Engaging prospects and capturing leads

Doctrine: the conversation note is the lead

A badge scan is a contact. What makes it a lead is the context — pain, authority, timeline, and the agreed next step — and that context decays in hours. The industry's documented failure is not "no follow-up", it's capture without qualification: CEIR's actual finding is that fewer than 10% of exhibitors use customer qualifiers at capture (the famous "80% never followed up" line is folklore — see research-foundations §Debunked). So the discipline is: tier at capture, note in their words, next step agreed on the spot, CRM the same day.

Engaging (the craft)

• Open with a question, not a pitch. The working opener names the moment: "What's pulling you to this event this year?" or the qualification trigger straight up: "What's prompting you to look at AI seriously now?" The memorised elevator pitch is the documented trust-killer.
• The 3-question qualification frame (fits a 2–3 minute floor conversation — BANT compressed to trigger–authority–timeline):
  1. "What's prompting this now?" — trigger + urgency
  2. "Who else is involved in evaluating something like this?" — authority + buying committee (B2B committees run 9–11 people; the person in front of you is rarely the signer)
  3. "Are you looking to move before <date>?" — timeline

     Budget is inferred at an event, never asked.

• Qualify out fast and kindly. Two minutes with a mismatch costs the conversation you flew here for. "That sounds like something we don't do well — you want <category>" earns more trust than a stretched pitch, and trust compounds at annual events.
• The demo is a conversation prop, not a broadcast: 90 seconds, offline-capable, ends in a question ("which of your workflows looks like this?"). Longest-dwelling conversations are the qualified ones — length of genuine engagement beats scan counts as the quality signal.
• INTO-specific: listen for the strong-lead markers from reference/about-the-company.md §5.9 — a concrete workflow, an operational owner, data access, measurable pain. Those four in one conversation = tier A regardless of title.

Tiering (decided at capture, not later)

Competitors, vendors, and swag collectors are not leads; log nothing beyond intel.

The note schema (mandatory for A/B)

Name/title/org · pain in their words · timeline/budget signals · who else evaluates · what we promised · agreed next step + date · captured by. Voice-note discipline works well at INTO's scale: 30 seconds dictated between conversations, transcribed at the evening debrief — better fidelity than end-of-day memory, cheaper than badge-scanner licences. Whatever the method, it's decided in the pack before the event, and it syncs to the CRM same day.

The promise ledger

Every commitment made at an event — "I'll send the case pattern", "I'll intro you to our CTO", "we'll get you the workshop materials" — goes in the ledger at the evening debrief: what / to whom / owner / due. Commitments evaporate from working memory within hours (memo-04), and the strongest follow-up email is the one that fulfils a promise rather than asks for something. The ledger clears to 100% by T+7 — it's checked in the post-event report.

Pre-booked meetings (the other half of the sheet)

The meetings booked via chapter 07 run on their own tab: held/no-show, outcome, next step. No-shows get a same-day gracious reschedule message plus two further attempts — 35–55% of meeting no-shows are recoverable within 48h and recovered no-shows convert unusually well (vendor benchmark, memo-05). After two no-shows: nurture, not chase.

Daily reconciliation

At the evening debrief the sales captain closes the day: capture log reconciled, tiers sanity-checked (the test: would the follow-up owner know what to write from this note alone?), promises extracted to the ledger, CRM entries confirmed done, quota pace read against P1/P2. Day-one pace misses are diagnostic: wrong room → trigger the kill condition posture (refocus on side-meetings and hunting); wrong opener → fix the talk track at tomorrow's standup.