Chase list

A chase list is a record of intent that went unfulfilled. Someone agreed to meet you at a specific time on a specific day, then did not arrive. The meeting failed, but the interest that produced the booking did not necessarily fail with it.

The list exists because this group is almost impossible to reconstruct after the fact. A no-show leaves no trace in any normal system. There is no badge scan, because nobody scanned a badge. There are no notes, because there was no conversation. Unless someone deliberately marked the meeting as missed at the time, the person simply vanishes.

A no-show is a stronger signal than most of the leads in your export. Walk-in traffic includes people browsing, students, competitors and anyone drawn in by the coffee. Someone who booked a slot did something harder: they gave you a commitment in advance.

• They already qualified themselves by agreeing to a meeting.
• Most no-shows are logistical, not a rejection — overrunning meetings, a delayed flight, a hall that takes twenty minutes to cross.
• They expect to hear from you, which makes the follow-up welcome rather than cold.
• Your competitors are not contacting them, because your competitors are not tracking them either.

No-show rates vary widely by show and by how the meetings were sourced. Meetings booked cold weeks in advance fail far more often than ones confirmed the morning of. Either way, on a stand running thirty booked meetings a double-digit failure rate means several real opportunities walking out of the hall unrecorded.

A name alone is not enough to write a credible follow-up. For each entry you want the context that makes the second approach specific.

• Who they are — name, company, role.
• When the meeting was, which lets you reference it precisely rather than vaguely.
• How it was booked — organiser matchmaking, your own outreach, a referral, or arranged on the floor earlier that day.
• What it was meant to be about, taken from whatever you knew going in.
• Which of your team was waiting for them, so the follow-up comes from the right person.
• Whether they rebooked or were seen later, because some no-shows are simply reschedules nobody recorded.

A chase list assembled on the Monday after the show is guesswork. Someone has to cross-reference a calendar against a scanner export and work out who is missing, and that reconstruction is unreliable enough that most teams never bother.

The list has to be built as it happens, which means marking a meeting as missed takes seconds and happens at the stand.

1. 1Every booked meeting is on a shared schedule the whole team can see.
2. 2When the slot passes, whoever was waiting marks it met or no-show. Two taps, no form.
3. 3The no-show drops onto the chase list automatically, carrying the booking context with it.
4. 4If the person turns up later, the record is updated rather than duplicated.
5. 5By the end of the show the list is finished, with no reconstruction required.

• Send within 48 hours, while the show is still a shared reference point.
• Lead with the booking, not the apology. "We had 14:30 on Wednesday in hall 4" tells them immediately who you are.
• Give them an easy out. Shows are chaotic and assuming they blew you off starts the conversation badly.
• Offer something concrete — a call in the next fortnight, or the thing the meeting was going to cover, sent now.
• Keep it to a few lines. This is a reschedule request, not a pitch.
• Chase twice, then stop. A second nudge a week later catches people who were still travelling; a third is noise.

Expect a better reply rate than your general post-show follow-up, for the simple reason that there is an obvious reason to be writing and an obvious thing to say.

Kept across several shows, the chase list stops being an admin task and becomes evidence. It tells you which shows have a booking problem, which sourcing routes produce meetings that actually happen, and whether scheduling slots at the end of the day is costing you.

A team that knows its no-show rate by show and by source can fix it — more confirmations the morning of, fewer back-to-back slots, meetings scheduled away from the keynote. A team that has never measured it assumes the problem is small, because the people who did not arrive left nothing behind to suggest otherwise.