How to work an oil and gas trade show floor in one day

The first time I walked into a big energy show I did what most people do. I started at the door nearest the coffee, turned left, and drifted. By two in the afternoon my feet hurt, my bag was full of brochures I would never read, and I had not reached the hall where the one supplier I actually needed was standing. I left with a pen, a stress ball shaped like an oil drop and no useful conversation.

Large oil and gas shows run in Calgary, Houston, Aberdeen, Abu Dhabi and other energy cities, and they share a shape: indoor halls packed with booths, an outdoor area for heavy equipment, a few small theatres for vendor talks, and a technical conference running alongside. Most visitors get one day. This piece is about spending that day well. None of it depends on which show you attend.

Decide what the day is for

Before you think about the floor, write down why you are going. One sentence each, no more than three. It sounds fussy, but it changes everything you do once you are inside.

Typical reasons look like this:

• Find two or three suppliers for a specific need, such as a new pump package, a gas detection system or a replacement for a valve line you are tired of rebuilding.
• See equipment you have only read about, at full size, and ask the people who build it how it fails.
• Learn what is new in one narrow area, like pipeline inspection tools or drilling fluids.
• Meet people. Students and career changers often go mainly to talk to employers, training providers and associations.

If you cannot name a reason, the show will still be interesting, but you will spend the day as a tourist. That is fine, as long as you know it.

Map the halls before you arrive

Every big show publishes a floor plan and an exhibitor search some weeks ahead, usually on its own website and in a phone app. Spend an evening with it. This is the single most useful hour of the whole exercise.

Here is how I do it:

1. Search the exhibitor list by product category for each of your goals. Note the company and its hall and booth location.
2. Mark those booths on the map. Paper is fine. A screenshot with circles drawn on it is fine.
3. Group the marks by hall. You will usually find they cluster in two or three areas, because organizers tend to put similar suppliers near each other.
4. Find the outdoor equipment area and the showcase theatres on the map, and note how far they are from your clusters. At a large venue the walk between halls can take ten minutes or more once the aisles are crowded.
5. Pick a route that covers your clusters in one loop with no backtracking.

A floor map tells you a lot about how the industry is organized, too. Our guide to reading an exhibition floor goes through the usual layout and why the big rig and compression packages tend to end up outside.

Choose two or three talks, not ten

Most shows run short vendor presentations on small stages in the halls, usually well under an hour. Some are pure sales pitches. Others are the best free technical teaching you will get all year, because the engineer giving the talk has spent months on the subject and wants you to understand it.

Read the schedule and pick no more than three. More than that and the day becomes a dash between stages. Good signs in a talk listing:

• A specific problem in the title ("reducing gas lift instability in older wells") rather than a slogan.
• A named presenter with an engineering, operations or field role.
• A case from an operating site, even if the operator is not named.

There is more on what these sessions are and how to get value from them in our piece on showcase theatres on the show floor.

A sample plan for one day

This is an illustrative plan for a visitor with three goals (find a gas detection supplier, compare two pipe coating systems, see a working drilling rig package outside). The times are round numbers, not any real show's schedule. Adjust for opening hours and your own pace.

Notice what is not on the plan: a full lap of every hall. You will walk past most booths. That is the point.

What to ask at a booth

The person in the booth may be a salesperson, an application engineer, a product manager or someone from the plant who was sent along for the week. You want to get to the second or third of those quickly. A polite way to do it is to ask a question a salesperson would struggle with.

Questions that work well for equipment:

• "Where does this usually fail in the field, and what does a rebuild involve?"
• "What does it need from my site: power, air, foundation, space for maintenance?"
• "Who services it in my region, and how long does a part take to arrive?"
• "Which standards or certifications does it carry for the places I work?"
• "Can you put me in touch with someone running one now?"

For services and software:

• "What does the first month look like after we sign?"
• "What data do you need from us, and in what form?"
• "What is the most common reason customers stop using it?"

Watch how people answer. A good vendor will tell you where the product is weak, because they would rather lose your order than lose your trust when it breaks. Vague answers and a quick pivot to a brochure tell you something too.

Collect less, record more

Brochures are heavy and mostly online anyway. When a booth offers you one, ask instead for the name and email of the person who can answer technical questions, and photograph the product nameplate or data sheet if they allow it.

Then take notes right away. I use the same four lines for every booth:

• Company and person, with the badge scan or business card.
• What they offered that matched one of my goals.
• One thing I did not know before.
• The next step, with a date ("send drawings by Friday", "ask for reference site").

Three minutes per booth. If you leave it until the hotel at night, the booths blur together, and you will not remember which of two very similar pumps had the better seal design.

A note on badge scanning: when an exhibitor scans your badge, they get your contact details and you will hear from them. That is usually welcome for suppliers on your list. For the booth that gave you a free tote bag, think before you hold out your lanyard.

Outdoor equipment areas

The outdoor area is where full-size gear sits: rig components, pump trucks, compressor packages, pipe handling equipment, sometimes whole service units you can walk around. It is the closest most office staff and students will get to a working site.

Treat it like a site. Wear real shoes with a closed toe, not dress shoes. Stay out of roped areas, do not climb on equipment unless a staff member invites you onto a fixed platform, and keep clear of anything being moved. If you are new to the equipment, it helps to read up first. Our piece on how a land drilling rig works names most of the parts you will be looking at.

Practical things that save the day

• Shoes matter more than clothes. A day on the floor of a large show means many kilometres of walking on concrete.
• Carry water and a snack. Food lines at lunch can eat half an hour.
• Charge your phone fully and bring a small battery. Show apps, maps and badge scans all drain it.
• Bring a light bag you can carry on one shoulder for eight hours.
• Keep business cards in one pocket and the cards you collect in another.
• Check whether your badge covers the conference sessions or only the floor before you plan around a talk.

We keep a fuller list in the visitor checklist, including what to sort out the week before.

Follow up within a week

The show is only half the work. The other half happens at your desk the following week, and most visitors skip it.

Within two or three working days, sort your notes into three piles: act now, keep warm, and drop. For the act-now pile, send a short email to the person you met, mention one specific thing from your conversation so they can place you, and ask for the next step you wrote down. For keep-warm, a short note saying you may be in touch later is enough.

Then write a one-page summary for your manager or yourself: what you went for, what you found, what you are doing about it. If you want approval to attend again next time, that page is your case.

The visitors who get the most from a show are not the ones who saw the most booths. They are the ones who sent five good emails the following Tuesday.