How to get trade fair contacts into your CRM

The stack-of-cards problem

Anyone who has worked on a stand knows the scene: three days of conversations, a pocket full of paper business cards and the sincere intention of entering them into the CRM on Monday. Monday arrives with a full inbox, Tuesday with something urgent, and two weeks later half of those cards are still in a drawer. When someone finally gets in touch, the visitor no longer remembers the conversation.

It isn’t a question of willpower, it’s a question of method. Capturing trade fair leads works when every contact is recorded, qualified and assigned at the moment it happens, rather than depending on someone typing it up later.

1. Before the fair: decide what you want to know

A contact without context is worth little. Before the event, the team should agree on three things:

• The minimum details to ask for: name, company, email and, at most, phone. Every extra field reduces the number of contacts.
• How each visit is qualified. A simple scale — cold, warm, hot — is enough and takes a second to apply.
• Who follows up each type of contact, and how quickly. If the deadline isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist.

If you use Odoo or another CRM, also decide the event tag and the source each lead will carry. That way you can measure afterwards which fair generated opportunities and which only generated visits.

2. On the stand: three ways to capture, one inbox

A real stand sees very different visitors, and it pays to have one route for each:

1. Scan the badge. If the organiser issues badges with QR codes or NFC, reading it with your phone is enough: the attendee’s details come in with no typing.
2. Scan a paper card. Many visitors will still hand you their card. A photo and AI recognition extract name, job title, company, phone, email and website.
3. A quick form. For those with neither a badge nor a card, or who would rather leave their details from your own digital card.

What matters is that all three routes end up in the same place, with the event already tagged. At that moment you add a two-line note — what they need, what they were promised — and the rating. That note, written on the spot, is worth more than anything you remember on Monday.

3. Consent is not a formality

Scanning a badge does not, on its own, entitle you to send marketing. Every capture should include explicit consent in line with the GDPR, with the wording shown and the date. Beyond compliance, it’s about trust: people who agree to receive information respond far better than people who receive it out of the blue.

4. Assume there will be no signal

Exhibition centres are notorious for poor mobile coverage, precisely when they are busiest. Whatever tool you use has to work offline: store contacts on the phone and sync them as soon as the network returns. If it depends on signal, the team will be back to paper by mid-morning.

5. From phone to CRM, with no middleman

The last step is the one that usually fails. Exporting a spreadsheet at the end of the fair and importing it “when there’s time” recreates the drawer problem. What works is for every contact to reach the CRM on its own, with its source, tags, note and assigned salesperson.

That is what we are building with the TARJE2ME Odoo integration (coming soon): every captured contact will be created as a contact or a lead with the source “Digital card / Event X”, and the follow-up reminder is planned to become an activity inside Odoo. The salesperson won’t have to open another tool: the task will appear in the one they already use.

6. Afterwards: measure what matters

Counting stand visits is easy and tells you little. What is useful is matching each event’s contacts with what happened next: quotations, orders and revenue. That tells you which fair is worth repeating, which salesperson converts best and which kind of conversation ends in a sale. And if you are the organiser, a report of contacts per exhibitor and a stand ranking help you prove the event’s value — and, where there is public funding, report on it.

A short checklist for your next fair

• Minimum details and rating scale agreed.
• Event tag and follow-up owner defined.
• Three capture routes: badge, paper card and form.
• Consent recorded for every contact.
• A tool that works without signal.
• Automatic sending to the CRM, with a follow-up task.