Are you leaving money on the trade show floor?

There are many strategies to consider when exhibiting. A recent potential client has two meeting rooms designed into their large trade show display. They are measuring the success of the show on how many meetings they have - period. These meetings are supposed to all be booked before the show starts.

If they don't book all of the meetings they want, are they going to skip the show because they know it's a failure? If all you care about are the sales meetings, why not just rent a hospitality suite? That is certainly a considerably smaller budget than exhibiting.

Having sales meetings is a great idea at shows. However, they have no strategy for stopping attendees, qualifying them, collecting contact information from attendees or a system for following up with the ones that stumble into the booth looking for information.

This strategy is like only picking one food from the buffet line. I know bad analogy, what if I'm on a diet? Yeah, but I've never heard of a sales diet before!

When you examine your strategy, are you leaving money on the trade show floor?  What have you seen that shows people leaving money on the trade show floor?