A 20-minute pre-show checklist for the stand team

Most show-day problems are not problems of effort. They are problems of assumption: someone assumed the devices were charged, someone assumed the export worked, someone assumed everyone knew which visitors counted. Twenty minutes the evening before removes most of them.

Block 1 — Devices and access (five minutes)

• Every phone or tablet charged, with chargers in the bag and a power bank if the stand has no sockets.
• The tool opened once on each device and logged in. Not "we think it is logged in" — opened, with a test capture done.
• One test badge or business card photographed, and the result checked. This is the single most useful five minutes of the whole checklist.
• Airplane-mode test: put a device in flight mode, capture, and confirm it queues rather than loses the record.
• Wi-Fi details and a fallback plan if the venue network is oversubscribed by eleven o'clock.

Block 2 — Roles (five minutes)

Decide, out loud, who does what. Ambiguity on a stand means the most outgoing person talks to everyone and nobody writes anything down.

• Who captures. Ideally everyone who talks to a visitor, with one person nominated as the backstop for busy periods.
• Who greets. The person working the aisle, whose job is to start conversations rather than finish them.
• Who handles the queue at the busiest hour, and what they say to someone waiting.
• Who owns the end-of-day review — ten minutes to check that every conversation became a record.
• Break schedule, so the stand is never staffed by one person eating a sandwich.

Block 3 — What counts as a lead (five minutes)

This is the block teams skip, and it is the one that decides whether Monday's list is usable.

• Agree the two or three questions every rep will ask. Keep them about the visitor's situation rather than your product: what are they using today, what is prompting them to look, who else is involved.
• Agree what a qualified lead looks like, in one sentence, and what a polite "not a fit" looks like. Both need a record; only one is pipeline.
• Agree the note. One line per lead, written before the visitor is out of sight: what they asked, what you promised.
• Agree consent language: what you say when you ask to follow up, and how that gets recorded.
• Agree the follow-up date that goes on every lead before the device goes in a pocket.

Block 4 — The Monday plan (five minutes)

• Who is writing the first follow-ups, and on which day. Name a person, not a team.
• Where the list will live — the tool, the CRM, or a shared document — and who exports it.
• What the first message will say, at least in outline. A template agreed in advance is faster to personalise than a blank page.
• How the team will report back: what the sales manager wants to see on Wednesday.
• One thing you will test at this show, so it is not just a repeat of the last one.

The two-minute version

If you only do three things: test a capture on every device, agree the qualifying question out loud, and name the person doing follow-up on Monday. Those three account for most of the difference between a show that produces pipeline and one that produces a carrier bag of leaflets.

The kit list for the first hour

The first hour is when the checklist either pays off or is exposed. Keep a small kit together so nobody is searching a suitcase while visitors are arriving.

• A power bank and two cables, because a phone at 30% at ten in the morning will not last a busy day.
• A printed card with the Wi-Fi name and password, plus the login for the capture tool, in case the person who set it up is not first on the stand.
• One physical badge or business card kept as a test — capturing it takes ten seconds and proves the camera and the form are working before a real visitor is waiting.
• A short paper form for the worst case. If a device dies and the queue is three deep, writing a name and company on paper beats losing the conversation entirely; it takes two minutes to add it to the list afterwards.
• The qualifying questions written down where the team can see them, not memorised.

During and after

At the end of each day, ten minutes: look at the day's records together, fix anything missing, and check the follow-up dates. On the last afternoon, export the list before the stand comes down — not because anything will be lost, but because doing it while the show is fresh catches the gaps that a Tuesday export discovers too late.

If you want the capture, the notes and the follow-up dates in one place, that is what StandProof does; the flow and plans are on the pricing page, and there is a version of this checklist written for sales managers running several shows a year.