Run Exhibition Booths, Layout, and Lead Capture

An exhibition has four jobs that all depend on the same list of companies: knowing who has booked and paid, drawing a floor that actually fits them, giving each stand a way to remember the visitors it meets, and getting its staff through the door with a badge. Most organisers keep those in four places, and they drift apart the week before opening. Booth Manager puts the four steps in one workspace so they follow the same list.

The short version: record each exhibitor and the booth they hold, draw the floor with rows of booths that fit the hall, print lead sheets for the exhibitors, and print badges for their staff.

What Booth Manager is, and what it is not

Booth Manager is a connected workspace with four steps in a row: Exhibitors, Floor layout, Lead capture and Badges. Each step opens one of the tools below, and each tool does the whole job on its own. What the workspace adds is a shared project. The project lives in your browser tab, it is not stored on our servers, and it is erased when you close the tab, so you save the project file before you leave and open it again next time.

Its limits matter as much as its features. It is not an invoicing system, it does not take payments, and it does not check fire, safety or access rules for your venue. The floor layout is a planning drawing, and your venue or local authority decides what is allowed. Treat it as the organiser's working copy that you can print and share.

Step 1: Exhibitors

The first step opens Exhibitor Booth Tracker. Each company has a status (enquiry, booked, paid or cancelled), a booth label, a fee and what has been paid so far. The tracker warns when two exhibitors hold the same booth and when a booked exhibitor has no booth at all. The step's note in the workspace counts how many exhibitors you have. The full walk-through of fees and payments is in track exhibitor booths, fees and payments, so this post only covers how it connects to the rest.

One habit pays off later: choose booth labels now that you will use on the floor plan. If the tracker says "A1" and the plan says "1", the two never line up.

Step 2: Floor layout, with a worked example

The second step opens Booth Layout Planner. You enter the hall width and depth with a unit (metres or feet), then either add items one at a time or press Fill rows. Fill rows takes booth width, booth depth, how many booths, the aisle between rows, the wall margin and an option for back-to-back rows, and it replaces the booths on the plan. Items can be booths, a stage, an entrance, an aisle or something else, and you drag them around on a grid that snaps to 0.5 m (or 1 ft).

Here is a real case, worked through the tool's own row logic. The hall is 30 m by 20 m. You want 30 booths of 3 m by 3 m, a 3 m aisle between rows and a 1 m margin at the walls.

• The space inside the margins is 28 m wide, so each row holds 9 booths (9 times 3 m is 27 m).
• With ordinary rows, each row costs 3 m of booth plus 3 m of aisle. The rows start at 1 m, 7 m and 13 m from the top, and a fourth row would have to start at 19 m and end at 22 m, which does not fit in a 20 m hall. So only 27 booths fit.
• The tool does not hide that. It tells you that only 27 of 30 booths fit, suggests smaller booths, narrower aisles or a bigger hall, and says that with this hall width the hall would need to be about 23 m deep.
• Switch on back-to-back rows, where an aisle sits only between pairs of rows, and all 30 booths fit. The rows start at 1 m, 4 m, 10 m and 13 m, and the last row ends at 16 m. The booths take 270 square metres of the 600, which the status line reports as 45%.

That one comparison is why the layout step is worth using before you sell the last stands. Back-to-back rows gain three booths here, and the cost is that the visitor can only reach each booth from one side, which is a commercial decision for you.

The planner also protects you from mistakes you would only otherwise find on the day. Items that overlap, or sit outside the hall, are outlined in red. A stage or other item placed on an aisle gives a blocked-aisle warning, because aisles are allowed to overlap anything but you should not. An aisle narrower than 2 m (6.5 ft) produces a hint. Two booths with the same label are flagged.

When you are happy, download a PDF (A4) to print, a PNG to share or a CSV with the columns Label, Type, X, Y, Width, Depth, Area and Note. Each download counts as a usage. If you typed an exhibitor name in a booth's note field, the CSV carries it in its Note column, which makes it a handy list to compare with the tracker. For more on drawing a hall, see plan an exhibition booth floor layout.

