First-time exhibitor guide: how to do your first trade show

7 steps·About 8 minutes to read·With a free printable checklist

1Pick the right show before anything else

No booth design rescues the wrong room. Before you book, find out who walks the floor, not just how many people do. Ask the organizer for the attendee breakdown by job title and industry; most publish one for prospective exhibitors, and the good ones have it audited.

Then look at last year's exhibitor list. If your competitors are there, buyers expect to find your category at that show. If nobody in your category exhibits, either you have found an opening or the buyers are somewhere else, and it is worth one phone call to a past exhibitor to find out which.

• Who attends: job titles and industries, not the headline attendance number.
• Who exhibits: are your competitors and your customers' suppliers there?
• When: space at established shows sells out months ahead, and early booking is usually cheaper.
• What it includes: carpet, furniture, power, internet and lead retrieval are often extras — read the exhibitor manual before you sign.

2Set one goal, with a number

"Get our name out there" cannot be measured, so it cannot be judged afterwards. Pick one number you would be happy to leave with — forty qualified conversations, ten booked demos, three distributor meetings — and plan the booth, the staffing and the follow-up around that number.

Write down what makes a conversation qualified before the show, not during it. Two or three questions are enough: do they buy what you sell, do they decide or influence the decision, and is there a reason to act this year?

3Budget for more than the floor space

The booth space is usually the smallest surprise. A common rule of thumb among exhibitors is that the total cost of a show runs about three times the price of the space once everything else is added.

• The booth itself: rent a pop-up or modular booth for a first show rather than buying a custom one.
• Show services: furniture, carpet, electricity, internet and cleaning are ordered from the organizer's contractors, with cheaper early deadlines.
• Shipping and material handling (drayage): charged by weight to move your crates from the dock to your booth.
• Travel and hotel for everyone working the booth — book inside the show's hotel block early.
• Lead capture: the show's official badge scanner is rented per device; an app on your own phone is often free or cheaper. What lead retrieval costs.
• Promotion: pre-show emails, a giveaway that filters for buyers, printed material.

4Work back from show day

Most first-time stress comes from deadlines found too late: the furniture order that doubled in price, the graphics that arrived after setup closed. Read the exhibitor manual on the day you book and put every deadline in one calendar. Our trade show checklist lays it out week by week, with a printable version.

5Keep the booth simple

• One message, readable from the far side of the aisle: what you do and who it is for. Not your slogan.
• Nothing between you and the aisle. A table across the front is a wall; put it at the side or back.
• Something to demonstrate — a product, a screen, a sample — so a conversation has somewhere to start.
• Two people per shift for a 10×10, so one can step away without leaving the booth empty.

6Capture every conversation, not just the card

A business card tells you who someone is. It does not tell you why they stopped, what they need or when, and three days later nobody on your team will remember. Decide before the show how you will capture each conversation and mark how good it was, and make sure it works when the hall's signal does not.

You do not need the show's official scanner to do this. How to capture leads without a badge scanner.

7Follow up while they still remember you

The follow-up that gets remembered arrives while they are still walking the aisle: a short, personal message minutes after you spoke, mentioning what they actually told you. Almost nobody in the hall does this. Everyone else sends a generic email the week after the show, by which time you are one of forty booths they visited.

That only works if the note is written while the conversation is fresh. Capture it as you go, and have the first email ready to send before they reach the next booth.