Exhibitor Management: Booths, Logistics and Lead Capture

An exhibition is a second event with its own audience, its own logistics and its own definition of success — and it happens inside the first one. Treated as a row of tables, it disappoints everybody.

Allocate the floor plan deliberately

Position is the product. Decide the rules before you sell:

• Price by position, not only by size. A stand by the coffee is worth more than the same stand in a corner, and pretending otherwise means the first buyer takes the best spot for the base price.
• Put catering and seating inside the hall. Traffic follows food; a hall attendees have no reason to enter is the commonest exhibition failure.
• Separate direct competitors by a reasonable distance.
• Keep the aisles wide enough for a conversation plus a passer-by.

Publish the plan as a live floor map so attendees can find a company by name — see wayfinding and floor maps.

Write one exhibitor manual

One document, sent eight weeks out, covering:

• Load-in and load-out times, door, lift dimensions and access route.
• What the stand includes: table, power, wifi, chairs, lighting.
• Deadlines for artwork, staff names and any equipment orders.
• Rules: height limits, noise, what may be fixed to walls, food handling.
• Badge allocation per stand, and how to register staff.

Almost every exhibition problem on the day traces back to something that was not in the manual, or was in an email thread instead of it.

Schedule load-in by slot

Thirty exhibitors arriving at once is a car park argument. Assign slots, with the largest builds first, and tell each one their time. The same applies at the end — and state the earliest possible breakdown time, because a hall dismantling itself during the closing keynote is a bad final impression.

Make lead capture work

Scanning a badge should take two seconds and transfer name, organisation and email with the attendee's consent. Brief exhibitors that consent is required, and brief attendees that scanning shares their details. Provide the scanning method yourself; leaving each exhibitor to their own app produces thirty data-protection questions you cannot answer. See event data and GDPR.

Drive the traffic you promised

Exhibitors do not buy floor space; they buy conversations. Put the breaks in the hall, run a session in it, print stand numbers next to company names in the programme, and give attendees a reason to walk the floor. If the hall is empty at 3pm, that is your problem to fix, not theirs.

Report afterwards

Scans, stand page views, and attendee composition — the same one-pager as sponsor ROI, sent within ten working days. It is what rebooking is decided on.

Manage exhibitors, stands and the floor map free on Gathervo.