Step 3: Lead capture

The third step opens Visitor Lead Capture Sheet. It has two modes. In Capture, a stand member types what they learn from each visitor: name, company, email, phone, interest and notes, with a hot, warm or cold rating and a follow-up flag. It will not accept an entry with no name, company, email or phone, it rejects an email that does not look like an email or a phone number with fewer than six digits, and it warns when an email or phone number matches a lead already saved. Leads are kept in that browser tab so a reload does not wipe the day, and they clear when the tab closes.

In Print sheets you choose the columns (Name, Company, Email, Phone, Interest, Rating, Follow up and Notes), the number of rows per page and the number of pages, the paper (US Letter or A4) and an accent colour, and download a PDF of blank lead sheets for stands that prefer paper.

At the end of the show the CSV puts the hot leads first, then warm, then cold, each group in the order captured, with the follow-up column marked "yes". The tool can also copy the email addresses of the leads you flagged, hottest first, and fill a thank-you template with each person's first name and interest. Only collect personal details with the visitor's agreement and follow the data rules where you operate. The detail of the capture screen is in capture booth leads in ten seconds.

The organiser's role here is modest and useful: you do not collect the exhibitors' leads, you give each exhibitor the tool and a printed backup. Put the stand number in the line under the title of each printed sheet, so the paper sheets can be matched to booths when exhibitors hand them in.

Step 4: Badges

The last step opens Name Badge Maker. It prints badges for stand staff on badge-insert or large label sheets, with the event name, each person's name, organisation and role. You can take names from the guest list in your project, or type one badge per line as Name, Organisation, Role separated by vertical bars. Exhibitor staff are usually not on the guest list, so typing them is the natural route: put the company name in the organisation field and "Exhibitor" or the stand number in the role field.

There are two details that save a reprint. Typed badges do not carry a QR pass; only badges made from project guests can, because the pass is signed with the project file. And you can set "Start at badge" to the first free spot on a part-used sheet. Print a test page on plain paper first and print at 100% or Actual size. The badge side is covered in print name badges with optional QR passes.

How the four steps depend on each other

If you change a booth label in the tracker, change it on the floor plan too, and put the stand number on the lead sheets and badges. If an exhibitor cancels, mark them cancelled in the tracker (do not delete them), then free their booth on the plan. If you shift the aisle width, re-run Fill rows and check which exhibitors moved. The workspace does not rewrite one tool from another, so the discipline is yours; the benefit is that all four sit one tab away.

Steps

1. Create or open your project, and enter the exhibitors in the first step with a booth label each.
2. Open the floor layout, enter the hall size and press Fill rows. Compare ordinary rows with back-to-back rows if the fit message says some booths do not fit.
3. Give each booth its label and exhibitor name, then fix anything outlined in red or flagged as a blocked aisle.
4. Download the floor plan as a PDF, PNG or CSV.
5. Open Lead capture. Give each exhibitor the link, or print blank sheets with the stand number in the heading.
6. Open Badges, type the stand staff as Name | Company | Role, print a test page, then print the badges.
7. Save the project file before you close the tab.

Exports, whether PDF or CSV, count as usage. Booth Manager and the Visitor Lead Capture Sheet are Premium Applications, which get 2 trial uses a day before a day pass or plan applies. Name Badge Maker is a Professional Tool with 10 trial uses a day.

Common mistakes

Drawing the floor from the booth count you hope to sell instead of the hall you have, then finding out later that the last row does not fit. Leaving the aisle at its default and never checking whether it is wide enough for your crowd. Using different labels in the tracker and on the plan. Printing badges without a test page. Printing lead sheets with no stand number, so nobody can tell whose leads they are. And forgetting that the whole project is erased when the tab closes.

Summary

Run an exhibition from one project: exhibitors and payments, a floor plan that tells you honestly how many booths fit, lead sheets that rank visitors by interest, and badges for stand staff. Open Booth Manager with your exhibitor list, or press Try a sample first to see the steps filled in. More planning tools are in the event tools category.

Open Booth Manager→

Would a way to hand each exhibitor their own lead link be useful to you? Tell us on the contact page.