TechSparks is six weeks away. You have a booth.
Right now, six weeks out, the booth is not your problem. The booking is done. The stand design is in review. You have a spreadsheet tracking the giveaway quantities. Someone is handling logistics. You are thinking about the demo flow and whether the game setup looks right.
TechSparks draws serious buyers. The audience is real. That is exactly what makes your lead capture process matter more here, not less.
The problem arrives on the Monday after.
You fly back with somewhere between 200 and 400 badge scans. The show ran for three days. You spoke to maybe forty people properly. You are not sure which forty. The team is tired. Someone needs to clean the list before it goes to sales. That person is probably you.
Day one: pull the export from the badge scanner app. Deduplicate rows. Remove entries with no company name. Flag the personal emails. Try to remember which names you actually spoke to and which ones scanned just for the prize.
Day two: rate the leads. Except nobody at the booth rated them in real time. The reps were running conversations. The notes field in the scanner app is blank on most entries - or has something like "followed up" or "interesting" with no context. You are rating from memory, two days after the event, based on a name, a company, and whatever you can vaguely reconstruct about a conversation you had standing up in a noisy hall.
Day three: by the time a clean, rated list reaches sales, 72 hours have passed. The leads have moved on. Your reps are looking at it cold.
Three days of cleanup is not bad luck. It is the consequence of decisions you did not make six weeks before the show.
What you set up before the event - how the booth captures information, whether the qualification happens during the scan or in a spreadsheet the following week, whether reps are rating leads on the floor or from memory - determines whether that Monday morning is a cleanup problem or a follow-up problem.
One is recoverable. The other wastes the whole event.
You have six weeks.