Trade show guides, playbooks and product news

StandProof is built by people who have watched too many exhibitors pack down a stand with a list of names they cannot use. This section exists to fix the part of that problem software cannot fix on its own: knowing what good looks like before you walk onto the floor, and what to do with the leads once you have them.

Nothing here is a sales page with a headline. Every article is written to be useful in its own right, whether or not you ever use our product, and we say plainly when something we are describing is still in build rather than shipped. That standard is unusual in this category, and it is deliberate — you should be able to tell which parts of this site are describing software you can use today.

What we publish

Articles are grouped into five categories. Exhibitor Guides covers the practical mechanics: what a badge scan actually produces, how lead capture works when you are not using the organiser's system, what your obligations are when you photograph a badge. Booth and Stand ROI deals with the money: how to build a cost per qualified lead that survives a finance review, what a rental quote really contains, how to compare owning a workflow against renting a device for three days. Lead Follow-Up is about the week after the show, where most of the value is won or lost.Show Playbooks are checklists and briefings for the people standing on the floor. Product Updates is where we describe changes to StandProof itself, including the things that are not finished yet.

How the advice is built

Our guidance comes from three places: the mechanics of how lead capture actually works, publicly available research on sales response times and B2B buying, and the patterns we hear from exhibitors. When we cite a study we name it. When we use an illustrative calculation — a conversion rate, a number of scans — we label it as illustrative rather than presenting it as measured data. We do not publish invented statistics, and we do not name competitor prices we cannot source from a public page.

The arithmetic in these articles is deliberately reproducible. If we say a follow-up sequence takes three hours, you can count the leads on your own stand and check the estimate. If we say a rental quote hides a per-lead charge, the checklist in that article tells you which line to look for on your own contract. You should be able to disagree with our conclusion using your own numbers, and that is the point.

UK and US editions

StandProof runs separate UK and US sites because the practical details differ: prices in pounds or dollars, company registers, consent conventions, and the vocabulary used on the show floor. Articles are tagged by market so the right ones appear in each edition. The US edition covers booth briefings and US pricing, and the UK edition covers Companies House enrichment and UK GDPR practice. Where an article applies in both places, it appears in both lists.

What we will not do

We will not tell you a trade show is always worth attending, because sometimes it is not. We will not claim customers or testimonials we do not have. We will not describe a feature as available when it is still being built — CRM sync and an ROI report are both in build right now, and our articles say so. And we will not pretend that a tool solves a process problem: if your team has no agreed definition of a qualified lead, better software will help you collect the wrong data more efficiently.

Where to start

If you have a show coming up in the next month, read the pre-show checklist and the follow-up piece, in that order. If you are being asked to justify the stand budget, start with the finance director article and the cost comparison. If you are deciding whether to rent a scanner at all, the independent capture guide and the organiser scanning breakdown will save you a contract review. If you are new to the category entirely, read what enriched lead data means before you choose any tool, ours included.

The product context sits alongside this section: current plans and what each includes are on the pricing page, the differences between approaches are set out on the comparison page, and the specific concerns of each buyer are covered for sales directors, sales managers and procurement teams. If you want to know how we handle lead data, the badge scanning and GDPR guide is the place to start.

New articles are published most weeks during show season and less often in the quieter months. If there is something you would find useful that is not here, the contact page reaches a person rather than a form queue, and suggestions genuinely shape what gets written next.