Collecting Leads at Trade Shows: 7 Methods That Work (2026)

You paid for the booth, the flights, and the hotel. By most estimates, a single event costs $20,000 or more. The leads you collected? Half are wrinkled business cards stuffed in your laptop bag. The other half are first names scribbled on a notepad with no email attached.

Three days later, you’re back at your desk squinting at your own handwriting. “Sarah… something about data migration?” That’s what collecting leads at trade shows looks like for most exhibitors. The conversation was great. The capture was garbage.

CEIR research shows that meeting a prospect at a trade show costs $96 per face-to-face contact. Meeting that same person through cold outreach costs $1,039. You’re paying for the cheap version and throwing it away because you can’t remember who said what.

This guide covers 7 ways to get leads at a trade show. Each has tradeoffs. Some are free. Some cost thousands. Pick the one that fits how your team actually works on the show floor.

1. Rental Badge Scanners

The default. You rent a scanner from the event organizer. It reads QR codes or barcodes printed on attendee badges.

What you get: Name, email, company, title. Whatever the attendee typed during registration.

What you don’t get: Anything about your conversation. What they need. What you promised. Why they stopped at your booth instead of the one with free t-shirts.

Rental scanners work fine if all you need is a list of names. But a list of names is the least useful thing you bring home from a trade show. You could buy a list cheaper. The whole point of being there is the conversation, and rental scanners capture zero of it.

Cost: $200 to $500 per device, per event. Some events bundle it with booth packages.

Best for: High-traffic booths at large events where speed matters more than depth. Scan the badge, hand them a brochure, move on.

2. Lead Retrieval Apps

A step up from rental scanners. Lead retrieval apps turn your phone into a badge scanner and add CRM sync (connecting leads to your customer database), notes fields, and lead scoring.

Some apps need the event organizer’s badge API (a connection to the event’s registration system) to read badges. Others use AI to read printed text on any badge, business card, or handwritten nametag. No API kit required. The second type works at every event, every networking dinner, every hallway conversation. The first locks you into events that support it.

Most lead retrieval apps also scan business cards. Someone hands you their card, you scan it, and OCR (optical character recognition: the app reads the printed text) pulls the name, email, phone, and company into a contact record. Fewer people carry cards than they used to, but at dinners and smaller gatherings where nobody wears a badge, a card is often all you get.

For a full breakdown, see our lead retrieval app comparison.

Cost: Free to $8,000+/year depending on the app.

Best for: Teams who attend multiple events per year and need leads in their CRM without typing them in by hand.

3. Voice Memos

The method most exhibitors skip. Also the one that saves the most context.

The most common version: after a conversation, you step away and record a quick voice memo to yourself. Say the person’s name, what they care about, and what you promised to send. That’s it. Nobody else is being recorded. You’re just talking to your phone the way you’d talk to a notebook, except you speak about three times faster than you type. More detail, less time.

A few seconds of audio captures more than you’ll recall three days later at your desk. The catch is that a pile of voice memos is hard to search through or act on. You need an app that transcribes and summarizes them. Without that, you’re re-listening to 40 recordings on the flight home trying to match voices to faces.

Cost: Free (built into most phones, or included in apps like BoothIQ).

Best for: Every exhibitor. Even if you use another method for contact info, pairing it with a voice memo changes your follow-up from template to personal. See our trade show follow-up guide for why that matters.

4. Manual Entry and Note-Taking

The pen-and-paper method. Or the “type it into a spreadsheet on your phone” method. Or the CRM form you built that nobody uses because it has 14 required fields.

This works when you have few conversations per day (executive dinners, VIP events) and time to write notes between each one. It does not work on a busy show floor. At CES, you might talk to 50 people in a day. Nobody types notes for 50 people between conversations.

If you go this route, capture the minimum: name, company, one sentence about what they need. You can fill in the rest later. But “later” is a lie exhibitors tell themselves, so keep it honest and keep it short.

Cost: Free (but expensive in time).

Best for: Low-volume, high-value conversations where you have time between each one.

