The trade show ended. Which companies came back to your website?

The show’s over. There’s a spreadsheet of 212 badge scans on your desk and sales wants to know who to call.

My advice: start with the companies that came back to your website. Someone who’s serious about buying goes back to the office and looks you up. Someone who came for the free pen doesn’t.

At Snitcher, we show you which companies visit your website, even when nobody fills in a form – so you can see which of your 212 scans looked you up.

Why isn’t the badge-scan list enough?

Because it can’t tell you who’s interested.

Everyone on it looks the same. The production manager with a budget and a deadline is one row. The student who wanted a free pen is the next.

You know what happens next. Your reps start at the top and work down. By the twentieth “I only picked up a brochure”, they’ve given up – and the company with a real project was on row 140.

Here’s who’s usually on the list and what they do after the show:

Only the first row does anything useful after the show. They look you up – on your website, where the spreadsheet can’t see it.

How do you see which companies came back to your website?

Most website visitors never fill in a form, so normally you’d have no idea who they are.

Website visitor identification fixes that.

When someone browses your website from work, the visit comes from their employer’s network. Snitcher looks up whose network it is and tells you the company, which pages it read and when it came back.

So if that production manager reads your product pages from the office, you’ll see their company’s name. They don’t have to fill in a thing.

Here’s how to set it up for a show:

1. Turn the scans into a list of companies. Badge scans are people, but Snitcher matches companies. One row per company, with its website address. Five people from the same firm are one row.
2. Upload the list to Snitcher the day you get back. Visits start while you’re still unpacking the stand. Don’t wait for the debrief.
3. Check who turns up. Snitcher flags every company from your list that visits, with what it read. Every morning for two weeks, then once a week.

Say your 212 scans come down to 140 companies. Then 31 of them visit your website in the two weeks after the show.

Those 31 are your call list. The other 109 can wait for the newsletter.

How do you know which ones are interested?

Look at what they read when they come back. It tells you what they want from you next, so you can have it ready before you pick up the phone.

Someone who had a real conversation at your stand comes back for the details: the product they saw, the technical data, maybe your lead times.

Someone who was just being polite looks at your homepage once and leaves. (We’ve all done it.)

Here’s how to read each visit and what you should have ready:

The second row – a visit from a different office – is the one I’d jump on.

You scanned one person. Now someone else at the company is reading too. That’s often the person who signs off the order. You’ve never met them.

Find out who it is before you ring.

Who should call them and what should they say?

The rep who met them at the stand. They remember which machine the visitor pointed at, what they asked and what they were promised. Anyone else is calling cold.

Set it up once and nobody has to forward anything. Each rep’s companies go straight to them in Slack, Microsoft Teams or email. If you don’t know who met a company, send it to the rep for that region.

Here’s what that looks like. Say you make filling lines and I’m on your stand. On day two, I spend ten minutes with a production manager from Heinz, talking about whether the line can cope with thick sauces.

A week later, this turns up in my Slack channel:

I didn’t have to spot that visit. Snitcher matched Heinz to the show list and posted it straight to me.

So I ring the production manager.

I don’t open with “I saw you on our website”. Nobody likes finding out they’ve been watched. It’s not a reason to talk either.

I pick up where we left off on the stand: “We ran that trial with a sauce like yours. Want to see the results?” The visit just told me this is a good week to ask.

No answer? Same thing, by email:

What should you do in the six weeks after a show?

Keep checking for six weeks, not six days.

Most companies come back in the first two weeks, while the show is fresh. But nobody buys a filling line on impulse. Some only look you up a month later, once the budget’s signed off.

That last row is the one your MD actually cares about. “We scanned 212 badges” is nice. “Six companies asked for a quote” gets next year’s stand booked.

So, which companies came back?

Not as many as you scanned – and honestly, that’s how it should be. Most people stopped at your stand for the pen.

The ones who came back are the ones worth your reps’ time. If it were my show, I wouldn’t send a single follow-up email until I knew who they were.

So upload the list the day you’re back, give it two weeks, then hand each rep their own companies with what each one read.

Got a show coming up? Try Snitcher before you go, so the list is ready the day you get back.