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If you’re a founder, CEO or CRO of a company with around 40 people or more, you’re unlikely to be the one standing on the stand. Your team will be. But the event is still your investment: the fee, the travel, the time away from the business and the people you send. So the most important question isn’t how good the stand looks. It’s whether your ideal customers will actually be there, and whether your team is ready for them. Both come down to preparation, and because it’s your staff who will be at the event, that preparation needs someone who owns it.
I recently attended an event and asked a number of different people at stands, including heads of departments, how they prepared for the stand. They predominantly focused on the swag and making sure that the design is ready, but in terms of inviting their potential clients, hardly any of them mentioned that. And not many of them understood who would be at the event.
You can have a great stand, a sharp pitch and a brilliant giveaway. If your ICP isn’t walking past it, none of that counts. An event won’t hand you your ideal customers. You have to invite them, and you need to start early.
Before anyone books a stand or buys a ticket, your team should be able to describe your ICP in a sentence. If they can’t, an event will just look like a crowd.
Get specific about three things:
Then ask the honest question: will these people actually be at this event? If you can’t say yes with confidence, find out before you commit the budget. Ask the organisers who attended last time, and look at the speaker line-up and past exhibitors.
Events fall through the gaps when everyone is involved and nobody owns them. Before you book, name one person who is responsible for the event from start to finish.
That person doesn’t need to be on the stand, but they do need the time and the authority to:
This often sits best with a sales or marketing leader, but a clear name matters more than a job title. Your role is to back them: agree what the event needs to achieve, give them months rather than weeks, and ask what they learned afterwards.
Most events are booked months in advance, which means you have months to put your presence in front of your ICP. Use them.
A single post or email a few days before the event is far too late. Very often the algorithm won’t show your post to the people you most want to reach, and even when it does, a few days’ notice isn’t enough for a busy leader to plan around.
Giving people enough time to see your messaging is what makes the difference. Announce that you’re exhibiting as soon as you’ve booked, then keep showing up. Share why you’re going, what you’ll be talking about and who you’re hoping to meet, so that by the time the event arrives your ICP has seen you more than once.
Ask your event owner to plan this as a schedule of posts and messages that runs from the day you book, not a one-off announcement.
Posting isn’t enough on its own, so message your ICP directly too. Don’t assume they’ll find you on the floor, and don’t leave it to the event’s own marketing.
A short, personal message should cover:
Make it about them, not you. “I’ll be at stand 12” is an announcement. “I’ll be there to talk about the hiring challenges teams like yours are facing right now” is an invitation.
Send the first message well ahead and follow up as the date gets closer. If they were already going, they now know where to find you. If they were on the fence, you’ve given them a reason to say yes.
Don’t leave this to the company page alone. Ask the people who will be on the stand to message their own contacts and target accounts too, because a personal message from a named person lands very differently from a company announcement.
Many events share an attendee list, an event app or a speaker line-up. Use whatever you’re given. Look at who has registered, mark the people and companies that match your ICP, and put them at the top of a shortlist. More often than not, the app and attendee list is shared just a few days prior to the event, which makes it more difficult to engage with the attendees.
If you already keep a target list of companies, cross-check it against the attendees. Anyone who appears on both is someone to message personally before the day.
A shortlist turns a busy room into a plan. You know who you’re hoping to see, you can keep in touch with them as the event approaches, and you’re not relying on luck to put the right people in front of you.
Your event owner should build the shortlist and share it with everyone who will be on the stand, so the whole team knows who they’re hoping to meet.
Getting your ICP to the event is half the job. The other half is who they meet when they arrive. A great turnout won’t help if the people on your stand are flat, distracted or reading from a script.
Your event owner should choose who goes, deliberately, rather than sending whoever happens to be free that week. Look for people who:
That may mean taking your best conversationalists away from their day-to-day work for a few days, so be ready to back the decision.
Your staff will be talking to people on your behalf, so they need to arrive knowing what you know. Your event owner should run a briefing before the event that covers:
If you can, let them practise the opening questions out loud before the day.
The event is the start of the conversation, not the end. Before the day, agree who follows up with whom, what they’ll send, when it will go out and where it will be logged. Your event owner should make sure it happens.
Draft a short message the team can personalise in a couple of minutes, and block out time in their diaries for the days after the event. Leads go cold quickly, and the people you met will have plenty of other things competing for their attention once they’re back at their desks.
I’ve recently started reading The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, and I’d recommend it to any founder, CEO or CRO whose team goes to events, and to the people they send. It’s full of practical thinking on identifying and addressing your ICP, and I’ve found it especially useful for the work that happens before an event.
Its best-known idea is the “Dream 100”: choose the small group of ideal buyers who matter most to your business, then pursue them with focus and persistence rather than sending one message to everyone. That’s the same logic behind starting months ahead. One post rarely lands, but steady, personal contact over time gives your ICP a reason to turn up and a reason to come and find you.
The book also covers trade shows as part of its approach to marketing, so it’s worth reading before you book your next one, not after.
Finding your ICP at an event is less about what happens on the day and more about what you do before it. Make one person responsible, know who you’re looking for, make sure they’re coming, start telling them months ahead, give them a reason to find you, put engaging salespeople on the stand and make sure they arrive prepared.
Get that right and the day itself becomes much simpler: you’re having conversations with the people you came to meet.
Emilia Kruszewska is the founder of RecruitHer. A former educator and EdTech sales leader, she is now a recruiter and talent strategist working at the intersection of education and EdTech. She partners with founders and hiring managers to build high-impact teams, and she previously built and sold an education business after seven years.
RecruitHer is a specialist EdTech and eLearning recruitment agency based in the UK, working with organisations across Europe and globally. We hire mid-level to leadership talent across sales, customer success, product and marketing.
We do the sifting, screening and interviewing for hiring managers, so you only meet candidates who fit. We also use psychological assessments, completed by both the hiring manager and the candidate, to gauge whether someone will thrive beyond their first 6 months. Once a hire starts, we check in every four weeks with both the candidate and the hiring manager, and every placement is backed by a guarantee of up to 12 months.
ICP stands for ideal customer profile. It describes the type of person and company you most want to work with: their role, their seniority, the kind of company they work for, the problem you solve for them and where they are based.
An event is only as valuable as the people who walk past your stand. If your ICP isn’t there, even a great stand, a sharp pitch and a brilliant giveaway won’t lead to the conversations you came for.
As soon as you’ve booked. Most events are booked months in advance, and a single post or email a few days before is far too late. The algorithm often won’t show your post to the people you most want to reach, so give them enough time to see your messaging more than once.
That’s common, and it makes it harder to engage with attendees in time. So don’t wait for it. Message your ICP directly from the day you book, then use the attendee list when it arrives to cross-check against your target list and build a shortlist.
One named person. They don’t need to be on the stand, but they do need the time and the authority to confirm your ICP, run the pre-event messaging, build the attendee shortlist, choose and brief the stand team and make sure the follow-up happens. This often sits best with a sales or marketing leader, but a clear name matters more than a job title.
Run a briefing before the event that covers who your ICP is, who’s attending, a few opening questions, what a good conversation looks like, what the stand should communicate and how to capture details afterwards. If you can, let your team practise the opening questions out loud before the day.
Look for people who are naturally curious, ask good questions and listen to the answers, can explain what you do and who it’s for in a sentence or two, and have the energy to stay switched on for a full day.
Yes. RecruitHer specialises in EdTech and education, hiring mid-level to leadership talent across sales, customer success, product and marketing.
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