5. QR Codes and Digital Forms

You print a QR code that links to a form. Attendees scan it, type their info, and submit. You get a lead in your inbox or CRM.

The theory is clean. The practice is painful. At a busy booth, you’re asking someone to pull out their phone, open the camera, scan the code, wait for the page to load on convention center wifi (which barely works), and fill out a form. Most people walk away. The ones who don’t give you a name and email with no conversation context.

QR codes work better for giveaways and contests where the attendee wants something in return. They fail as a primary lead capture method because the friction kills completion.

Cost: Free to create. Landing page tools like Typeform or HubSpot charge separately.

Best for: Booth giveaways, contest entries, and self-service sign-ups.

6. NFC and Tap-to-Share

NFC (near-field communication) lets two phones share contact info with a tap. Some exhibitors use NFC cards or tags. The attendee taps their phone to your card, your details transfer, and you get their info back.

In practice, it stumbles. Not every phone supports NFC. The attendee needs NFC turned on. You need physical hardware for every team member. And you still get zero conversation context.

NFC works well for pushing your info outward (digital business cards). It works poorly for pulling leads inward because it depends on the other person’s phone cooperating.

Cost: $2 to $10 per NFC card or tag, plus the platform behind it.

Best for: Sharing your contact info with prospects. Not a reliable method for collecting theirs.

7. AI-Powered Lead Capture

The newest category. AI lead capture apps combine badge scanning, business card reading, voice recording, and contact enrichment in one tool. Scan any badge (no API kits), record a voice memo, and AI fills in missing data like email addresses and LinkedIn profiles.

The shift: you don’t need the event organizer’s technology. Any badge, any card, any handwritten nametag. Your phone camera and AI do the reading.

Some AI lead capture tools also write follow-up emails from your conversation notes. You review and send before leaving the booth. Instead of collecting leads now and following up “next week” (which, for most exhibitors, means never), you follow up while the conversation is still warm.

Cost: Free for basic scanning and voice memos. Team features and CRM sync are paid.

Best for: Teams at 8+ events per year, whether exhibiting or attending, who need capture, context, and follow-up in one workflow. If your team stitches together a scanner, a notes app, a CRM, and an email tool, this replaces all four.

How to Collect Leads at a Trade Show: Picking the Right Method

The right method depends on two things: how many conversations your team has per day, and how much context you need for follow-up.

If your team talks to 5 people a day at intimate events, manual notes work. If your team talks to 50 people a day at a big trade show, you need scanning plus voice memos at minimum.

The biggest mistake: picking a tool that captures names but not conversations. A name without context is a cold lead. A name with a quick voice memo about their biggest headache is a warm one.

FAQ

What is the best way to collect leads at a trade show?

Pair a scanning tool (badge or business card) with voice memos. The scan gets contact info. The voice memo gets context. Without both, you either lose names or lose the conversation. For most teams, an AI lead capture app handles both in one step.

How do I capture leads without a badge scanner?

Scan business cards, ask for their LinkedIn, or take a photo of their nametag. Apps with AI-powered OCR read printed text from any source. Manual entry works too. Keep it minimal: name, company, one sentence about what they need.

How many leads should I collect at a trade show?

Quality beats quantity. Industry benchmarks suggest about 20 leads per salesperson per day, so a team of three at a three-day show might collect 150 to 200. But 20 well-documented leads with conversation notes will outperform 150 badge scans with no context.

What should I do with trade show leads after collecting them?

Follow up within 24 hours while context is fresh. Sync leads to your CRM (customer relationship management tool like HubSpot or Salesforce) so they don’t sit in a spreadsheet. See our trade show follow-up guide for email templates and a complete playbook.

Are rental badge scanners worth it?

At large events where speed matters and you need to scan hundreds of badges, yes. As your only capture method, no. They give you no conversation context. Pair them with voice memos or a note-taking system.

References

• “The Cost Effectiveness of Exhibition Participation.” CEIR (Center for Exhibition Industry Research). ceir.org
• “Trade Show Statistics 2025.” Trade Show Labs. tradeshowlabs.com

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