How to follow up on trade show badge scans

You follow up with trade show contacts by sending each one a short, personal email within a day or two of the show. The email should come from the person they met, mention something specific from the conversation, and ask for one clear next step. Speed matters because every other exhibitor is emailing the same attendees that week, and the people you met remember your booth for only a few days. Specific details matter because they're how someone recognizes you among all of those emails.

The tools you rented for the show handle part of this. A lead retrieval app, whether it's the one the event organizer offers or a separate app on your reps' phones, records each badge scan. A scan usually captures the person's name, title, company, email, and sometimes a phone number and address. Most apps also let your rep answer a few qualifying questions and type a quick note after each conversation. After the show, you can export everything as a CSV or Excel file and import it into your CRM, and many apps can also push scans into HubSpot or Salesforce as they happen.

That gets the names into your CRM, but it doesn't tell you who to follow up with or what to say. A badge scan only proves that someone stopped at your booth. Some of the people in your export had a real conversation about a problem you solve. Others wanted a T-shirt, and some were vendors hoping to sell to you. When everyone gets the same "Thanks for stopping by" email, the people who were ready to talk get treated like everyone else, and they move on to the exhibitor who wrote to them personally.

A good result sorts the list by what actually happened. The people who had a real conversation get a personal email from the rep who met them, mentioning what they discussed. Good-fit people you only scanned get a shorter email with a reason that applies to them. Everyone else gets set aside or a light touch. Every record lands in your CRM tied to the event, so you can see later what the show produced.

Kite does that work for you. It reads your scans and notes, decides who deserves which kind of follow-up, updates your CRM, and drafts each email so it's ready the morning after the show.

Start by sharing your badge scan export with Kite and telling it what you want:

"Here are our badge scans and booth notes from the trade show. Get the good ones into HubSpot and draft follow-ups from whoever met each person."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with it in your browser in the Kite web app or in Slack. Kite already knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors from its research on your company, so it can judge who's a good fit without a long brief. It proposes how it will group the people you met and what each group's follow-up should say. Confirm that plan or adjust it, and Kite starts.

You'll need a few things connected or shared:

• Your badge scans. Share the CSV or Excel export from your lead retrieval app in the conversation. If your app already pushed the scans into your CRM, tell Kite how to find them, such as by lead source or campaign.
• Your booth notes. Add whatever your team wrote down, whether it's notes typed into the lead retrieval app, a shared document, a photo of handwritten notes, or a photo of the business cards you collected.
• Your CRM. Connect HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or Attio through OAuth so Kite can check and write records.
• Your reps' email. To send each follow-up from the rep who met the person, connect that rep's Gmail or Outlook account. Otherwise, Kite sends from your team's Kite email address.

Adding records and tasks to your CRM is routine work, so Kite does it and then tells you what changed. Sending outreach is different, so Kite shows you the emails first and sends them once you approve.

Kite starts by reading everything you collected at the show and turning it into one clean list of people. A typical lead retrieval export has one row per scan, with the person's first and last name, title, company, email, and phone number. It often also includes their address, the time of the scan, the rep who scanned them, the answers to your qualifying questions, and any notes typed in on the spot.

Badge data is messier than it looks. The same person often shows up twice because two reps scanned them. Names and companies can arrive in all capital letters, and titles are whatever the attendee typed when they registered. Kite merges repeat scans into one person and keeps every rep's notes. It then matches the rows to your separate booth notes and business cards by name and company, so each person carries everything your team learned about them.

Kite sorts the people you met into groups based on what happened at the booth, because that's what decides the right follow-up. The rep's notes and the answers to your qualifying questions are the strongest evidence. A note like "evaluating tools this quarter, wants pricing for 20 seats" marks a real conversation. A scan with no note, taken in a burst of scans during a giveaway, usually doesn't.

Kite then checks each person against your ideal customer profile. It confirms their current title and company from their public profile or the company's own pages, since registration titles go stale and people change jobs. It also looks at the company's size and industry, plus recent news such as a funding round or new hires in a relevant team. Each person gets a fit score from one to five with a one-line reason, such as "Operations director at a 150-person freight company that asked about integrating with their warehouse system."

Putting the two together gives a small number of clear groups:

• Real conversations with good-fit people. These are the people sales should hear back from first, with a personal email from the rep who met them.
• Good-fit people with no recorded conversation. These people get a short email with a reason that fits their role and company.
• Real conversations with people outside your profile. These still get a polite reply to whatever they asked, without being pushed into your sales process.
• Set aside. This group covers competitors, other exhibitors and vendors who were selling to you, your own team, and anyone your records mark as having opted out.

