The week after the show, our rep started calling the scan export. He worked through it for two days.
Most of them did not pick up. A few did. None of them remembered scanning our booth.
One man answered - politely, not rudely - and said he had scanned our badge because someone offered him a gift voucher. He had no idea what we sold. He was a logistics manager from Pune. We sell event software.
That is not a lead. That is a scan.
The event industry calls badge scanners "lead capture" tools. The category is officially named "lead retrieval." Conference organisers rent out badge readers to exhibitors under that label. Exhibitor guides tell you to scan everyone you speak to. Some tell you to scan everyone, period. The implicit promise is that more scans means more leads.
A badge scan records that a person was near your booth. It records nothing else.
It does not record whether they came because they had a problem you can solve. It does not record their budget, their role, or whether they were looking for something to buy or just something to take home. It records a name, a company, a job title, and sometimes an email - all of it from the badge they printed at registration. None of it from anything they told you.
The rep who worked through our scan export was not calling the wrong list by accident. He was doing exactly what the tool implied he should do. The list was called a lead export. It was marketed to us as leads. He treated them as leads.
The problem is the word. "Lead capture" describes something that did not happen at the booth. Nobody was captured. They scanned, or they were scanned, and they kept walking.
A lead is a conversation where you established that the person has a relevant problem and a reason to talk again. A badge scan is not that. It is a record of attendance, delivered in a format that looks like a CRM export.
The format is the lie.