What to Do With Your Buyer Contacts After SIAL Paris

SIAL Paris closes on Wednesday 21 October. By the time your team is home, the contacts from the show are spread across business cards in three bags, photos on four phones, a notebook, a few WhatsApp chats started on the stand and some emails that arrived during the week. Each of those pieces is useful. Together, unsorted, they are a liability: the buyer who asked for a price is mixed in with the packaging salesman, and two colleagues are about to write to the same importer.

This article is about the data work between the show and the first follow up message. It is not glamorous, but it decides whether the follow up reaches the right person, through the right channel, from the right colleague. Plan for a few hours of focused work on Thursday 22 October, the first working day after the show.

Gather every source before you clean anything

Do not start typing contacts into a CRM one by one as they come to hand. First get everything into one place, then clean it in one pass. Cleaning in batches is faster and catches duplicates that one-by-one entry misses.

Ask everyone who worked the stand for:

• Business cards, front and back. Handwritten notes on the back are often the most valuable part.
• Phone photos of cards, notes and product requests.
• Notebook pages and any notes written on brochures or order forms.
• WhatsApp chats started during the show. Many buyers share a number by sending a message on the spot; those numbers exist only on one person’s phone.
• Emails received during the show from visitors who wrote ahead of meeting you.
• Meeting lists for appointments booked before the show, including people who did not turn up.
• Lists from the organiser or any lead tool you used, exported in whatever format it allows.

Put the raw material in one shared folder and create one spreadsheet. Each source becomes rows in that sheet, with a column recording where the row came from (card, photo, WhatsApp, meeting list). That source column helps later when two rows disagree.

Standardise and clean the rows

Two steps: agree the format, then fix every row against it.

Set one standard for every row

Before entering anything, fix the columns and the format rules. A sheet where one person writes “UAE”, another “United Arab Emirates” and a third “Dubai” cannot be filtered reliably.

Keep “Country” (where they are) separate from “Markets supplied” (where they sell). A trader based in Dubai who supplies East Africa needs a different follow up from a Dubai retailer.

Clean the data in one pass

Work through the sheet top to bottom. Typical problems from a food show and how to handle them:

• Standardise country names and business types against your fixed lists.
• Put every phone number in international format.
• Lowercase every email and remove spaces and trailing full stops.
• Fill the “Products of interest” column using your own product names, so you can filter by product later.
• Mark rows with missing email or phone, rather than deleting them.

Deduplicate without losing history

At a five-day show, the same buyer often appears more than once: met by two colleagues on different days, already in your database from last year, or sending a WhatsApp message and dropping a card.

Sort the sheet by email, then by phone number, then by company name, and look at neighbouring rows. Apply three rules:

1. Same person, two rows: merge into one row. Keep the most complete contact details, and combine the notes with initials and dates, so you know who heard what.
2. Same company, different people: keep both rows. A purchasing manager and a quality manager from the same importer need different messages, and you may want to send the specification to one and the price to the other. Make sure both have the same owner.
3. Already a buyer of yours: do not overwrite their existing record with show data. Add the show as a tag or note on the existing record and pass it to the person who already handles that account. A current customer who visited your stand needs an account conversation, not a “nice to meet you” sequence.

Keep the original raw sheet untouched in the shared folder. If a merge goes wrong, you can go back.

Enrich only what you will use

It is tempting to research every contact. Spend the time in proportion to the priority:

• A leads (around 10 minutes each): check the website. What do they sell, under which brands, in which markets? Do they already sell a product like yours, and from which origin? Do they do private label? Note anything that changes your first message.
• B leads (2 to 3 minutes each): confirm business type and the markets they supply from the website.
• C leads: no research. Their reply, if it comes, will tell you more than research would.

Write enrichment into the notes column in plain language: “Imports Turkish and Iranian dried fruit, own brand in Danish supermarkets, no organic range yet.” That sentence is what the person writing the follow up needs.

Check permission before you message

Two separate questions apply: may you send commercial email to this person, and may you send them WhatsApp messages through the WhatsApp Business Platform. This is not legal advice, and rules differ by country, but the regulators and platforms publish the basics.

Email. France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, says prior consent is not always required for B2B prospecting by email if the message relates to the professional activity of the person contacted, the person is told where their data came from and the purpose of the message, and they can easily object to receiving further messages. In practice for show contacts: write to them about products relevant to their job, say you met at SIAL Paris, and give them a simple way to say no more messages. Rules in the buyer’s own country may differ.

WhatsApp. Meta’s opt-in guidance for the WhatsApp Business Platform says businesses must clearly state that a person is opting in to receive messages from the business over WhatsApp, must state the business name, and must comply with applicable law. A buyer who said on the stand “yes, send it on WhatsApp” after you asked has given you that, so record it: “Agreed on stand, 19 Oct, [colleague’s name]”. If you have only a number from a card and no conversation about WhatsApp, start by email and ask.

• Fill the WhatsApp permission column for every row: yes (with how and when), no, or not asked.
• Keep a “do not contact” list for anyone who asks to be removed, and check it before each campaign.

Categorise with tags you will actually filter by

Tags are only useful if they answer questions you will ask later. Keep the set small and agreed in advance.

Avoid one-off tags such as “met Tuesday afternoon” or “nice guy from Lyon”. Put that in notes. For a deeper look at how tags and fields divide the work in a buyer database, see how to build an international buyer CRM.

Assign one owner per buyer

Every A and B buyer needs exactly one person responsible for the next message. Without that, two things happen: two colleagues send different prices to the same importer, or each assumes the other has written and nobody does.

Simple rules work best:

• The person who had the conversation owns the buyer, unless the market belongs to someone else.
• Split by language where possible: a French-speaking colleague for buyers from France, Belgium and North Africa, for example.
• Existing customers stay with their current account owner.
• If ownership changes, the new owner reads all the notes and mentions the conversation at the show in the first message.

Contacts who are not buyers

Every show produces contacts who will never buy your product. Do not put them in the buyer follow up, where they make your numbers misleading and receive messages that do not apply to them. Do not throw them away either.

The last row matters. A biscuit manufacturer exhibiting in another sector may be a better lead for your walnuts than half the visitors who stopped at your stand.

Import into your CRM or master list

Once the sheet is clean, the import is quick:

• Remove the X rows into their own files.
• Check the column headers match what your CRM expects.
• Import ten rows first and check that names, countries and phone numbers landed in the right fields.
• Import the rest.
• Search for three or four buyers you know were duplicates and confirm they appear once.
• Filter by priority A and check every row has an owner.

Then the follow up can start. The phase-by-phase tasks for the month ahead are in the SIAL Paris exhibitor follow up checklist, and the general approach in our 30-day trade show follow up guide.

In Double Export: when you import a CSV or Excel file, duplicate emails and phone numbers are caught and an existing buyer is never overwritten. Tags such as “SIAL Paris 2026” act as campaign audiences, so buyers you tag later are included automatically.

How to do this in Double Export

Double Export does not scan business cards or badges, so the gathering and cleaning above happen in a spreadsheet first. From there:

• Import the cleaned sheet into the export CRM. Each buyer record holds company, contact person, country, email, mobile, WhatsApp, website, address, tags and notes, and you can search by company, contact, email or phone and filter by country and tag.
• Use tags for source, priority, business type, product interest and status, as in the table above. The export lead management page shows how leads move from first contact to order using tags and order stages.
• Record permission on each buyer: buyers with WhatsApp or email permission switched off are left out of campaigns automatically.
• When the list is ready, start the follow up for each tag from the trade show lead management workflow, by WhatsApp sequence or email sequence.

Plan details are on the pricing page.