After enough events, you stop being surprised by the rep situation. You have seen all three types. Most field marketers have.
Type 1 is why you keep doing events. They show up early. They know the product. They run conversations without needing to be managed. They qualify the person while talking to them, rate the lead before moving on, and close follow-up commitments on the floor before the attendee walks away. At a three-day show, a single Type 1 rep can generate more pipeline than a full badge-scanner export.
There are never enough of them.
Type 2 shows up for the morning keynote, appears at the booth for an hour, then goes missing. By midday you are running the booth alone. The scans still happen - visitors walk up, you scan the badge, hand over the gift, try to ask a qualifying question while also managing two other visitors. Nobody gets a proper conversation. Nobody gets a lead rating. The export at the end of day one is a list of names with no context attached.
Type 3 is more expensive. They pushed the hardest in the planning meeting to get the booth at this event. The budget was signed off partly on their conviction. During the show, they are busy - with their own contacts, their own agenda, sometimes at a different event entirely. The booth runs without them.
Type 2 breaks your lead capture. Type 3 breaks your follow-up. One is a gap in the data. The other is a knife in the debrief.
On the Monday after, Type 3 opens the review call. The leads are junk. The footfall was disappointing. Marketing did not deliver. It goes in the notes. Next quarter's event budget has a question mark next to it.
The real cost of Type 2 is a bad list. The real cost of Type 3 is that the bad list becomes someone else's fault.
Most field marketers eventually learn to staff for Type 1 explicitly, compensate for Type 2 with tools, and document everything before Type 3 can rewrite the narrative. A few never do.