Problem · Owners
We spend a fortune on trade shows and come home with a stack of cards.
The booth, the travel, the swag, and the four days of the founder's time add up to $30,000 to $60,000 per show. The return is a spreadsheet of badge scans that gets a mass email two weeks later and then nothing. SciLeads' 2026 benchmark found 77 percent of science sales teams attending the same or more conferences, only 33 percent satisfied with the return, and 30 percent choosing shows out of habit. The show is not the problem. The three weeks before it are.
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The conference sprint is a $7,500 per event add on on any tier: meetings booked before and at one trade show, from a list of attendees and exhibitors built for that event, with follow up run afterward by the same seat. Pricing is published.
Why the cards go nowhere
A badge scan is a person who walked past. It is not a lead. Mass emailing 200 of them two weeks later gets reply rates under 1 percent because the context is gone. Meanwhile the 15 people you actually wanted to meet were at the show and you never found them, because nobody built the list beforehand. The event produced proximity to your buyers for three days and you spent it hoping they would stop by.
Book the meetings before you fly
Three weeks out, build the list: exhibitors, speakers, and registered attendees who match your ideal customer profile, usually 100 to 300 names. Two weeks out, sequence them across email and LinkedIn with a specific ask: 20 minutes at the show, at a time, at a place. One week out, phone the ones who opened twice. A well run sprint books 8 to 20 held meetings at a show where you previously booked none, and each of them arrives with a brief.
After the show, run the sequence, not the blast
Everyone you met gets a personal follow up inside 48 hours with the page relevant to what they said. Everyone you wanted and missed gets a three touch sequence referencing the show. Everyone else gets nothing, because they were never a lead. Then decide next year's shows from held meetings per dollar, not from habit. That number, once you have it, usually cuts the show list in half and doubles the return on what is left.
Questions on this problem
Yes. The conference sprint is priced per event at $7,500 and does not require a monthly tier, though it runs better with one.
Exhibitor and speaker lists are public. Attendee lists come from the organizer where offered, from the event app, and from public signals like posts announcing attendance. We build from real data, not purchased lists.
Then the first sentence has to name their work. Our COO spent a decade selling to researchers at conferences. The sequences are written in the register of the field.
George Stoff, Founder and Lead Engineer
Thirty years building software, brands, and demand. On every account.