Expo leads: from a bowl of business cards to calls within 24 hours

Every expo ends the same way. The stall comes down, someone carries back a bowl of business cards and a notebook of half-legible numbers, and a fortnight later somebody calls a few of them. Most do not remember the stall at all.

The stall, the travel and the brochures are paid for over three days. Whether any of it pays back is decided in the twenty-four hours after the show closes. This playbook covers capturing every visitor in a form that can be called, labelling where they came from, and a calling routine that reaches all of them before they forget you.

Decide three things before you print anything

Most expo follow-up fails because nobody decided, before the show, who would do what after it. Settle these in a ten-minute meeting the week before.

• One source name for the event, spelt the same way by everyone — for example the show’s name and the month. This is the label every report will use later, so agree it now rather than letting each person invent one at the stall.
• Who calls whom. The simplest rule is that whoever met the visitor makes the first call, because they can say “we spoke about the cold-storage unit on Saturday”. Visitors who filled in a form without speaking to anyone need a different rule, which the form handles for you.
• The deadline and who checks it. “Everyone called within 24 hours of the show closing” is a target only if one named person looks at the numbers the next evening.

A QR poster for the visitors you never get to speak to

At a busy stall, more people stop than your team can talk to. A QR code lets them leave their number without waiting for a free salesperson.

In LumaKol, create a lead form for the event under Settings → Integrations → Lead capture forms. Set its Source to the event name you agreed, add any tags you want on every lead it produces, and choose who receives the leads: nobody yet, one person, or shared in turn across the people you pick. Keep the fields short — the mobile number is always asked for, and a name plus one question (“What are you looking for?”) is usually enough for someone standing in an aisle.

Then open QR code on the form. You can download the code as a PNG for your own standee or brochure design, or print the ready-made poster, which carries the headline “Scan to get a call back” and three short steps for the visitor. Leads who come in through the code arrive with the tag “qr”, so you can always tell them apart from people who found the same form online.

• Put the poster at eye level next to where people queue, and a smaller copy on the table where brochures are picked up. A code at knee height on the front of the counter gets ignored.
• Mean the headline. The poster promises a call back. A visitor who scans on Saturday and hears nothing until the following Thursday has learned something about your company, and it is not what you paid the organisers for.
• If someone’s phone will not scan, your team does not need the poster to help them. Anyone on the Android app can open Lead forms in the app’s settings and share the form’s link over WhatsApp, or open the form on their own phone and hand it across.

Visitors who are already in your workspace do not become a second lead. When a submitted number matches an existing lead, a note is added to that lead saying they enquired again through the form, and the lead keeps its owner and history. The form’s counters show new leads and repeats separately, so an existing customer saying hello at your stall does not inflate the expo’s numbers.

Scanning business cards instead of typing them up

For the visitors your team does speak to — usually the more valuable ones — a business card is still the normal currency. Do not let the cards pile up: scan them between conversations, or at the latest that evening.

In the LumaKol Android app, go to Leads → Add leads → Scan business card (on iPhone the button reads Scan a card). Take a photo, or choose one you already took from the gallery. The card is read on the phone itself; the photo is not uploaded or kept. The app fills in what it finds — name, mobile number, other phone numbers, email, company, job title, city and website — and shows a reminder to check each field before you save. If a card carries several numbers, the first mobile number becomes the main one and the rest go under Other phones; a fax number is ignored. A website has no field of its own on a lead, so it is saved as a note.

The Source is filled in as “Business card”. Source is a free-text field with quick choices underneath — Walk-in, Business card, Referral and Event — so if you agreed to label everything with the show’s name, replace it before saving. Then tap Save & add another and go on to the next card.

• Hold the card flat, in good light, filling the frame. Glossy cards photographed under exhibition-hall spotlights are the most common reason a field comes out wrong.
• Open the scanner once before the show. The first time, the phone may need a minute to set up card reading; better to find that out in the office than in front of a queue.
• Saving a lead needs a data connection. If the hall’s signal is poor, photograph the cards with the phone camera and use Choose from gallery once you are back on a network.
• Keep the paper cards, one envelope per salesperson, until the first call is made. Whatever was scribbled on the back during the conversation is the opening line of that call.

When an agent or team lead adds a lead from the app, it becomes their own lead and shows in their list at once — which fits the “whoever met them calls them” rule. On a team workspace, leads added by an owner or admin are left unassigned for someone to hand out. If a scanned number is already a lead, the app says so instead of creating a duplicate.

Every expo lead should say where it came from

Three months from now someone will ask whether this show was worth doing again. The honest answer comes from leads that carry the event in their source or tags. Here is what each capture route leaves on the lead.

A dedicated form per event, rather than one form reused for every show, keeps this clean. When the show is over you can pause the form, which closes it while keeping its settings and its counts.

The 24-hour calling routine

An expo visitor meets dozens of stalls in a day, and by the following morning your conversation is one of many. If they still remember you, the call picks up where the stall left off. That is why the routine is about speed and completeness, not a perfect pitch.

1. Close of the show: every card scanned and saved before anyone leaves for the hotel or the train. Nothing goes home in a pocket.
2. Next morning: callers start with expo leads, before their usual queue. Each call opens with the context — the stall, the day, the product they looked at.
3. After each call: log the outcome on the phone when the call ends, with a follow-up time. A visitor who said “send me the price list” gets it the same day.
4. No answer: leave it to the calling policy. An unanswered lead waits the time set under Settings → Calling policy before it comes back into the queue, and after the maximum number of attempts it is flagged for review instead of being dialled forever.
5. Next evening: the person who owns the deadline checks who has not been called, and moves those leads to someone who has time.

You can let the system do the checking. Under Automations, a rule that starts “When a new lead isn’t called within” a time you choose can give the lead to someone else, notify the owner or notify managers. Limit it to leads tagged “qr” or with your form’s tag if you only want it for the poster leads, or leave the conditions empty so it covers scanned cards too. It only counts leads that have had no call at all, so it catches exactly the ones that slipped. Afterwards, Reports → Coaching shows speed to lead — how long new leads waited for a first call, split into bands from under five minutes to more than a day, plus those not called yet.

What to say on the first call

Keep it short and specific. Remind them who you are and where you met, confirm the one thing they were interested in, and agree a next step with a date — a quote, a visit, a sample, a demo. Do not repeat the stall pitch; they heard it on Saturday.

“Hello, I’m calling from the stall near the main entrance on Saturday — you were asking about bulk pricing for the steel racks. Is now a good time for two minutes, or shall I call you this evening?”

If they do not remember you, ask what they were looking for at the show and treat it as a fresh enquiry. If they are not interested, log it and let them go: a clean “no” on day one costs less than five unanswered calls over a month.