A stand with four people on it collects leads four ways at once. By the end of day one there are sixty of them, and the question "who is following up the one from the packaging company" has no answer, because nobody has been asked to. Every one of those sixty belongs to the team, which is to say to no one.
Ownership is the whole game. A lead with a name on it gets a call. A lead in the pool gets remembered fondly in the post-show meeting.
One person runs the stand
Not the most senior person; the most organised one. Their job, beyond selling, is the leads: who has what, what is unowned, what is hot and unowned, which is the emergency. They are the exhibition lead, and for the days of the show they can hand any lead to anyone.
Everybody else captures and follows up their own. That is the default rule and it covers most leads: whoever had the conversation owns the follow-up. They heard what was said, they made the promise, they are the face the customer remembers. Handing that lead to someone else costs a re-introduction and usually the warmth.
The exhibition lead overrides the default in three cases:
- The wrong person had the conversation. The visitor's account already belongs to someone on the team, or needs a specialist, or is in a territory. The person who captured briefs the owner before the day ends, on the stand, in two minutes.
- Someone has too many. A rep who captured twenty leads on day one cannot follow up twenty leads properly. Move the warm ones to whoever captured five.
- A lead was captured with no owner. It happens: a quick scan in a rush, a card someone dropped on the counter. These are the ones triage exists for.
The unowned pool
Capturing at a show, the honest default is to leave a lead unowned and decide at the end of the day, rather than guess in the moment. That is fine, as long as the end of the day actually comes with a decision.
So the pool has a rule: nothing stays in it overnight that is rated Hot, and nothing stays in it after the last afternoon at all. A hot lead without an owner at ten in the evening is the most expensive thing on the stand. It is the visitor who asked for a quote by Friday, and nobody knows to send it.
The exhibition lead's fifteen minutes each evening are: look at the pool, hand out every hot lead, hand out the warm ones if there is time, leave the contacts for the last day. The rep who receives a lead they did not capture gets the note with it: what was said, what was promised, when.
Claiming versus assigning
Two different acts, and mixing them up is how leads get lost.
Claiming is a rep taking an unowned lead for themselves. Anyone can do it, any time. It is how the pool empties without a meeting: a rep sees a visitor from their account walked up while they were at lunch, and takes it.
Assigning is giving a lead to someone else. Only the exhibition lead does that, and only they may take a lead off one person and give it to another. If everyone can reassign, leads bounce between people and the customer gets two emails, or none.
The rule is simple enough to say out loud: take what is yours, and let one person move the rest.
What the last afternoon looks like
By four o'clock on the final day:
- Every lead has a name. Every one. If a rep is looking at a contact-level lead with no obvious owner, it goes to whoever captured it, because that is better than nobody.
- Every hot lead's owner has booked the call, with a date. Not "next week".
- Every promised thing has a person responsible for sending it and a day it goes out.
- The exhibition lead has the list: leads captured, by whom; leads owned, by whom; hot leads and their next step. That list is the start of the report.
If those four are true, the show is set up to return. If they are not, the leads will still be there in three weeks, and most of them will not have been called.
The trap of the fair split
Some teams hand out leads at the end of the show by dividing the pile equally. It feels fair and it is wrong twice over. The person who had the conversation is the best person to continue it, and equal counts have nothing to do with capacity: one rep has a quiet month ahead and one has a factory commissioning. Hand out by conversation first, by account second, by capacity third, and never by counting.
Why this is the manager's job
Reps on a stand are selling. They will not, in the middle of a conversation, stop to think about whether the lead from twenty minutes ago has an owner. Somebody has to hold that question all day, and that somebody is not doing it if they are also trying to hit their own number.
Name the exhibition lead before the show. Give them the last fifteen minutes of every day. It is the cheapest thing on the whole budget, and it decides whether the rest of the budget came back.