Kite searches your CRM for each person before it creates anything, so the follow-up fits what your team is already doing. Existing customers aren't treated as new prospects, and their scans go to the account owner with whatever they said at the booth. A person with an open deal goes to the deal's owner, who learns that their prospect stopped by.

How Kite searches depends on the CRM you use:

• HubSpot. Kite searches contacts by email address, because HubSpot treats the email address as a contact's unique identifier, and it searches companies by domain. It reads each contact's owner, lifecycle stage, and associated deals.
• Salesforce. Kite searches both leads and contacts, because a person you met may already exist as either. It also checks accounts by company name and looks at open opportunities.
• Pipedrive. Kite searches persons and leads by email and name, and it checks organizations and open deals.
• Attio. Kite searches person and company records, matching people by email address and companies by domain.

When the person already exists, Kite updates their record instead of creating a second one. When the badge carried no email, or the address on it doesn't match the person's current job, Kite looks up their professional email and keeps the provider's verification status, such as verified, catch-all, or risky, so you know which addresses are safe to use.

Kite writes each person into your CRM tied to the event, so you can later see what the show produced. It creates the company first and then the person, so every record arrives linked to its account. Each new record gets the person's name, work email, title, company, and owner, along with a source that names the event.

How Kite records the event depends on the CRM:

• HubSpot. Kite creates or updates the contact and company, fills in the lead source or event property your team already uses, and creates an event property if you don't have one.
• Salesforce. Kite creates a lead for each new person and adds every attendee, new or existing, to a campaign for the event, so the show's results appear in your campaign reporting.
• Pipedrive. Kite adds the person and their organization, creates a lead, and adds a label for the event.
• Attio. Kite creates or updates the person and company records with the event recorded on them.

Kite also adds a note to each person that records what happened at the booth. The note captures the rep's notes, the answers to your qualifying questions, the fit score and its reason, and the sources behind Kite's research. For each person in the first group, Kite creates a task for the rep who met them, due the next business day. If your team uses a lead status, Kite can update it as well.

Kite writes one email per person, and each one opens with the reason it's being written, in terms of the person's own situation. For someone who had a real conversation, that reason is the conversation itself: the question they asked, the problem they described, or the next step your rep offered. A follow-up that says "You mentioned your team is still reconciling shipments by hand" gets read, while "Great to meet you at the show" gets lost among a dozen others.

Every email follows a few rules that make trade show follow-up work:

• One email, one ask. Each email asks for a single next step, such as a call, a demo, or the pricing the person asked for, and carries at most one link.
• Short. A first follow-up stays under about 120 words, in plain text, because it should read like a note from a person and not like a newsletter.
• From the person they met. Each email is signed by the rep who had the conversation, with their name and role, so the person recognizes who's writing.
• True details only. Kite uses facts from your notes and its research on the person and company. A detail that could describe anyone isn't personalization, so Kite leaves those out.

Good-fit people with no recorded conversation get a shorter email that names a reason relevant to their role and company and offers something useful from the show, such as a recording of your talk or the one-page guide you handed out. People outside your profile who had a real conversation get a helpful answer to what they asked.

Kite shows you the drafts grouped by rep, and once you approve, it sends them one person at a time so each email stays personal. It sends a small first batch, confirms those went through, and then sends the rest. If a send fails, Kite reports which person it affected and why, and it doesn't retry on its own, since the email may have already gone out.

Each sent email gets logged on the person's CRM record. In HubSpot, it appears as an email on the contact's timeline. In Salesforce, Kite logs it as email activity on the lead or contact. In Pipedrive, it adds an activity to the person, and in Attio, it adds a note to the person's record. That way, the rep sees the follow-up next to the booth notes.

People who don't reply get at most two follow-ups, spaced several days apart, and each one adds something new instead of repeating the first email. When the person's email supports it, each follow-up threads onto the original message. Kite schedules them and drafts them in advance, so you can review the whole sequence at once.

When someone replies, Kite reads the reply, decides how strong the interest is, and drafts a response that answers what the person asked. For a strong fit, the response proposes two meeting times or includes your booking link. Kite updates the CRM record and tells the rep, so a warm reply from the show reaches the right person quickly.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It says how many scans came in, how many unique people that turned into, and how many landed in each group. It also lists who was set aside and why, which people turned out to be existing customers or open deals, and how many emails are waiting for approval. The full list comes with it as a table showing each person, their group, their fit score, the rep who met them, and the status of their email, so you can scan it without opening your CRM.

When Kite finishes, your CRM holds a clean, event-tagged record of everyone worth knowing from the show, and each rep has a short list of people to follow up with personally.