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It's Thursday afternoon, just gone four, and the halls at the NEC are emptying out a lot faster than they filled up. Your feet hurt. Your voice has gone a bit croaky from two days of explaining what your business does over the noise of somebody's demo rig. And in the inside pocket of your jacket, held together with a rubber band someone found at the back of the stand, there's a stack of about forty business cards.
Maybe it's forty-three. Maybe a few of them are badge scans sitting in the organiser's app instead. Either way, it feels like a good show.
If you're exhibiting at Advanced Engineering this year, on 4 and 5 November in Halls 3 and 3a, the organisers are expecting upwards of 9,000 engineers through the doors. That's a lot of conversations. And at some point, on the drive home, probably somewhere around the M42, a slightly uncomfortable thought arrives. What on earth do we actually do with all of these?
I've done that drive more times than I'd like to count, mostly on stands for big industrial groups earlier in my career, and more recently sitting with MDs on the Monday after, going through the pile together. And here's what I've noticed. There are two ways to waste a show. Most people only worry about one of them.
The first is the one everyone talks about. The cards go in a drawer, nobody follows up, and three months later someone finds them while looking for the stapler. That's real, and it stings, because you paid a lot for those cards.
The second is quieter, and in my experience it costs more. You follow up on everything. Every card gets a quote. Your estimator spends a fortnight pricing work you never really wanted, your sales lead chases all forty with equal enthusiasm, and a couple of them say yes. Which feels brilliant, right up until you realise one of those yeses is at a price you can't make money on, in volumes your shop floor can't absorb without bumping your best customer.
That's the bit I want to dwell on. Demand you can't deliver profitably isn't a win. It just looks like one for a few weeks.
So this is a practical, show week guide to what to do with the cards. What to write on them before you leave the hall. How fast you really need to move. How to sort forty cards into four piles before anyone opens the estimating spreadsheet. And how to say no, or not yet, in a way that leaves the door open.
The single most useful thing you can do happens before the show's even over. Write on the back of the card.
I know. It sounds almost too simple to bother saying. But a business card on its own tells you very little. A name, a job title, a company, and a logo you vaguely remember. By Monday morning, the conversation behind it has blurred into the other thirty-nine. Was this the chap with the aerospace bracket, or the one who mainly wanted a free pen and a sit down?
So agree a rule with everyone on your stand. Within a minute of a conversation ending, they write four things on the back of the card, or in the notes field of the badge scanning app if you're using one.
What they need. In plain words. "Machined aluminium housings, about 500 a year, currently coming from Poland." Not "interested."
When. Is there a live requirement, a project next spring, or just general curiosity?
Who decides. Are they the buyer, the engineer who'll specify it, or the person who'll pass your brochure on to someone else?
Why us. What made them stop at your stand? This one's gold, honestly, because it tells you what the market thinks you're good at, which isn't always what you think you're good at.
Then add a fifth thing that most teams forget. A gut score from one to three. Three means you'd be genuinely disappointed to lose it. One means you were being polite.
At the end of each show day, ideally over a drink rather than in anything that feels like a meeting, spend fifteen minutes going through the day's cards as a team while it's all still fresh. Fill in the gaps. You'll be surprised how much a colleague remembers about a conversation you only half heard while you were talking to someone else.
A card with nothing on the back is a stranger. A card with four lines and a score is a lead.
There's a statistic that gets passed round the exhibition’s world like a hot potato. You've probably heard it. Eighty percent of trade show leads are never followed up.
To be honest, I'd treat that one with a bit of caution. It's been repeated for decades, and back in 2010 the American trade magazine Exhibitor got so fed up with nobody being able to find the original source that it ran its own survey. What it found wasn't exactly comforting, mind. Fewer than half of exhibitors were even tracking their show leads, and only around 28% had any way of judging what those leads were worth. So the famous number might be shaky. The problem underneath it clearly isn't.
And the money is real. The Events Industry Alliance's economic impact study put direct spending at around £34,000 per exhibitor at UK exhibitions in 2022. Your figure might be well below that if you've gone for a modest shell scheme stand. But add up the space, the build, the graphics, the hotel, the parking and two days of three or four senior people not doing their day jobs, then divide it by forty. Each card in that rubber band probably cost you a few hundred pounds. Worth treating them accordingly.
On speed, most of the hard evidence comes from online enquiries rather than shows, so I wouldn't push it too far. But it's hard to ignore. A Harvard Business Review study from 2011 found that firms which got back to an enquiry within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to have a proper conversation with a decision maker than firms that waited even one hour longer. Older exhibition research from the US suggested something a bit more painful too: a fair chunk of show visitors received the information they'd asked for after they'd already made their buying decision.
Think about that for a second. You did the hard part. You got them to the stand. And then the brochure turned up after they'd already chosen someone else.
So here's how I'd split it.
