visitor: is the stand readable from the aisle? |
| During the day | The loop | Every conversation ends in one scan — theirs. The form carries the context; nobody collects paper. | Ask the three questions; scan; if they hesitate, offer the badge QR instead of the stand. |
| 15 each evening | Triage | Two humans, one screen, fifteen minutes: every lead gets A/B/C and a next action. | Defend your A’s out loud; the second pair of eyes is the point. |
| Within 48 h | Follow-up | Tiered messages go out with names on them. A gets a call, B a dated invite, C a thank-you. | Book meetings before inboxes refill; log the numbers for the report. |
The card deck
Use the faces from trade-show-lead-kit-prop-cards.pdf: a master card (the loop in one view), the booth-roles card, the three qualifying questions card, the scan SOP card (what a good lead record looks like), the 48-hour triage card, and a watch-out card — plus branded backs and blanks for your product-specific prompts.
Failure modes
- The card bowl. Paper cards collected all week, dumped into one inbox Monday, dead by Friday. Rescue: one scan per conversation or nothing happened — the bowl is banned at the huddle, out loud, day one.
- Everyone is an A lead. The collector grades generously; the funnel drowns. Rescue: triage is two humans and a written definition of A; the collector never triages alone.
- The dead QR. A printed code pointing at a changed link, a form that works on hotel Wi-Fi and dies on the floor. Rescue: dynamic codes only, and a day-one floor-network test before doors.
- Monday’s silence. 48 hours pass, the show becomes a memory, the leads become cold. Rescue: follow-up texts are drafted during triage, not after; the A-list gets called before the deck gets written.
Variations
- One-person booth: greeter and demo host are you; triage becomes a same-evening solo pass against the written A definition, and the closer role is a calendar block before breakfast.
- Conference speaker: the stand is the slide footer; the scan is one QR on the last slide; triage happens on the plane home.
- Open-house / local event: the same loop at kitchen scale — one stand, one form, five A’s to call this week.
- Online: the loop survives — QR becomes link, huddle becomes a shared doc, triage becomes a 15-minute screen-share.
Facilitation notes
- Say the goal in meetings, not scans: “eight conversations that end in a date” beats “many leads”.
- The three qualifying questions are the script; let people keep their own words — what must not vary is the third question.
- Photograph the empty card bowl at the end of day one. Show it at the next huddle. Objects argue better than speeches.
- The post-show report is three numbers: scans, A-count, meetings booked. If a number needs explaining, fix the loop, not the sentence.
Put it on the wall
Print trade-show-lead-kit-activity-poster.pdf (A3): the loop, the roles, the triage definitions, the watch-outs — for the prep room wall and the hotel desk the night before.
the debrief sheet
// the debrief questions, in full — the .md version prints on one page for the room.
The show is loud; the review is where the money is found. Use with
trade-show-lead-kit-guide.md. The evening triage is the compressed version; this sheet is the full one, run within a week of the last handshake.
How to run this review
- Within five working days, before the show becomes “last time we went”. Bring the triage list and the three numbers: scans, A-count, meetings booked.
- Review the loop, not the luck: which phase leaked — capture, grading, or speed?
- One page, three columns: what leaked, what fixed it, who owns the fix before the next show.
Read the four leaks
- Scans far below conversations — the loop was not one scan deep. People hesitated at the form, or the Wi-Fi died, or the stand was invisible from the aisle. Each cause has a different fix; guessing wastes the show.
- A-count suspiciously high — grading inflation. Either the written definition of A is mushy, or the collector triaged alone. Both are huddle problems, not people problems.
- A’s that never got called — the 48-hour rule broke somewhere between intention and calendar. Find the exact hour it broke; that is the review’s real output.
- Meetings that went cold after booking — capture was fine, follow-through was generic. The tiered messages said the same thing to everyone; the A-list deserved a sentence with their own words in it.
The six review questions
- The number under the number. What was the scan-to-conversation ratio, and what made people walk past the stand? → Targets: capture design; “the aisle didn’t stop” is a layout fact, not a mood.
- The grading audit. Re-read ten B’s: which one was secretly an A, and what does that say about the written definition? → Targets: triage calibration; the definition improves one sentence at a time.
- The speed line. For the three A’s that converted, how many hours until first contact? For the ones that didn’t? → Targets: the 48-hour rule’s real shape; the gap between the two groups is the entire business case.
- The script test. Which of the three qualifying questions got skipped most — and did the skipped leads grade worse? → Targets: question design; the third question exists for a reason.
- The money check. What did this show cost, and what would the same money buy if half went into the follow-up week instead of the booth? → Targets: budget honesty; exhibitors over-invest in furniture and under-invest in phone calls.
- The next-show change. Name one change to the loop for the next event, with an owner and a date. → Targets: durability; a review that changes nothing is a tour of regrets.
Failure modes of the review
| Failure mode | Why it happens | The rescue |
|---|---|---|
| The blame tour | Leads died, someone must be wrong | Review the loop, not the humans; the bowl was the problem, not the booth staff |
| Deck theater | A beautiful report nobody acts on | The review ends with one owned change, not a slide count |
| The lost spreadsheet | Triage data lives in one person’s inbox | The lead list lives in one place or the loop starts over next show |
| Six-month amnesia | The fix is decided and forgotten by the next event | The owned change has a date before the review meeting ends |
What this is not
This is not a marketing attribution study, and one show is not a trend — it is a five-day habit that keeps the lead furnace from leaking into next quarter. The three numbers tell you where the loop broke; this sheet makes sure somebody owns the welder.
who it's for · what it leaves behind
How is this different from a scanner rental?
The rental rents you hardware; this kit installs a loop — capture, grading, speed. The stack is one printed QR stand, one badge and one form, which costs less than an hour of the rental. Nothing here stops you from renting too.
What if visitors refuse to scan?
The loop has two doors: the stand QR and the personal badge QR — and the three qualifying questions work with zero capture, too. A conversation with a written A/B/C grade beats a pocket full of unread cards.
Who decides what an A lead is?
Two humans, before the show, in writing. The collector never triages alone — that is the entire mechanism behind "everyone is an A lead", and the fix is one huddle line.
Can my AI agent use this folder?
Yes. The folder ships a SKILL.md with runnable prep — pull the deck and the review sheet, or build the five-field lead form from the guide. Plain text, CC BY 4.0.
make it live
The printed stand and badge are the default — one scan, thirty seconds, no rental. If you want the lead form smarter — qualifying fields built in, responses landing in your own workspace — two ways:
for AI agents
$ formlm-cli smart generate --input "Trade show lead form: name, email, company, the one thing they care about, next step (call / demo / not now) — five fields, thirty seconds, collected at the booth."
Step 4 of the agent workflow: npm install -g @formlm/cli, log in once, and the prep above runs itself. The form and its data live in your own workspace.
— or, with a mouse —
Set up the booth QR on QRCard-AI — the code stays editable after print, so the stand never dies between shows.
// optional, not required — the paper version in this folder is complete on its own. free account on their side.
take this folder with you
// every file downloads as a plain file. no account, no email wall inside a folder.