Trade fair success is decided eight weeks earlier — and for this autumn’s payment dates the window is nearly shut

What happened

On 10 September 2026 Vertriebszeitung published a practitioner’s piece on trade fair preparation whose thesis is in the title: what happens at a trade fair is decided eight weeks earlier. The author Maximilian Hedt describes the order in which trade fair appearances work in B2B — first select target customers, then identify contacts, then initiate conversations, and only a few weeks before the date make the actual appointments. His core argument applies explicitly with and without a stand of your own: the stand only makes the whole thing more expensive and the preparation correspondingly more important. Anyone who turns up without arranged appointments is competing on site with diaries that filled up long ago. For the payments industry the timing of the piece is convenient: according to the organiser, the ibi Zahlungsverkehrsforum takes place on 28 and 29 October 2026 in Frankfurt, and EuroCIS in Düsseldorf from 16 to 18 February 2027.

Who it affects

Every sales team heading to events in the fourth quarter — payment network operators (Netzbetreiber), till dealers, payment service providers, software vendors. Equally sales leaders who carry trade fair budgets in the marketing pot and then wonder at the year’s end about the yield. And everyone currently booking stand space for 2027 without having planned the staff hours that come first.

Assessment

The sentence sounds banal and is still ignored every year, because it is uncomfortable: a trade fair is not a channel where you find customers, it is one where you redeem appointments. The costs arise visibly — space, build-up, staff, hotel — and sit neatly in a budget line. The work that decides the return arises invisibly: build the list, research the contacts, call, follow up, confirm appointments. Those hours are rarely budgeted by anyone, and so in the end nobody does them. Anyone in payment sales who has ever stood at a well-built stand waiting for passing trade knows the result.

For the coming weeks that produces a fairly clear calculation. From today it is just under seven weeks to the ibi forum at the end of October — so the window is almost shut, but only almost: start your outreach this week and you will still get appointments; wait until early October and you will travel there and have a look around. For EuroCIS in February, by contrast, the honest starting point is around the turn of the year, in other words right in the middle of the period when nobody in retail picks up the phone and your own people take their holidays. That is exactly why the target customer list for February has to be created now and not in January. This is not a trade fair question, it is the same discipline as in day-to-day business: the diary four weeks from now is filled by the contacts that happen today.

What to do now

1. For every booked event, create a target customer list with names — including contact person, a reason for the conversation and the date on which outreach starts.
2. Budget the preparation hours before the fair just as you budget the stand costs, and assign them to a person. Without a name next to it, it does not happen.
3. For EuroCIS in February 2027, build the list now and start the outreach in the first week of January at the latest — the window falls exactly in the period when, in experience, nobody gets started.