Lead capture for engineers

You come back from a show with a lanyard full of cards and a bag of literature. The intention is to sort it on the plane. It rarely survives the first week back.

By the time a spec changes and you need the supplier who had the right connector, the card is somewhere and the memory of which booth it came from is gone.

• Forty cards, no record of which booth or what they make.
• Email addresses mis-heard across a noisy stand.
• Literature that goes in a drawer with the cards.
• Nothing searchable when procurement asks for options.

There is nothing to configure on the day. Build the card once and it works at every booth.

1. 1Create your card with your name, discipline, company, and a link to your profile or portfolio.
2. 2Save the QR to your phone home screen or wallet so it opens instantly.
3. 3At the booth, hold up the QR instead of spelling anything out.
4. 4Scan the cards you are handed as you go.
5. 5Add a note on what they make before you walk to the next stand.

Nothing to install on their side, which matters at a booth where the person opposite is using whatever their company issued them.

A company name tells you nothing when a spec changes. What matters is the part, the process, or the capability you were standing there discussing.

"Machined aluminium enclosures, five-day turnaround on prototypes, min order 25, quoted roughly $50 a unit at that volume." That note is worth more than the card it is attached to.

• What they actually make or specialise in.
• Lead times, minimums, or constraints they mentioned.
• The booth or session, so you can place them later.
• Whether they are a supplier, a peer, or a recruiter.

By the end of the day, every exchange is a clean contact with a note attached. There is no evening of typing, and nothing is lost because a card went through a bag.

Export the list to CSV for procurement, or sync it into the company CRM on a paid plan.

"Good to meet you at the show" gets ignored. "You mentioned five-day turnaround on machined enclosures, we have a prototype run coming in March" gets a quote.

The specific follow-up is only possible because you wrote down the specific thing.

The same flow works at a site visit, a standards committee, a user group, or the queue after a conference talk. Anywhere you would have handed over a card, you can capture theirs with the context that makes it useful.