Trade Show Checklist: The Exhibitor Timeline, Week by Week

A trade show is a project, not a date in the calendar

Most exhibitors treat the show as three days in the calendar. The pipeline it produces is decided in the six weeks before it and the two weeks after. Every one of those weeks has a hand-off — marketing passes the attendee list to sales enablement, sales enablement passes a filtered list to the reps, the reps book meetings, someone writes the report — and every hand-off is a place where a show quietly goes wrong.

This checklist puts each step on a timeline, with an owner. Adjust the days to your show; keep the order.

Six weeks out: get the list

• Ask the organiser for portal access (Marketing). Attendee and exhibitor lists, the organiser's meeting tools and the badge-scan app all sit behind it, and organisers get slow in the last weeks.
• Share the list and the content pack (Marketing, four weeks out). The attendee export, the booth location, the session schedule, the one-pager and the demo video — everything a rep needs to write a credible email.

Three to four weeks out: pick the targets

• Pull and pre-filter the attendee list (Sales Enablement). Remove students, competitors and duplicates, and match the rest against your CRM so existing customers and open opportunities are marked before anyone starts writing.
• Pick the target contacts (Sales, three weeks out). Each rep picks their names and ranks them by value, not by how easy the meeting is to get. The method: how to build a trade show target list.

The last three weeks: reach out and book

• Reach out and book meetings (Sales and SDRs, until the day before). A short sequence anchored to the show date, pointing at a booking page that offers only genuinely free slots. The playbook: pre-event email campaigns.
• Publish the meeting status report (Sales Enablement, one week out). Booked, waiting for confirmation, still to reach — per rep. A week is enough time to fix a thin calendar; a day is not.

The show: keep the record live

• Keep every meeting up to date (Sales, every day of the show). Each meeting gets its status, notes and next step before the next one starts. Thirty seconds at the stand; impossible to reconstruct a week later.
• Review every evening. Meetings held and missed, the hottest leads, tomorrow's schedule with its conflicts resolved.

After the show: close the loop

• Final status, score and deal potential (Sales, two days after). Every meeting marked Completed or No Show and scored, with its next step, while people still remember the conversation. See the 72-hour follow-up system.
• Final report and CRM export (Sales Enablement, five days after). Meetings held, pipeline created, the accounts to watch, and the export to the CRM.
• Ask again what came of it (weeks 2, 6 and 13). Pipeline from a show surfaces long after it; record each meeting's outcome so the show gets the credit — how to track meeting outcomes for 90 days.

Why steps slip, and how to stop it

Steps rarely fail because anyone disagrees with them. They fail because nobody noticed the previous one was finished, or nobody noticed this one is late. Three habits fix most of it:

1. Due dates relative to the show, not to the calendar — "three weeks before" — so one checklist works for every event.
2. A named owner for every step, and the next owner told the moment their turn comes.
3. A reminder before each due date and a nudge when it's late — to the owner first, and to whoever runs the process if it stays late.

The checklist on one page

When	Step	Owner
6 weeks before	Portal access requested	Marketing
4 weeks before	List and content pack shared	Marketing
25 days before	Attendee list pulled and pre-filtered	Sales Enablement
3 weeks before	Target contacts picked	Sales
Until the day before	Outreach and booking	Sales, SDRs
1 week before	Meeting status report	Sales Enablement
Show days	Every meeting kept up to date	Sales
2 days after	Final status, score, deal potential	Sales
5 days after	Final report and CRM export	Sales Enablement

EventsGO's Event Process Tracker runs this checklist for every show: steps owned by each team, due dates tied to the show, items that tick themselves off as the work shows up in EventsGO, and kickoff, reminder and late emails. See the plans.