Everyone gets a short, personal note within two working days. Not a mail merge starting "Dear Valued Visitor." Two or three lines that mention what you actually talked about. "Good to meet you on Wednesday. You mentioned the housings currently coming from Poland. Once I've had a proper look at the drawing, I'll come back to you next week." That costs you an hour on Friday morning, and it puts you ahead of a surprising number of the stands you were sharing an aisle with.
But nobody gets a quote yet. That's the important bit. Speed matters for the first touch. It doesn't mean every card earns a fortnight of your estimator's time. Which brings us to the sorting.
On the Monday after the show, put an hour in the diary with three people. Whoever leads sales, whoever runs operations, and whoever looks after the money. If that's you wearing all three hats, fine, but try to think in three different voices.
Lay the cards out on the table. Then ask four questions of each one, in this order.
1. Does it fit what we're genuinely good at? Not what you could do at a push. What you'd be proud to put your name to, on the machines you've already got, in the materials and tolerances you know. A lot of show enquiries are people fishing. That's fine. You don't have to bite.
2. Can we deliver it without hurting someone we already serve? This is the operations question, and it's the one that gets skipped most often. If the work lands on your busiest cell, in the month your best customer always ramps up, somebody loses out. And it's usually the customer who's been paying your bills for ten years.
3. Will it make money at the price they've hinted at? People at shows often tell you more about price than they realise. "We're paying about a fiver a part at the moment" is information. So is "we've been told to take fifteen percent out of the supply chain this year." If the number they've hinted at is below what the job will cost you, a quote is just a polite and slow way of finding that out.
4. Will they pay, and on what terms? A big name on a lanyard isn't the same thing as a good payer. Check before you get excited. More on that in a moment.
Then sort every card into one of four piles.
Quote now. Good fit, the capacity's there or can be made, the price looks workable and they're likely to pay. In my experience this pile is smaller than people expect. For a business your size coming back from a decent show, maybe five or six cards out of forty. Sometimes fewer. That's normal, and honestly, it's fine.
Nurture. Good fit, but no live requirement yet, or a requirement that's a year away. This is usually the biggest pile, and it's where a lot of the real value of a show sits, quietly, for months.
Point elsewhere. It's not for you, but you know someone it is for. A friendly referral to another firm costs you nothing and earns a surprising amount of goodwill, from the visitor and from the business you send it to.
Thank and park. Students, competitors having a nose around, suppliers wanting to sell to you, and the ones who were just being polite. A thank you, and that's it.
Why be this strict? Because quoting isn't free. Figures from the machining sector in the US suggest job shops typically win somewhere between 20% and 30% of what they quote. I'd be surprised if many UK subcontractors were wildly different. So for every quote that becomes an order, two or three don't. If those quotes were for work you never really wanted, your estimator has spent days building careful numbers for jobs you'd have been better off losing. Meanwhile, the existing customer who's been waiting on a requote since September is still waiting.
There's a flip side worth mentioning too. If your win rate from a show is suddenly very high, don't automatically celebrate. Sometimes it just means you priced too low.
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This is the part I'd most like you to take away, so let me make the case properly.
Not all customers are worth the same. That sounds obvious, but the scale of the difference usually catches people out. Back in 1991, Robin Cooper and Robert Kaplan at Harvard wrote about customer profitability at Kanthal, a Swedish maker of heating wire. Once the true cost of serving each customer was worked out, the most profitable 20% of customers were generating roughly 225% of the company's profit. The least profitable 10% were wiping out about 125% of it. Most of the rest broke even. Plot that on a chart and it climbs steeply, then slopes away, which is why it got nicknamed the whale curve. Plenty of studies since have found the same basic shape.
The detail I find most useful is where the biggest customers tend to sit on that curve. Very often at one end or the other. They're either your best accounts, or the ones quietly costing you a fortune through special packaging, rushed deliveries, constant engineering changes and long payment terms. Size alone doesn't tell you which. Only the numbers do.
Now think about what a trade show does. It tends to put the big, shiny names in front of you. The defence prime. The household name consumer brand. The OEM whose logo would look lovely on your website. And it's very tempting, especially after a slow year, to say yes to exactly the sort of customer who ends up on the wrong end of the whale.
I remember an injection moulding business in Staffordshire, turning over around £8m, that came back from a show with what everyone agreed was the lead of the year. A consumer brand you'd recognise, wanting a new product moulded in volumes that would have added close to a fifth to turnover. They quoted keenly. A bit too keenly, if I'm honest, because everyone wanted it so much.
They won it. And then the trouble started. The tool took longer to prove out than planned, and the customer took four months to pay for it. The volumes arrived in lumps rather than the smooth monthly schedule that had been promised. To hit them, the business ran its two biggest presses flat out, which meant pushing back work for a medical devices customer it had looked after for the best part of a decade. That customer didn't make a fuss. It just quietly qualified a second supplier.
