Every unscanned card is revenue you cannot attribute.

The lost-leads cost nobody calculates

Take a typical B2B manufacturer exhibiting at a flagship industrial show. Booth cost: roughly $7,000 to $14,000 for a mid-size stand. Travel, stay and team-time: another $3,500 to $6,000. Total cost per show: in the region of $12,000 to $18,000. Output: 200 cards across three days. Cost per card: $60 to $90 just to put the rep in front of the prospect. If half those cards are never scanned, half the cost-per-card is wasted. The cost of not tracking sales leads is hiding in plain sight on every exhibition P&L. The B2B lead leakage cost is rarely calculated because the leads were never visible in the first place.

• $60–$90 cost per booth conversation — minimum, before product cost. Exhibition capture →
• ~50% of cards never enter the CRM — industry estimate. Pipeline reality →
• 5% of cards convert to design-in over 6–12 months. Conversion case →
• ~$18,000 average B2B mfg deal per design-in conversion. Attribution →

The number that will scare your CFO

A team scanning only half its exhibition cards is losing roughly $72,000 of attributable pipeline per show, assuming the conversion and deal-value averages hold. Run that across four exhibitions a year and you are leaving close to $290,000 on the floor, every year, invisibly. The hidden cost of lost leads is not what the CFO sees in the P&L; it is what the CFO will see if marketing ever produces a closed-loop attribution report and the number turns out lower than expected. VynDeal and CardToDeal close the leakage by ensuring every card is captured at source. See the costly follow-up problem for the related leakage downstream of capture.

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