Capturing Leads at the Booth: Every Method

Updated October 9, 2026·Capturing Leads·Share on X

The booth is loud, fast, and the wifi is unreliable. Conference Hero gives you several ways to capture a lead so you can pick whatever fits the moment, and it keeps working when the connection drops. Every capture files a lead against the conference and scores it against the conference's Ideal Customer Profile.

Open the capture page for a conference (the same one your booth QR code points to) or use the scanner from the conference detail page.

Quick entry

Type the essentials into a short form: name, company, title, email, phone, and a note. Fastest when you are having a real conversation and just want the key details down. Quick entry works one-handed on a phone.

Badge scan

Scan the attendee's badge to pull their details in. Badge scans often carry little more than a name and company; enrichment fills in the title and company details, and the lead is re-scored when it does.

Business card photo (OCR)

Snap a photo of a business card and let optical character recognition read the name, company, title, email, and phone into a lead. Fix anything the OCR misreads before saving. The card photo capture itself needs a connection to run OCR, but the save step is offline-safe.

Voice capture

When your hands are full and the line is long, talk. Voice capture records a short note, sends it to Deepgram for transcription, then has Claude pull structured lead fields out of what you said: name, company, title, email, phone, and notes. You speak a sentence like "Just met Dana Ruiz, VP Marketing at Northwind, wants a demo next week," and it becomes a filled-in lead for you to check before saving.

Recordings can run up to 10 minutes. If your workspace has no voice transcription configured, you can still type the note by hand.

Adding a lead by hand

Back at your desk, click Add Lead on the Leads page. Fill in the name, company and whatever else you know.

Only have their LinkedIn profile? Paste the link and click Fill from LinkedIn. Conference Hero looks the person up and fills in their name, title, company, location and company details, plus their email when it's verified. It only fills empty fields, and the filled ones are highlighted so you can check them before saving. If they're already one of your leads, you get a link to open them instead, and no credit is used. A match uses one enrichment credit, and saving the lead doesn't use another. The Note box at the bottom saves to the lead's Notes tab with your name and the time, the same as a note added later. Spaces typed before or after a name, email or company are removed when you save. Once the lead is added, it opens so you can keep working on it.

Offline capture queue

Conference wifi fails at the worst possible moment. The capture surfaces keep working offline: quick entry, badge scan, card capture (the save step), the event landing page, and voice capture all queue on the device when there is no connection. The moment you reconnect, queued captures replay automatically. An offline badge shows the pending count so you know nothing is lost.

Voice notes captured offline are transcribed and turned into leads automatically when they sync, since nobody is watching the screen at that point. Check them afterwards in the Leads list.

Filling in email and LinkedIn

A badge often gives you just a name and a company. When a new lead is missing an email or LinkedIn profile, Conference Hero looks the person up and fills in what it finds: email, LinkedIn, and job title. It never overwrites anything you typed.

We only add an email once its mailbox has been verified. If we find the person but can't verify their email, you still get their LinkedIn profile and title, and the email stays empty. That keeps bounced emails from hurting your mailbox's sender reputation.

Each lead we find data for uses one enrichment credit. A lookup that finds nothing is free. You can also click Enrich on a lead to run the lookup by hand, or turn automatic lookups off under Settings.

If nothing was found because of a typo, just fix the lead's name, company or LinkedIn link. Conference Hero looks the person up again with the corrected details, up to three times per lead. HubSpot contacts that already have an email aren't looked up.

A LinkedIn profile link is the most precise way to find someone. When a lead has one, the lookup goes by that link alone. If a lead's first lookup found nothing and you add their LinkedIn link later, Enrich shows up again so you can try with it.

Lead temperature

Every lead carries a temperature that tells your team how urgent the follow-up is:

Hot - ready to talk now.
Warm - interested, needs nurturing.
Cold - early stage, long-term pipeline.

Temperature comes from the lead score and always matches it. If you already know how the conversation went, tap Hot, Warm, or Cold before you save the lead on the capture page or in the iOS app. That sets the score in that band (Hot 85, Warm 55, Cold 20). Leave it empty and your Ideal Customer Profile scores the lead.

After capture, change the score on the lead and the temperature follows. It drives how follow-up gets prioritized in AI campaigns.