A year later, turnover was up. Profit wasn't. And the business had swapped one of its best customers for one of its worst. When we went through the numbers together, the MD summed it up better than I could. "We spent a year being busy for someone who doesn't care whether we exist."
That's what I mean by demand you can't deliver profitably. It isn't just a thin margin on one job. It's the knock-on effects. Cash tied up in tooling and stock long before the first invoice gets paid, which is the classic route into overtrading, where a business grows faster than the cash it needs to fund that growth. A loyal customer bumped. A team stretched. A quoting queue clogged with work that was never going to pay its way.
And the timing makes this more relevant right now, not less. The flash UK manufacturing PMI from S&P Global rose to 52.8 in October, up from 51.9 in September and ahead of what forecasters expected, with firms pointing partly to defence projects and AI investment as reasons for optimism. When order books start filling up, capacity becomes the scarce thing. Every hour of machine time you give to a marginal customer now is an hour you can't give to a good one when they come knocking in the spring.
So before you send that quote to the big name, check two more things.
Run a credit check. It takes minutes and costs very little. Research from Experian, reported by The Manufacturer, found that around 65% of UK manufacturers weren't checking their customers' credit status. Given how much cash a manufacturer has to lay out before it ever gets paid, that's a slightly alarming number. A new customer with an unusually big first order is exactly when you should look, and when a deposit or staged payment is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for.
Price the whole job, not just the parts. Tooling, who pays for it and when. Payment terms, and whose terms win if their purchase order says something different to your quote, which happens more often than you'd think. Packaging, scheduling, call off patterns, engineering changes. If the margin only works when everything goes perfectly, it doesn't really work.
None of this means turning down big customers. Some of your best accounts probably started life as a card at a show. It means saying yes on purpose, knowing exactly what you're saying yes to.
There are two kinds of follow up that most manufacturers skip, and both quietly earn their keep.
The first is the honest no. If a card's gone in the point elsewhere or thank and park pile, tell them. Briefly and warmly. "Thanks for stopping by the stand. Having looked at it properly, I don't think we're the right fit for the volumes you need, but you might want to speak to so and so." It feels odd to put effort into saying no. But engineers move jobs, requirements change, and people remember the supplier who was straight with them. I've seen a polite no turn into a very good yes three years later, from the same person at a different company.
The second is the long game with the nurture pile. This is where most of the value of a show really sits, and it's exactly where most of the effort stops. Something genuinely useful every month or so works far better than a newsletter that says nothing much. A short case study from their sector. A note when you've invested in a machine that's relevant to what they told you on the stand. A quick call just before their budget year starts. Not a sales pitch every time. Just staying on the radar until their requirement becomes real.
A quick word on the rules, because people do worry about this. The ICO's guidance says the specific consent rule for marketing emails under PECR doesn't apply when you're emailing someone at a limited company or a similar corporate body. It does apply to sole traders and some partnerships, which are treated much like individuals. And UK GDPR still applies whenever you're handling someone's personal details, even in a business setting, so you need to tell people what you're doing with their details and make it easy for them to say no thanks. In practice, that means a clear way to opt out on every follow up email, and actually honouring it. It's not complicated, but if you're unsure, check with your own adviser.
Finally, decide now how you're going to judge the show. Not by the number of cards, and not even by the number of quotes. Put a date in the diary, sometime around the end of February, and look at which cards turned into orders, what margin those orders are really making, and whether any of them bumped work you'd rather have kept. That's the only honest scoreboard for a show. Everything else is footfall.
So the stand's back in the van, the lanyards are in a drawer somewhere, and the rubber band is sitting on your desk. Here's the short version.
Write on the back of every card before you leave the hall, while the conversation is still in your head. Send everyone a short, personal note within two working days, because you paid for those cards and plenty of the stands around you won't bother. But don't let speed turn into quoting everything. Sit down with sales, operations and finance and ask four questions of each card. Does it fit? Can we deliver it without hurting someone we already serve? Will it make money? Will they pay? Sort them into four piles, quote the few that pass, nurture the many that aren't ready yet, and give an honest no to the rest.
And keep the whale curve somewhere in the back of your mind. The most exciting card in the pile isn't always the most valuable one. Sometimes it's the most expensive one you'll ever pick up.
If you'd like a hand with the bigger question sitting underneath all this, which is what sort of demand your business should be chasing in the first place, that's very much what our Strategy SPRINT is built for. It's a two-day session for UK manufacturing and engineering firms turning over £3m to £25m, built around the three things that collide every time a show goes well: your sales pipeline, your production capacity and your cash flow. You'll leave with a clear view of what's really choking profitable growth, your Big 3 priorities, and a named, measurable 90-day plan to act on them. You can read more about the Strategy SPRINT here. Or, if you'd rather just talk through what came back from the NEC, book a free, no pressure strategy call and we'll go through the pile with you.
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