The Trade-Fair Checklist: 24 Points Marketing and Sales Control Themselves

• 1. Review the last fair. What worked, what did not, which points from that debrief are still open? Planning starts with the retrospective, not with a blank page.
• 2. Set a concrete number for every fair objective. A fair rarely has just one job. Set a number per purpose: new qualified leads, meetings with existing customers, partner and press conversations. Around half of companies rate fair success primarily by leads, contacts and new business; about 20 per cent fall back on visitor numbers.
• 3. Define what counts as a qualified lead. Which details must be captured, which stages exist, who in sales takes over, by when? Without that definition the evaluation afterwards is a matter of taste, and that is exactly where most trade-show appearances lose their effect. Also record what is explicitly not a lead: someone who only enters the prize draw does not belong on the same list as someone with a project, a timeframe and a budget.
• 4. Involve sales and the booth team early. The people who will stand at the booth know best which questions come up and which arguments land. Collect requirements and ideas before the concept is fixed, instead of handing them out in the briefing. It sharpens the content, and it makes the team carry the appearance rather than just operate it.
• 5. Train and enable the booth team. Clarify topic ownership and lead responsibility, and add hands-on training on setting up and operating the digital stations, the interactive elements and the content. Whoever is to run them at the booth must have run them once beforehand. Anything else shows on the first day.
• 6. Calculate the budget in full. Space, construction, services, travel, content production, technology and internal working time. That sum is later the reference for the only number that really helps in a budget discussion: cost per qualified lead. Separate what is one-off from what recurs at every fair. That is where it is decided whether an appearance gets cheaper the more often you exhibit.

• 7. Agree the framework with booth builder and organiser. In one go: deadlines and registration cut-offs, floor plan, screen positions and formats, power and network, delivery, contacts, handover. You do not have to know how to do it yourself, you only have to say early what digital content should go in.
• 8. Fix screen formats before content production. 16:9, a vertical totem in 9:16, a video wall in a special format, a tablet in portrait? Content does not adapt itself to a different aspect ratio. Viewing distance belongs here too: what is legible at your desk is far from legible at three metres.
• 9. Plan the interactive stations with a clear job. A touchscreen nobody touches is expensive wall decoration. Decide in advance what the station should achieve: explain the product, qualify a need, bridge the wait or simply be remembered. It works best when the interaction starts at the exhibit rather than at the screen.
• 10. Test the digital stations under real conditions. Final device, real resolution, legibility from booth distance, autostart and automatic reset, PIN protection, the offline case and a spare device. The offline test matters most: pull the plug and see whether everything really keeps running, videos and large images included.
• 11. Consider accessibility. Reachable operating height, sufficient contrast, type sizes legible from two metres, and a quiet zone for longer conversations. Organisers such as Messe Frankfurt now cover this in their exhibitor guidelines.

• 12. Look at the competitive field. Who is exhibiting, where are they, what did they show last time? That shapes your location, your topics and your conversation openers, and it shows you which claims everyone in the aisle is already making.
• 13. Define the fair story. One core message, three topics at most, the matching exhibits, and a look at what can be reused from existing content. Ask not only what you want to show, but what your customers are dealing with right now. The test is the passer-by’s view: can someone tell within three seconds who you are, which problem you solve and why it is worth stopping now? If one of the three answers only comes up in conversation, for most people it comes too late.
• 14. Settle content governance before the fair. Approval status, language versions, image and logo rights, responsibilities. All of that belongs before the build-up. By set-up day the content is final; for the exceptional case it is clear who signs off a correction. Anyone who starts changing prices on the evening of the fair has a planning problem, not a tooling problem.
• 15. Activate target customers. Meeting list, personal invitations with a concrete reason to talk, a reminder shortly before the fair. Pre-booked conversations fill exactly the quiet hours, and a good 44 per cent of exhibitors name visitor activation as one of their biggest challenges.
• 16. Plan the follow-up now, not afterwards. Deadlines by lead priority, ownership, text modules, target system. Anyone who plans the follow-up only after the fair plans it exhausted.

At every trade show both kinds of booth stand side by side: the one that looks like it did twenty years ago, with a brochure rack and a stack of catalogues, and the one where visitors touch something, try it out and talk about it afterwards. The difference is rarely the budget but a decision: whether the booth does something or merely stands there. What sticks is almost always what the visitor set off themselves.

The most expensive setback we see again and again in digital trade-fair projects: the booth design is finished, the portrait totem is ordered, and the content exists in landscape. The rebuild then happens on set-up day or the night before, while the carpet is still being laid next door. Screen formats belong in the brief to the booth builder as a binding specification, agreed as part of the defined content concept. That saves exactly that night.

• 17. Start the day with a walk-around. Ten minutes around your own booth with a visitor’s eyes: are all devices running, did the autostart complete, are the screens on the home page, is the content up to date, does the network work? Plus wiping the screens, restocking material, agreeing the priorities for the day and who has which meeting.
• 18. Capture every conversation with context. Not just who, but what they are interested in, which need, which next step, who takes over, by when. A stack of business cards without context is not a lead.
• 19. Hand over matching content after the conversation. Instead of a generic brochure, exactly what was discussed, ideally as a link, with no file to send and no software to install. It spares the visitor the pile of paper and you the promise “I’ll send that over”, which over four days of a fair turns into a list nobody works through.
• 20. Note competitors and market systematically. Which claims, which new products, which pricing arguments, and above all the questions visitors kept asking. That is market research for free, and it is lost if nobody writes it down.

A typical failure at the booth is not a defect but a screen that went into sleep mode overnight and that nobody notices in the morning because everyone is in conversation. The second is fair Wi-Fi. Fair Wi-Fi is two things: unreliable and expensive. Organisers charge well for a dependable line, which is why many exhibitors do not book one at all. That is perfectly fine, as long as the content runs offline. Anyone who depends on it pays twice: once for the line and once with the risk that it drops out during the product demo. Both can be checked beforehand: run the autostart once, pull the plug, look.

• 21. Hold the debrief in the first week afterwards. Not on the day you get back, but while the impressions are still fresh: leads, frequent questions, objections, booth operations, competitor observations. From that come actions with owners and dates.
• 22. Follow up by priority. Hot contacts within one to two working days, everything else according to the stages defined in point 3. A single deadline for all leads is not prioritisation.
• 23. Evaluate what happened at the booth and afterwards. Which content was viewed how often and for how long, were the links you handed over opened and which parts? That turns gut feeling into a basis, and it delivers the arguments for the next budget round.
• 24. Measure success against the numbers from point 2. Qualified leads, meetings, pipeline contribution, cost per qualified lead. From that follows what changes next time, and what you take into sales in terms of content.

Two things decide the follow-up: how fast it arrives and how much context it carries. After four to eight weeks the fair contact has evaporated, however good the notes are. Conversely, fast but generic follow-up throws away all the preparation. Someone who follows up promptly and knows which topic was discussed at the booth and which documents were actually opened afterwards has a different conversation than someone who only has a name. That is exactly why it pays to hand things over digitally at the booth.