ISE Barcelona: lead capture without the vendor portal

The problem

Trade shows are where B2B leads go to die. The usual setup: you rent the venue's lead retrieval scanners, your team taps badges for three days, and sometime the following week someone exports a CSV. By then the context is gone. Nobody remembers which conversation belonged to which brand, follow-up goes out late and generic, and attribution becomes a guess. The leads technically exist. The value mostly doesn't.

ISE Barcelona 2026 was our group's biggest event of the year, with four brands and a partner programme represented on one stand. A pile of anonymous badge taps in a vendor portal was not going to cut it.

What I built

A custom lead capture system, built by me, running live on the stand. The flow: scan the visitor's badge QR code, or photograph a badge or business card and let OCR pull the details. The contact then syncs straight into HubSpot in real time, with the event source, the brand context of the conversation and the campaign attribution already attached. No vendor portal in the middle. No export step. No waiting.

I kept the capture flow deliberately simple, because the people using it were busy working a stand, not testing software. A few seconds per lead, then back to the conversation.

The outcome

Leads landed in the CRM the moment they were captured, so follow-up could begin while the show was still running rather than a week after everyone had flown home. Attribution survived contact with reality: we knew exactly which contacts came from the event, and the brand tagging meant each one routed to the right follow-up rather than a one-size-fits-nobody email. And the team owned the whole pipeline, badge to CRM record, instead of renting it back from an events vendor.

The quieter outcome is the one I value most. Sales opened HubSpot during the show and found fresh, complete records waiting. That is what marketing infrastructure is for.

The stack

• HubSpot CRM and API, for live contact sync and attribution properties
• Badge QR scanning
• OCR pipeline for badges and business cards
• Custom-built capture app, architecture described generically here by design