After our fourth trade show in a year, I pulled the numbers on what happened to every lead we scanned. Forty percent had no logged touch within a week. Not because anyone dropped the ball on purpose, but because our sales reps assumed marketing was working the list, and marketing assumed sales had already called the hot ones. Nobody owned it, so nobody was accountable for it, and that gap cost us more pipeline than any follow-up script ever would.
We'd already tried fixing this with process: lead scoring, a routing rule, a shared spreadsheet. It worked for one show. By the third, reps were back to cherry-picking the leads that looked easiest and marketing was back to sending generic nurture emails to everyone else. The problem wasn't the process. The problem was that we were asking two teams with two different jobs to jointly own a task that belonged to neither of them full time.
The volume signal that means it's time for a dedicated owner
Splitting follow-up between sales and marketing works fine when you're doing one or two shows a year and walking away with a few hundred scans. It stops working somewhere around three or more events a year, or any single show that generates more than 300-400 leads in a three-day window. Below that line, a shared playbook with clear scoring rules is enough. Above it, you're generating more leads in 72 hours than either team can absorb into their existing workload without something breaking, and what breaks first is always follow-up speed on the middle tier of leads — not hot, not cold, but genuinely worth a conversation.
The tell isn't the lead count by itself. It's what happens to your CRM in the two weeks after a show. If you're seeing a spike in "attempted contact, no response" logged by reps who are also carrying a full quota of non-event pipeline, that's your signal. Those reps aren't failing. They're doing the math on where their commission actually comes from, and a stack of unqualified booth scans loses every time against a warm inbound demo request.
What this role actually is, and what it isn't
This is not an SDR job and it's not an events coordinator job, and hiring for either title usually gets you the wrong person. An SDR hired for this will burn through the list fast and treat it like any other outbound queue, missing the context of what happened at the booth. An events coordinator will nail the logistics and swag orders but won't have the sales instinct to know which conversation is worth a phone call versus an email.
The person you actually want owns the full loop: they were either at the booth or debriefed the reps who were, they score and route leads same-day, they run the follow-up cadence personally on the leads that don't clearly belong to a named account owner, and they report back on what converted so the next show's targeting improves. Think of it as a hybrid of a junior AE and a growth marketer, reporting to whichever leader — sales or marketing — actually owns the events budget at your company.
Four questions that predict whether a candidate can do this job
I run every candidate for this role through the same four questions now, after making a bad hire on this exact role once and learning what I should have asked.
First: "Walk me through what you'd do in the 48 hours after a show ends." I'm listening for a specific sequence — segmenting leads same day, personalizing the first message with a detail from the actual conversation at the booth, and having a clear rule for what happens to leads nobody remembers talking to. A vague answer about "sending a follow-up email" is a pass, not a hire.
Second: "Tell me about a time you had to chase a lead that had gone cold, and it worked." I want the specific angle they used to re-open the conversation, not a generic persistence story. Anyone can say they followed up five times. I want to know what the fifth message actually said that the first four didn't.
Third: "How would you decide which leads you personally work versus which ones you hand to an account owner?" This tells you whether they think in terms of ownership and triage, or whether they'll just work the whole list themselves and burn out by the second show. The right answer involves a rule, not a gut feeling.
Fourth, and this is the one that separates good candidates from great ones: "What would you track to know, within two weeks, whether this show's follow-up worked, before any of it turns into revenue?" Closed-won takes months to show up. If they can't name a leading indicator — reply rate on first touch, meetings booked within 14 days, whatever it is — they'll be flying blind until the quarterly numbers come in, and by then it's too late to fix the next show.
The red flag that matters more than experience
The biggest red flag isn't a thin resume. It's a candidate who talks entirely about outreach volume and cadence tools without once mentioning what they'd actually say differently to a lead who talked to you for four minutes at the booth versus one who just scanned a badge for the tote bag. This role lives or dies on message quality, not message quantity, and a candidate who can't tell you how they'd personalize a follow-up beyond "hi, saw you at our booth" will produce the same generic nurture emails that got you into this problem in the first place.
If you're running three or more shows a year and your CRM shows the same pattern mine did — a pile of "attempted, no response" leads sitting under reps who are busy elsewhere — stop trying to fix it with another routing rule. Write the job description around ownership of the full loop, run these four questions on your next round of candidates, and hire for judgment on message quality over experience with any particular tool.