Should You Bundle Lead Retrieval into the Stand Package or Sell It Separately?

Bundle lead retrieval into the stand package when you want every exhibitor scanning and the show judged on leads. Sell it separately when it is a revenue line you can defend and partial uptake does not worry you. The break-even is simple: the stand uplift equals the add-on price multiplied by the share of exhibitors who would buy.

What Do Exhibitors Pay When a Contractor Sells It?

At many large US trade shows, lead retrieval is sold by an official contractor through an order form in the exhibitor manual, priced per app licence or per rented device, with the price rising as the show gets closer. The 2026 ATD International Conference and Expo form is a tidy example: a first app licence, then a lower price for each additional licence, a separate rate for a handheld scanner, and three price windows labelled advance, regular and on-site (ATD 2026 lead retrieval order form). The same form says a licence covers one device and cannot be moved to another.

Two independent round-ups of 2026 order forms, one from Converve (August 2026, updated 11 November 2026) and one from Vendelux (September 2026, updated October 2026), show the same shape across contractors. The figures below appear in at least two of those three sources.

Read the last column first. The interesting question is less "what does it cost" than "whose line item is it". When a contractor sells lead retrieval, the contractor sets the price and the deadline, and the exhibitor's grumble still lands in your inbox. Converve's piece makes the same point from the organiser's side: hand the service to a third party and most of the revenue goes with it.

What Does Bundling Buy You?

Adoption. If lead retrieval is in the stand package, every exhibitor has it on day one and nobody is filling in an order form during build-up. That changes what you can say after the show, because your total scan count describes the whole floor and not only the exhibitors who bought a licence.

It also removes a line item exhibitors resent. A stand is already a long invoice: space, shell scheme, power, carpet, a chair that costs more to hire than to buy. Lead retrieval as one more extra, with a late-order surcharge, reads like a toll on the reason they came. Converve lists the absence of that line as a selling point at stand sign-up, and Vendelux's read of order forms notes at least one large show that puts it in the booth package (booth being the US word for stand).

The trade is that you give up a visible revenue line. Whether you really give up revenue is a different question, and the next two sections deal with it.

What Does Selling It Separately Buy You?

A revenue line with a name on it, and a signal. Exhibitors who pay for lead retrieval tend to be the ones with a follow-up process, so uptake is a rough measure of how many of your exhibitors came to sell. It also gives you something to put in a sponsor tier: "includes lead retrieval for the whole stand team" is a concrete benefit in a package otherwise made of logo sizes.

The trade is partial adoption. The risk sits with the smaller, first-time companies: if they skip it, they are the ones most likely to leave with a fishbowl of business cards and the feeling the show did not work. Those are also the renewals you can least afford to lose. If you sell separately, plan the reminder emails as carefully as the price. Our day minus 30 plan for getting exhibitors to use lead retrieval has a timetable.

How Do You Work Out the Break-even?

Multiply the add-on price by the share of exhibitors you expect to buy. The answer is how much you would need to add to every stand to earn the same money with everyone included.

A made-up exhibition with round numbers, so you can swap in your own:

• 120 exhibitors.

• Sold separately at 150 pounds, with 40% uptake: 48 exhibitors buy, which brings in 7,200 pounds.

• Bundled: 7,200 pounds divided by 120 exhibitors is 60 pounds on each stand.

So the choice in this example is between 48 exhibitors with lead retrieval and a 150 pound line item, or 120 exhibitors with it and stands that cost 60 pounds more. On a stand that already runs to four figures, 60 pounds is hard to spot. A separate 150 pound charge with a deadline is easy to spot and easy to resent.

The sum changes if a third party takes a cut of each licence, because then the separate route earns you less than the sticker price suggests. It also changes at very high uptake: if four in five exhibitors would buy anyway, the bundle uplift approaches the add-on price and bundling mostly saves admin.

What the sum leaves out is renewal. An exhibitor who goes home with 80 rated leads in a spreadsheet rebooks more readily than one who goes home with a hunch, and no formula on this page captures that.

How Does This Work on eventcloud?

Lead retrieval comes with every seat: exhibitors scan attendees with their own phones, rate and qualify each lead, and export their leads to Excel. No charge from us per scanner or per lead. You decide whether exhibitors get it with their pass or buy it at checkout for a price you set.

If you sell it, it is a per-attendee extra at checkout, and the money settles into your own Stripe account with the rest of your registration revenue (Stripe's own processing fee still applies). If you include it, there is nothing for the exhibitor to order. In both cases reps scan the QR code on each attendee's badge or in their event app, rate each lead from 1 to 5, answer up to 10 questions they wrote themselves, add notes, and keep scanning through a signal drop. Each rep gets a leads email the morning after.

You see totals across the show, and each rep's leads stay with that rep. For how exhibitor and staff passes fit around this, see eventcloud for trade shows and exhibitions. Coming soon: CRM sync for Salesforce, HubSpot and Dynamics. Need leads to land in a CRM for your exhibitors? Tell us which one they use.

What Should You Tell Attendees About Scanning?

That a scan is not consent, in whatever words suit your show. Bundling means more scanning, so the wording on your registration form matters more, not less. Say what an exhibitor receives when they scan a badge and what they may do with it, and keep marketing permission as a separate question the attendee answers for themselves.

Tell exhibitors the same thing in the stand confirmation: a scan records that a conversation happened and gives them the details to follow it up. It is not a newsletter sign-up. The legal detail for UK and EU shows is in our guide to badge scanning under GDPR and PECR.

Which Should You Choose?

Three questions settle most cases.

1. Is your show sold on leads? If your sales deck promises buyers on the floor, bundle. You want every exhibitor able to count them.

2. Who are your exhibitors? A floor of first-timers and small companies gains most from bundling. A floor of large brands with their own capture tools may shrug either way.

3. Can you price the stand to cover it? Run the break-even with your own numbers. If the uplift per stand is small next to the stand price, the separate line item is costing you goodwill for no gain.

Whichever way it falls, write the decision into one sentence and put it in the stand confirmation email: "Lead retrieval is included for every member of your stand team" or "Lead retrieval is available when your team registers". Then check, two weeks before doors, how many stand teams have registered at all.