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Hello to all our 2025 SVC TechCon Exhibitors!
Before we know it, the 68th Annual Technical Conference (TechCon) will be held from May 17 to May 22, 2025, at the Nashville Gaylord Opryland Hotel.
Once again, we will not be offering “lead retrieval” as a stand-alone package to our exhibitors as we believe we have an economical and no cost solution for you!
Three years ago, we completed a comprehensive review of lead retrieval systems and to those of you who are “new” to the SVC we reported the following:
- All organizations that offer lead retrieval solutions for an exhibition provide two options.
- The first option is a standalone “device”, which on the older platforms is a hand-held reader and on the newer platforms it is generally a tablet running a specific program. This stand-alone option requires the rental of the “device” and a license fee for the application. These stand-alone devices can be shared within a booth so multiple sales resources at the show can share a single device. Onsite support personnel are required for this approach and is the costliest solution. Typical “all in costs” are more than $1,000 USD before any post event processing or customization activities are considered.
- The second option is an App that will reside on a smart phone. These solutions are less costly but suffer from the fact that they will need to be deployed across all booth personnel’s mobile devices. Historically, only 20% of the SVC Exhibitors took advantage of any lead retrieval solutions. Those that did generally found the solutions clumsy. Nobody ever completed a post TechCon survey with a kind word to say about lead retrieval!
- All the lead retrieval systems require integration with the on-site registration program which is a single point of failure. Registrant information is uploaded to the lead retrieval company’s server and then the software/device accesses the database on that server. Upload timing is always an issue and never as fast as one would expect.
- By contract, all lead retrieval systems restrict the information that can be encoded in the QR/Bar Code and encrypt the contact information. Most allow first and last name to remain unencrypted. A few completely encrypt all data and allow no information to be displayed publicly.
It turns out that our registration program allows us to print a badge with a readable QR code that contains the name, company, mailing address, title, email address, telephone number, and registration type of our participants. Any number of free QR reader programs are available for IOS and Android devices that can decode, store, and export the contact information of a scanned badge. That said, we are in a position to suggest a preferred “free” app that is available for either Android or IOS devices:
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