From business card to RFQ: the 30 days after a trade fair

On 9 October the last stands at Inter Expo Center came down. MachTech & InnoTech 2026 had 205 exhibitors across five halls and thousands of visitors. Every stand went home with a stack of business cards and a few promises to “send the offer next week”.

On a lot of stands, that stack is where the fair ends. The cards go into a drawer, sales goes back to running orders, and three weeks later nobody remembers who asked about what.

My expo follow-up playbook sets the rules: note every conversation, write within 48 hours, offer one next step. This article is the calendar that goes with it: what to send on which day, to whom, and how to tell on day 30 whether the stand paid off.

The stand opens the door, the follow-up closes the deal

Engineers do not choose a supplier at the stand. They take your card back to the office and check you from there. Asked what makes a supplier credible, engineers rate a well-kept website far above trade show sponsorship.

The stand earns you a second look. That look happens later, in the buyer's inbox and on your website. Engineers do 62% of the buying process on their own before they contact a supplier (TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2026). More on that in how industrial buyers choose suppliers. If your follow-up is slow or generic, the research still happens. It just happens on a competitor's site.

Day 0 to 1: sort every card into A, B or C

Do this the evening the fair ends, not on Monday. Give each card a letter, then write one line about what that contact asked, in their words.

A useful line looks like this: “Needs a quote for 40 stainless flanges, DN100, before January. Asked about lead time.” A useless one says “interested”. In three weeks you will not remember the difference, and that line is what makes the day 2 email possible.

Be strict with A. If your stand had 80 conversations, A should be a short list. Five A contacts handled well are worth more than 80 identical thank-you emails.

The 30-day calendar

Day 2 is the email that matters most, and it should make no sense to anyone else. Name the conversation (“you asked whether we can hold the bore at ±0.02 mm”) and offer one next step with a date: “Send me the drawing and you will have the quote by Thursday.” Not “let us know if you have any questions”.

Day 3 to 5 is delivery. Whatever you promised at the stand goes out now, as a link the buyer can forward to a colleague. Connect on LinkedIn. Add a one-line note that names the conversation, so the request does not look like spam.

Day 7 and day 21 are follow-ups, and each must add something. The first can be the datasheet for the exact variant they mentioned or a firm lead time. The second takes a different angle: if you wrote about price, write about service, a reference customer in their industry or a visit to see the machine running.

Day 10 to 14 is for the phone. Email gets you read; a call gets you a date. It is also the latest point to have a landing page for the fair: the products you showed, specs as text, a short video and a quote form. Every follow-up links there, so a forwarded email leads to a page built for that conversation, not your homepage.

Day 14 is for B contacts. They have no project today, so send something they would keep, not a quote. In TREW Marketing's 2025 survey, 79% of engineers rated datasheets as valuable content and 61% said the same of technical articles. A short answer to a question you heard three times at the stand beats a brochure.

Day 30 closes the loop. One short, polite last email: say you will stop writing, and leave the page and your direct number in case the project comes back. Silent contacts move to a quarterly list.

My own MachTech 2026 numbers, one week in

I ran the same kind of follow-up after MachTech, with one difference: I was not exhibiting, so nobody on my list had met me at a stand. I went through all 205 companies in the catalogue and sent 191 individually written emails. Each carried one observation about the company that I had checked first.

In the first week, 10 prospects replied: 4 asked for a call or a meeting and 6 said no. Two addresses bounced. From day 7, automated follow-ups went to everyone who had not answered, which is fine as long as the first email is genuinely personal.

Six declines can look like a bad week. They are not. A clear no costs nothing, saves three follow-ups and, when it comes with a reason, tells you something about your offer or your timing. It is also early: these are first-week numbers with the follow-ups still running, not a result.

The time went into one sentence per email proving I had looked at their company. It is the slow part, and the part I would keep if I had to cut everything else. Your stand contacts are easier than mine: they have met you, and your day 0 line already is that sentence.

Track it in one sheet, or you cannot judge the stand

Without tracking, day 30 turns into opinions: sales remembers the good conversations, finance remembers the invoice. A shared sheet settles it, one row per contact, with these columns:

• Name, company and group: A, B or C
• What they asked: the one line from day 0
• Next step and its date
• Status: contacted, replied, call, quote sent, won, lost, quarterly list
• Source: “MachTech 2026”, spelt the same way on every row

On day 30, count only what meets the definition of a qualified lead: RFQs, quote requests and booked visits or demos from companies that fit your customer profile. Badge scans do not count. Divide the full cost of the stand by the number of RFQs and you have a cost per RFQ to compare with Google Ads or any other paid channel.

A buyer who ignored every email may still send an RFQ through your website two months later. Put a tagged link behind the stand's QR code and ask “how did you hear about us” on the quote form, so that request lands in the same sheet. Playbook 1 shows how to carry the source of every RFQ from GA4 into your CRM.

Prepare the follow-up before the fair ends

The last item matters most. Follow-up rarely fails for lack of templates. It fails when everyone worked the stand and nobody owns the list afterwards.

What to do this week

If you exhibited at MachTech in October and have not started, you are late but not too late. Sort the cards tonight, send the A emails tomorrow and run the calendar from there, moving every date. A late personal email still beats a prompt generic one.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your list or your first emails, book a 30-minute call.