How do you line up meetingsbefore an overseas show?

Once an overseas show or trip is confirmed, flights, hotels and the booth come first.

You might think meetings can wait until you are there. Sometimes a conversation does start with someone you meet on the floor.

Even so, we try to have at least a few meetings booked before we fly.

Arriving and starting to look for people is a different thing from moving around with people you have already agreed to meet.

When you know who you are meeting and when, you can read up on them beforehand and prepare what you want to cover. Booth shifts and routes between halls are far easier to plan too.

Here is how we prepare meetings ahead of a show.

We usually start one or two months out

A meeting takes thirty minutes. Getting that one meeting booked takes considerably longer.

First you find the companies worth meeting, then the right person inside each one. You send a message and wait, and if nothing comes back you follow up.

Even a reply does not settle the date. You still have to match calendars and agree a place.

So we usually start one to two months before departure.

At larger shows especially, the closer the dates get the faster the other side's diary fills. Starting two or three weeks out has often left us without time to wait for a reply or send a second message.

This is the order we work in

In practice these do not finish one at a time.

Replies arrive from earlier messages while you are still building the list, and you keep reaching out to new companies while settling one date.

Still, rather than sending volume from the start, we set out which company, which person and why before anything goes out.

The exhibitor list is not the whole picture

Preparation usually starts with the exhibitor list.

But exhibitors are not the only people on the floor.

Some companies attend without a booth, and procurement or partnership leads often come as visitors.

So alongside the exhibitor list we look for companies worth meeting in the host city during that week.

The 3D AI team we worked with at VivaTech 2026 researched 573 companies — exhibitors plus companies based in Paris.

At MWC 2026 the total came to 1,136.

The point was never to meet all of them.

We look broadly first, then decide who to actually contact.

At VivaTech, 291 of those 573 were contacted

The 3D AI team built their target list around where the product would actually be used.

Their strength was cutting the time between design and production.

So alongside fashion they looked at jewellery and eyewear, where the same problem shows up in the design and production process.

Once the companies were settled, we went back to find the right person in each.

A company name on its own is not something you can send a message to.

In the end 291 LinkedIn connection requests went out.

59 of those 291 accepted, and 4 replied.

Three of them became meetings in Paris.

On the numbers alone, 573 companies produced three meetings.

But those three were not chance encounters on the floor. They were meetings where the person had been found, contacted, and the date and place agreed before departure.

Booking even a few meetings in advance means looking at far more companies than most teams expect.

Which is why we start with some room rather than once the show is nearly here.

Where those 291 messages went from there is set out separately in Pre-show LinkedIn outreach, how we actually ran it.

Who you contact inside a company changes things

Settling on the company does not mean the message goes out.

Within the same company, business development, engineering and procurement are each looking at something different.

We work out who would actually be looking at the product, and write to that person.

This takes longer than it sounds.

A job title does not always tell you, and sometimes it means reading the LinkedIn profile and what they currently own.

So we treat finding the company and finding the person as two separate pieces of work.

When a reply comes, settle the date straight away

If someone replies with interest, we book the meeting as quickly as we can.

Leaving it a few days often means their diary fills first.

So we send a few possible dates, and once they pick one we settle the time and place in the same thread.

Ending with "see you at the show" means picking it up again on the day.

Where we can, we agree the day and time, and whether it is at their booth or somewhere else in the venue, before anyone travels.

Once meetings land, the on-site schedule follows

As meetings come in, the schedule on the ground gets built alongside them.

If you are running a booth, someone has to be on it, and in a large venue travel time counts.

At shows the size of MWC or CES, crossing the same venue takes a while.

If a morning meeting and the next one are far apart, there may be no room for anything in between.

So rather than simply adding meetings, we keep checking that the day is one you can actually get through.

It saves rebuilding the schedule on the morning itself.

People you contacted before are worth another look

Preparing for a show does not mean building the target list from scratch every time.

Business cards from the last trip, and people you connected with on LinkedIn but never spoke to again, all count.

So do companies you emailed once and never heard back from.

If time has passed, or the purpose of this trip is different, there is a reason to write again.

So before adding new targets we go through what is already there.

How far the conversation went, what was discussed, and whether there is a reason to meet this time.

What Scailout takes on before and after a show is set out on our exhibitions page.

Pricing and how we prepare are on the show preparation guide.

Choosing who to meet from an exhibitor list is covered in There are hundreds of exhibitors — who should you actually meet?.

We do not get every meeting booked before departure either.

But a handful of appointments already in the diary changes how the days on the floor run. So we spend the time beforehand finding the people and writing first.